Unreal Engine 5 - Beginner Course

1. Introduction: Hello, and welcome to the Unreal Engine five complete beginner course. My name is Alona Bazade and I'll be your instructor. If you want to work with Unreal Engine and become a game developer, this course will be the perfect choice for you. Here is what you will learn. Fundamentals. In this section, you'll learn the basics of Unreal Engine five. We'll start by exploring the interface, essential navigation tools, and key hot keys to improve your workflow. Actors. Actors are the building blocks of any Unreal engine project. In this chapter, you'll dive into concept of actors, meshes, and objects. You'll understand how they interact and how to manage their dependencies. Materials. Materials are the key to creating a visual engaging project. In this section, you'll learn how to build and modify materials in Unreal Engine. Modeling. Unreal Engine offers powerful modeling tools, and this section will introduce you to them. You'll learn how to model directly within the engine, create assets, and manipulate them to fit your project's needs. Lightning system. Unreal Engines lighting system is one of its most powerful features. You'll learn how to create lighting setups using directional point and spotlights. We'll also explore dynamic and stated lighting and learn how to optimize your scene. Blueprints. The blueprints allow you to create complex gambling mechanics without writing a single line of code. We'll cover visual scripting in detail, teaching you how to set up interactions, events, and triggers between actors and objects. Landscape and master material. This section is all about environment creation. You'll learn how to build vast landscapes and terrains for your projects. Then apply the master material system to automatically populate your environment with biomes and textures. Gameplay. In this chapter, we'll focus on gameplay mechanics. You'll learn how to create interactions between your character and the environment. Mini game. In this final section, you'll put everything together to create a minigame. This hands on project will help you understand the entire workflow from setting up a project to creating environments, programming interactions, and finalizing a playable level. This course is structured to provide you with a step by step approach to learn Unreal Engine. With practical real world examples, you'll gain not only technical skills, but also a deeper understanding of how to approach a game development process. Let's dive in and start creating with Unreal Engine five. Mm. 2. Downloading UE5: Welcome to Unreal Engine five basic stores. Over the next few hours, we will go through project setup, interface navigation, environmental setup, and creation of interactable objects and actors. By the end of this course, you should be able to comfortably use Unreal Engine five and have basic understanding of all core functions of Unreal Engine. This course does not require any prior knowledge about unreal game death or C plus plus or CSA. Before we can move on with the lecture, we need to download UnreleEngine. If you already have Unreal Engine installed, feel free to ignore this video and skip the next lecture. To download Unreal Engine, first, we need to download Epicamesauncher. You can do this by going to unrealengine.com and clicking the Download button. If you don't know how to do it or you have trouble understanding, please click on WatchOwT Install ink on the screen to the right. This will send you to a YouTube video which will explain and walk through the process. Now that Epic Games is installed, let's install the engine itself. Click on the Unreal Engine tap on the left side and go to Library. Here, you can choose which Unreal engine we need. We will be using Unreal Engine five dot four for this course. For demonstration purposes, I will download five dot three. But here, you need to click on five Dot four. After you have clicked and selected your engine version, click the Install button. And now we need to select a folder for the Unreal engine. Make sure to select SSD drive if you have one and click on Options. If you scroll down, you may have these four options selected by default. Unless you're interested in developing for that specific platform, check them as this will reduce the size required for your unreal engine. Make sure to keep starter content, template and feature packs, and engine source enabled. You do not need editor symbols for debugging. Click Apply and click Install. Real engine five is now going to install itself on your PC. 3. Create your Project: Now, let's begin by creating a new project. Click on the launch button and give it a moment while it initialize. Here, we have a selection of templates we can use, which are provided by Unreal. We have multiple selections here for games, film, video, architecture, automotive, and simulation. For the purpose of this course, we will be using cert person games template. Make sure to name your project and keep in mind you cannot use space and the name must be less than 20 letters characters. We now have to select the project defaults. Click on the blueprint, desktop, Maximum and keep on starter content. We will not be using rate racing, but to keep in mind if your project requires it, you should. All these can be changed from the project after its creation. So in case you need to change something that can be done later. Click on the Create button. Give it a moment to create your project. And now your unreal project is ready. See you in the next lecture. 4. UE5 navigation, hotkeys and fundamentals: Now, let's talk about the windows we have available to us. On the left side, we have Place Actors window. It's a window that lets you drag and drop any actor, object or shape or light, anything really to your scene easily. You can have your own created SSP here as well that you can just drag and drop into the scene. On the right side, we have world outliner. What does World Outliner do? World Outliner is a list of every object or actor existing in your scene in the level. You can click on them here, and you will have them automatically selected in the level. You can click here and you can see the name. It is quite useful to organize your layout. So for example, all blocks are inside block folder. You can hide them in combination instead of clicking them individually and hiding them from the level or deleting or moving them. You can click or like this, multiple objects at the same time to move them around at the same time. It's quite useful. You can move around all windows in your unreal engine scene. For example, you can take the outliner, detach it, make a separate window, or you can attach it in another place, bottom of the screen maybe or maybe you want it on left. It's up to you, really. You can remove it. If you want. And if you want it back, you can always go to the window tap on top and find the window you just removed. You can have multiple windows of the same thing as well. So outliner is now back, and I prefer it on the right. We have detail spanel as well. So when you have a object selected, you get detailed information here. So let me move this here. On top, as I prefer. And now we have access to the information about this object. As you can see, as I move this, the transformation location here changes. I can manually input any value I want. I can rotate it from here if I wish so, or scale it up or down. If I want to scale it uniformly, I can click on this lock button and scale it this way. There's also materials here and mesh. So here, if you have an object in the scene that you want to keep all the transformed location and excess scale, but you want to change the mesh, you can click here and search or just choose the mesh you want to switch it to. So now I want to change it to this chair. So I clicked on the chair. Now we have a chair. Let's look at it closely. And yes, now we have a chair in the scene. If I want to undo it, I can always control Z. Now I have my cube. If I want to change material, I can just choose a material from here. Let's try this queen 01. And now our cube looks different. Let's have a yellowish up with some metallic for now. It's the same material that was used for the chair. Now that we are done with looking at the details and outliner, let's talk about Content drawer. You can click on Content drawer here, which will let you look at all assets available to you in your project. The starter content contains a lot of useful meshes, materials, props, particles to learn unreal engine, and if you want to just prototype level for your game. Here, let's go to the props, and we have multiple meshes we can use from. So let's put a table. And just drag it and drop it into the scene, give it a moment to compile shaders. And now you have a chair in your screen. If you want to have your content browser visible at all times and not go down and hide itself, you can click on Doc in Layout button here. This will let you have a content browser on your screen at all times. You can put it into your second screen or as all other windows, you can just attach it somewhere. So I prefer to have it on the below my screen. If you have any issues with your layout or let's say you somehow deleted the windows and you don't remember their names or how to restore them, what you can do is click on the Window tab on top. Click on Load Layout and click on Default Editor layout. This will restore real layout. You can click Control Space and you have your content browser back, your Details panel, and outliners Obac. You may notice we don't have place actors tab anymore. That's because that's the default layout for Unreal four classic, which we don't really need. Place Actors tab can be also accessed from here. Everything that's in the place actors, more or less can be accessed here, and you can always just click on a shape you want or an object and you can just have it pop up into your scene. There are a lot of other windows in the Windows tab that we will talk in the future lectures. A few more details about the unreal interface. If you have an object selected and you move it around, you will see it's moving at a certain increment, like it's snapping. This is because we have this option here enabled. If you increase the snapping, it will only snap in the increments of 100. If you put it like one, you will see you have a smooth movement. And if you just disable it, you have even more incremental movement. I personally like to have it kept at one or ten for the purpose of having a uniform location for my objects in the scene. You can do the same with rotation and scaling. We also have viewport options here. If you click on the viewport options here, three lines on the left side, you will have a lot of options available to you. We will talk about them in the future lectures, but the one you should probably keep in mind is screen percentage. If you have screen percentage enabled, you can click on Custom override and click on the screen percent you want. If you look at the background here on the lines on the objects, if I reduce my screen percentage, the lines will get blur red. This is because this is now rendering only 25% of the polygons available in the skin. If you put in 200, it will render them at higher resolution. I recommend to keep it at 100 to have a good quality. Which is good reference to how your game will look. Of course, if your game has lower resolution, settings enabled, you can also essentially get a good feel about it by putting into, like, let's say, if your game is going to have a 50% resolution, you can just put it here, and now this is how it will look if your game has only 50% resolution or 25 or 200 let's say four K. We will discuss this in the future lectures There's also selection mode, landscape, foliage, mesh, modeling, fracture, brushing and animation tabs, which we will also discuss in the future lecture. Here, if you press on the play button or OP in your keyboard, this will go into play mode. What play mode does is essentially simulates your game. We have the third person template selected, so we have everything pre set up for a third person. You can move around by using WAST jump. And if depending on the template, some templates may have a gun which can shoot or a vehicle you can move around with or flying objects that you can fly with. Now, let's talk about unreal interface and navigation. To move around your camera, hold right mouse button. If you want to go forward, click W S backwards, left, A, right, T, down Q E for up. You can scroll up to increase or decrease your camera movement speed. Or you can click and select your camera speed here. We also have Gizmos to move around the objects in the scene. By default, if you have select Objects Gizmo, you will not see anything. If you click W or click on the Select and translate Objects icon on top, you will get these arrows. These arrows can be used to move around the object. Or you can click on the circle, move it in three D space. You can also click on Iki or this icon on top, select and rotate objects, which will let you use than Gizmo. There's also scale objects Gizmo. Click R or click this icon on top and you can scale your objects as you want. To hide your Gizmo, you can always click Cue button or click Select Objects icon on top here to hide your Gizmo and make sure you don't by accident, move your objects around. 5. UE5 Actors: Welcome to the lecture. In this lecture, we are going to talk more in depth about how to manipulate actors and objects in the scene. We already touched upon the subject in the previous video, but in this video, we're going to more in depth on how to use the hot keys and parameters to manipulate it. So we have a table here, which can be manipulated with our gizmos as discussed in the previous video. Movement, rotation, and scale We can also click and hold All Alt key to duplicate the object. You can shift click to multiple objects, Alt key move to duplicate multiple objects as well. If you hold Shift key and move your objects, your camera will move along with it. If you press Shift and Alkey at the same time as you move your object, you will create a duplicate and your camera will move with a newly created duplicator of the object. If you pick multiple objects, like I did in now and try to rotate them, the rotation will happen around the last selected object. You can easily define which one is by looking where your gizmo is. If we want to change the mesh of the object while keeping its location and the parameters transform parameters, you can do here in the static mesh. Let's say we want to change this table into a chair. Thankfully, it's provided in starter content, so we can just click on it here and we have a chair. Now, if we try to find the asset location for which we use this table or chair, and you are not sure where it was located in your content browser, you can always click on this icon over here, and it will take you directly to the asset location. So we can now see content, started content and props is the folder. And what we can do here, we can click on an object. Let's set the second table and click on the couch in our content browser and here on the details panel. While this is selected on the content browser, click on this arochy. This will automatically change the selected mesh into asset we have selected in the content browser. This works not only for meshes, but also for materials and other types of assets that are log can be used from the content browser. Let's say we want to change this to something else. So let's repeat the process. Let's say, let's take a statue and change this object to statue. And now we have a statue to place on the table, which we can do nicely. And let's say we want a second chair. Easy way to go about this. Click automatically get selected. Click on this and be. Now we have our chair and the couch and the lamp or whatever this glass is supposed to be. Now, let's talk about how to manipulate their materials. So in a similar fashion. Let's say, select this couch and we have materials folder here. These are standard materials that come with starter content of the Unreal engine. And we have options here. As you can see, we have a material called Chair, which is being used for this couch. Let's change this material to something else. Now, let's try it. As you can see, all I need to do is to just click on the material and click on the icon. But you can also drag the material on the object itself. You can select it from the list if you wish so as well. You may need to wait for it to compile and you can always, as I said before, just click on it and dict it on top of some material. Let's have it golden. There are additional options here in the details panel about your object. First of all, if you notice there's a scale and near the scale, there's a lock icon. If you don't have it locked and you try to scale an object, it will scale only in one direction in one axis to be precise. If you lock it and move along your transform, it will do it uniformly. Keep in mind, you can always just type in the resolution you want, the values you want. And if you are using it with some complicated numbers or scales, do keep in mind. You can do stuff like this. Let's say one plus 00 dot five. The unreal will do the mass for you. If you want to double the scale, you can just click on multiply and two. So double it. You can divide as well as multiply. You can do all mass operations with the values the unreal gives you. And it's not limited to only detail s panel. It can be used pretty much everywhere in the unreal. We have other options here on the details panel, which are not going to be covered now. We will cover them later. Now, let's do a task. You have access to your starter content and all props in it. Go to Props folder and select whatever meshes you want, static meshes. Drag them, drop them to the scene and create a small set the way you wish to. Just test your tools and get used to them. 6. Managing Actors & Objects: Si. Now, let's talk about how to keep our scene organized. As you can see, I set up a simple scene here with three chairs, a table, and a lamp. So let's pick them all up and move them. So if you want to move our objects as a set during the level, we have to click on every single one by shift clicking them one by one or move them independently, which is time consuming and inefficient. What you would like to do instead is shift click all of them. And press Control G, group them. Now they are a group of actors, so they are moved as one and are selected as one. You can shift G to ungroup them and Control G to group them. You can right click, go to groups and group or right click and click group. Same thing. You can also do it from outliner from the right side here. As you can see, we have a group actor tab here, which is this. Now, before we move one, there's a tip I would like to give you. If you want to move a single object out of all other objects, but you don't want to ungroup them all and group them back together, which may be time consuming when you have maybe 40 meshes in a single group, what you can do is you can click on these settings on top. Go to A group selection. Click on it, and now group selection is disabled. This is still a group of actors, but now you can select them individually. So now let's say I want to move it closer and this one as well. And now I can click Go to settings and click Allow Group Selection, and now I can select them again as a group. This is quite efficient when you have a lot of measures in the scene which are grouped together and you don't want to ungroup them and group them back together. And now we can easily move it anywhere we want. The scene, let's keep it here. Now, another way we can organize our actors is by folders. Unreal scene of this level has default folders already, but the actors we added are not added to the folder. So let's create a folder. You can create a folder by clicking on this folder with a plus icon on the top right. Click it, and if you have the object selected, it gets automatically added to the folder. Let's rename this to let's say per furniture. And let's add this couch in here as well. What we can do is we can make this bigger easier to see. We have this folder here. You can just drag this to the folder. Now our furniture is grouped together with others. But this furniture is not part of the grouped actor. It's a separate actor in the same folder. So do not mix up grouping actors with just having the same actors in the same folder. There are different things. If you want, you can create subfolders by doing this. So let's say set one, and let's put our group actor into set one. Another little task. Let's do some cleanup. Take your previously created scenes and organize them. Create folders, create groups, if it makes sense to have them grouped, and just make sure you have an easy clean scene which can be easily navigated through outliner. After you are done, move on to the next lecture. 7. Modeling: Welcome back. As you can see, I have created a simple set piece using the props in the starter content folder. And I did some foliage outside, grouped them together, add some furniture inside, and obviously grouped them together as well with additional probes, light sources, and glass wall, some pillars, as you can see, and did some cleanup by removing a lot of clutter from the scene. Added a door and a door frame, and modeled this simple box using unreal modeling tools. Now let's talk briefly about modeling tools inside unrele. Unreal has its basic modeling tools that you can use, but Unreal five dot four has additional modeling tools available to you, but you need to enable them from the plugins. If you click Edit and go to plugin section. These are all plugins available inside unrele. Some are built in, meaning UnreL provides them by default. They may be on or off. And some are installed from marketplace or custom plugins that you or someone else may have created. So there's a lot of plugins here, so we will not go through all of them one by one, search modeling. After you search modeling, you will get multiple modeling tools. I recommend modeling tools Editor mode, and static mesh Editor modeling mode. Both of them. They're both beta versions, so they will very likely be improved in the future by the unreal development tip. After you enable it, I'll ask for a restart. As I have already enabled it, I don't have to do it, but just click Restart button and give it a minute for it to re initialize. After your unreal has re initialized, go to tab on top and click Modeling mode. As you can also shift five to instantly switch to it. In the modeling tools, we have a lot of things. We will not go into details for every single one, but anyone familiar with modeling will see a lot of familiar tools. So if you want to just create a basic shape for blocking by blocking, I mean just a placeholder meshes that will be used for designing your level. You can just use modeling tools inside reel. So the way I created this one, we will recreate it in a smaller scale. First of all, just click on a shape you want. In our case, a box. You could also do rectangle, but as you can see, it's just a plane, not useful. We get box. And we need to define the height, width of the book. By default, it goes 1-2 thousand, but you can type in higher values if needed. So in our case, let's make it 500. Keep it simple. Let's move it up. Move it around. And I don't want it this small, so let's make it bigger vertically and horizontally, and I don't want it to be this sick, so I can reduce the height. So let's do it 20. You can increase the subdivision to increase the quality of the model, but as we are just using it for prototyping, we don't have to do it. Now, after we are done with selecting the general shape we want. And we have a output type, a static mesh, which is exactly what we need. We could assign a material here right away, but we will leave it till later and click Accept. Unless you click Accept, this mesh will not be generated. And after we click Accept, now it's a generated mesh existing in our level. And if you click on it and click here to find this mesh, we will see you have a generated folder and your generated folder as all the meshes you need. Now, let's go back to the modeling. So as you can see, it is just a shape. You may think the best way to do is just create another shape to make a wall on right side on left side. But if you pay attention, this is one whole mesh. So if we were to move it around, it is one whole mesh. It is not just a plane. So the way we do this by using the simplest way possible, is we click on the mesh and go to modeling. Well, shape modeling, and click on poly group Edit. These options on the top, and most of the options, really, will not be available to you unless you enabled plugin modeling plugin from the plug in section. After we have select the mesh and click on polygroup editing. What we need to do is click on a face. For information, these dots are called vertices. These lines are called edges, and this face the side of the meshes, essentially, are called faces. So we click on the face here and we click on Extrude. What Extrude does is creates a new face and let's put it like this. The reason why we did this is if we look at the model from below, if we try to extrude it here, it will extrude it whole. We need something smaller. So we extrude it slightly, and now we have a line pace that we can use to extrude our part. And now we have one side of the wall. We can repeat this process here and extrude again. And again, And we have now a similar shape. In this case, I have not modeled the backside of the model. It was already a wall there, but we can do that here if you wish. You can use extruding tools to make any kind of shape you want. As you can see, you could make complex shapes if you want to. There's a lot of tools here you can use to modify your models. You can use push pull, which is similar, but technically different function that can actually reduce. Technically, as it's named. It pulls or pushes the model. There's bevel, which is not really useful here because I have not selected any edges, click and select the bevel to There are not a lot of polygons, so it doesn't look good, but as you can see, we have modified the shape of the model. We will not touch this and we can just cancel it and I will cancel it as well. Again, because I have not saved the model. The moment I canceled it, it canceled all of them. Make sure to click except for your model to get saved. I don't need this model, so I will just remove it. But I would like to see what you have created. And don't forget to clean up your models. As I am not going to use it anymore, I will just delete it. I could probably rename it to something more reasonable, but as I will not be keeping this around for long, I will not bother. Now, we have a simple set that does not look really that appealing because of the color and lighting. It is just gray with grid, not the best look. And we will change all of that in the future lecture. 8. Working with Materials: Welcome back. In this lecture, we are going to talk about materials, how to apply them, how to create them, and how to modify existing materials. Thankfully, Unreal has provided us with materials in the starter content, which we'll be using for initial demonstration purposes. And after that, I will show you how to create basics materials. As you can see in this level, the grid based texture material while useful for development to eyeball the size and location of the assets you place, it is not very good looking. So let's change it. First of all, this floor here does not look that good. I would like to change it into something that makes more sense to be on the ground, and we have some materials here. I could use, I guess, ground concrete. Let's see. Let's use cobblestone, smooth, like, and place it here. Hmm. This looks quite weird. And the reason why this happened is it's because the material is stretched out. If you open the material itself, you can see it here, it looks okay. And if you put a simple basic shape of let's say, a cube and apply the same material. This looks quite good as well. The reason why this happens is because the UV difference. This floor is not really optimized for this material. So what we can do here, we can open our material and this is a material node for this particular material. This is quite complicated, but we don't need a lot from here. What we need to find is to find texture coordinate node. So All you need to do is find this and you tile your material. The higher the number, more squished the textures. You can do it here or here. Click except. Give the moment for it to safe. And now let's see. It is much better, but it is still way too big. So let's multiply it by ten times over again. Maybe 50 and 50. And safe now. Let's give it a moment. Ideally, you wouldn't want to edit tiling on the individual materials and use instance material. But I will explain what instance material are later. Okay. This could be better if we randomized it but this should be fine for demonstration purposes. Now we have a smooth ground floor. And now let's look at this here. I don't really like this material. So let's use something else. We could use something fancy like this material here to have this futuristic look. This material uses emissive lights. Sorry, emissive material which produces lights. If you go to the material, you will see there's emissive color noid which is being applied. We will go through it later in more detail. But let's for now increase tiling. Let's say five by five should be fine. Let accept. Again, give it a moment. Looks much better. Looks like something from a Sci fi movie. But as we are going to add lights to this scene later, we wouldn't want this to be conflicting with the light sources. So let's despite it being looking so cool, pick a more simpler material. Let's say, for example, how about this? It looks similar, but there is no lights. Or maybe. Should we make it from the wood. We could make it from the wood, as well. Let's make it from the wood. Give the moment. But, it doesn't look good. Let's just keep it. Black metal, grid metal. This is a bit too big, so let's tile it a bit more. So let's do 88 and see. Should be good enough. This floor. Sorry, this all needs to have material changed, as well. Let's apply to it here as well. This should be fine. Maybe a bit too dark, but who cares. Good enough. As you can see, we have changed the look of the whole scene. But these are all materials already existing in the starter kit. Materials are not always provided, and there will be times when you want to create them yourself. So let's create a material. Let's go to our content folder. Create a new folder called material. Open it and right click or click Plus. You can right click and create a material by going to here material and click on the material. There's a lot of things here that are for the future courses. Click on the material. Let's call it basic M understood score basic. M standing for material. It's good to have naming conventions for your materials in general. M is usually for materials. So we open it, and this is what we get. We have output, essentially, and before output, we have substrate. Substrate is an unreal specific material function that was recently added. 9. Custom Materials: You may notice that the way your materials look is slightly different than mine. You have a different output node, and that's because you don't have substrate materials enabled. You don't have to use this specifically, and regardless if you use it or not, the basic material functionality, how to create it is the same. Substrate is an expanded material function for creating layered materials which are very useful and very much unique to unreal engine. I have enabled by default, which I would recommend learning if you are interested in material creation. Now, going back to the materials. We have some options here. We will ignore everything on the right side, which are mostly specific to substrate, and we will focus on mainly here. Base color, metallic, specular roughness, normal MSF color and opacity. Base color is, as it is called base color. The left side, we have a preview of SR mesh. As you can see correctly, there is nothing in it, so it's just white. Let's add a color to this. The way you can do it, you can right click on the material graph. This is the material graph, as mentioned here. And you can try to find the texture node, et cetera, but you can just simply hold three on your keyboard, numpad, and click. What this does, this creates a constant value that you can use to select a color. So this is RGB based. So let's select red. We can adjust the color here the way we want. If you have a X code or X RGB code, you already know, you can just copy paste, type it in. And let's say red. As you can see, nothing's changed here because we have not plugged our node in yet. Let's plug our base color node here. And now our material is red. But let's say we want to make it more metallic. We need to add value to metallic. Usually, the value is not always, but usually goes 0-1, which means we need a one float value to put it in. This was sic values, which generated a color. But here we just need one value. So what we need to do hold one and click, which will create a single value, which will be the float. Let's put our zero value node into the metallic. Nothing changed much because the metallic value currently is at zero, which means it's as much as unmetallic as it can be. And as I mentioned earlier, one is usually the maximum value. So let's put a one here and click N. Give it a moment. Now, suddenly, it is very different. We can always put a value in between zero dot five. So let's keep it at one or now. We want it shiny and we want it to be different. So by the way, you can check the default values here. So as you can see, specular default value is zero dot five, which means this is a specular value of 05 at the moment. Let's add additional fluid and put it into specular. Now we have specular value of zero. And do it one you may notice much of a difference in the screen, but it is quite useful for non metallic surfaces. As we made it metallic, we will not be able to see it. So let's make metallic zero and specular one. And now reduce specular to zero to see the difference. You see? The material is very matte now. It's no longer shining because it is a non metallic material with no specular. So it will not be shining and reflecting light back. But I prefer my material to be metallic for now, so let's make it one. And specular does not matter when material is fully metallic in most cases. So now let's take a look at roughness. Roughness difft value is also zero dot five. So we put roughness to zero, which means it is as smooth as a glass, and it is very reflective because it is a metallic, fully metallic material with a completely smooth surface. If you reduce the metallic value, suddenly, it is just a smooth object. If you have one for specular, there is some shine to it, but it is not as much as it was when it was fully metallic. So now let's phot one, zero. And again, this is a very smooth metallic sphere. Specular does not matter when we have a metallic object, so we will just keep it at zero. And what happens if we put our roughness up? If you put roughness to one, it is the same texture as a chalk. The closest thing that is to the value of one in real life is chalk. For those who don't know what chalk is, it is a tool used to write on the blackboard. But this is too much. So let's put into lower value. Let's say 07. We don't want it to be very reflective, but we want it to be reflective. Maybe a bit more. Sorry, we need to make it lower because it is in reverse. The less value we have, more reflective it is. No, a bit more. And, yep, this is fine. Not too reflective. No and now we have a normal. So in this case, because we are just making a simple color material, normal is not as well useful for us, but normals are used to calculate certain values in the tangent space. Usually, normal textures are used in conjunction with normal, and value of zero, one is rarely used by default. So let's look at an application of a normal. Let's say, Oh, yeah, this cobblestone we recently took take a look at. So we have this normal node coming here. So we have a normal texture. This normal texture is important for the cobbledon texture to show up properly. So now let's look at the map. We have this material, or. And in this material, if we go and take a look at the normal texture, this is a normal texture for the material we used on the floor. And let's say we remove it or change it something else, right? So let's change it to normal of a different cobblestone or even pebbles. And apply. Suddenly, it looks a bit different. There is something wrong with the material. Let's do it again. This time, let's outright change it into texture of a concrete and apply. Now, these weird lines on the material, which are from the normal of cobblestone. It's very important for normals to match the texture. We need to apply it. I control the twice to restore what we had initially. Normal textures are usually created by texture artists or modelers. If you want to learn how to do it yourself, I recommend to search for the modeling and texture related information or the courses in our course list. It is very in depth and it can be as complicated as it can be, so we will not be covering it in this course. But if you're interested, please give your feedback. We may rush out a new course in this particular topic. So let's close this and go back to the material. Now, it looks the same as before. Let's go back to our basic material. We were creating here, we have something interesting. We have an emissive color. What does it mean? Emissive color is essentially a material that shines and produces light. So if we add a value and put it here, and at zero, it does nothing. If you put it at maybe five, now it is shining brightly. If you put it in, let's say, 5,000, we may go blind. As you can see, it is emitting a lot of light at the moment. And this material is not meant to be shiny, so we will just not do this. And keep it at zero is, which is by default. So we remove this. We also have opacity. If you add a float note, my apologies, I add another float value and put it into opacity and put it at zero, the material color will just not show up because it's at zero. If you put it at let's say zero dot seven, you have a bit of an opaque. It's kind of hard to see, so it's left at zero dot two. It is less opaque. In this case, we are not going to use this, but regardless, it is important to understand how materials work in general. If you want to make an opaque material or transluten, let's look at the material of the glass. So the glass we had it is a starter content materials, the glass material. Let's take a look at the glass material. We have reflection index refraction. My apologies. We have our substrate shading model. And here we have opacity, and the opacity is 035. We also have additional refraction, et cetera, which make additional modifications to edit the surface of the object. This is way above intermediate level, so we will skip that. If you take a look at here, we have a very interesting material which is pretty much almost all black We have a specular value of ten. As I said, usually, it goes between zero as well, but sometimes you can go higher. In the case of specular, it is a value of ten. We have a roughness of zero because this is glass, and we have opacity of zero dot 35. Because it is a black material with opacity, it looks like a glass. And if you remove this refraction here, as you can see, it changed almost nothing. So don't bother yourself with refraction too much at the moment. And if we change this opacity to one, this is no longer a transparent class. We change the speculative to one, it is way too dim. There is no guaranteed way to get the specific result you want, with a material. So best course of action is to just understand the basic functions of the material, what they mean, and try to tinker around until you get what you want. Now, for now, let's close this. We will not save. And let's go back to this. So here we are back, and we have now this material. And we want this material to be applied in the low. There is additional options here for masked additive, et cetera, which will be covered in the future courses. And we will save this and go mac the love. Now, let's say we want these boxes to be the same color as the newly created material. We go here and select it, and we apply it. Oh, now suddenly we have two boxes with a material we just created. It is quite that simple to apply the created material to the level. But let's say we want to have a metallic material, but we want to have them each a different color or different amount of roughness or specularity. We want some maybe this one to be yellow, this one to be green, this one to be white. It doesn't matter. Does that mean we create a new material for single one, every single type and variation? No. This is where material instances come in. So if you have a material, and you want to have multiple versions of that material, for example, as I said, I want everything to be here to be exactly the same, other than color. So I want the same amount of reflective surface, metallic, et cetera, and only thing I want to be different is the color itself. What I can do is I can right click on the material and create a material instance. Now, what does this mean? Material instance is a child of a material, and it takes all its parameters from the material itself. So now let's apply this to all these measures. So now we have a material instance. There are multiple benefits to having a material instance. It is more optimized, and it's easier to change on runtime. So now let's separate this for a second and take a look at this, right? Correct. So right now, we don't have anything in our material. Because we did not add any properties that we are supposed to be adding and changing from the material. There are some default options real has for you, but they are not what we want. So how do we add options here to change during the process? We go to material itself and we find the parameters we want. And in this case, this one, we want to change color. So we right click on it. And convert to parameter. So we need to name it. This is color, so it's simple to name. And now we have a parameter called color, correct? And the default value for this material is red. This is all we have to do. To keep in mind, you can do it for any other parameters. You could do it for roughness, metallic, et cetera. We go back and we open the material again. Let's make it a bigger. Now we have a color. So if we click on this and change the color here, it instantly changes the color of all meshes applied with this exact material. You can change it easily. But you may be asking yourself, wait, but I don't want all of them to be the same color. Fair enough. Create more instances of that same material. And this one can be material instance, two, and apply this one. And this one can be material instance three. And let's say this is applied to this one and this one is yellow. Let's do, once again, create material instance, name it. This one, let's make name four, open it, change it, green. And let's apply this to this. Now we have four materials of different color. So you may be asking, what is the benefit of doing this? Because we essentially created multiple material instances. Couldn't I just create multiple materials? No. So first of all, material instances are more optimized, meaning they take less resources than it would if you had multiple materials. Secondly, now, we have four materials, instances, to be correct, which is being applied to these boxes. And let's say we take this material instance and we want to change something. But there's additional benefit here if you want to change all of them. Let's say there was a difference in opinion later on, and we want to make sure none of these color materials are metallic. So we want them to be rough, and we change it in the parent save give it a moment. Go back and now all of them are nonmetallic. So now we have flexibility to edit materials in the parent, which will instantly change all values not being modified in instance or if you want to change a specific material only on specific instance of the mesh, you can just edit that As I said, we can do it not only with color, we can do it with anything. So let's say this is a metallic, so we can right click on it, convert to parameter. Call this parameter metallic, save. Keep in mind, this is a parent material. Now if you open any of the instances we previously created, we have an option here or metallic, which we can change. So keep in mind. Let's make it more visible. Keep your eyes on this blue box, and let's change the metallic. Now we have only one of them, non metallic. Obviously, it's better to just have zero instead of negative. So we can easily modify our materials and our material instances this way. And this is the recommended way of doing this. So now let's save this and take a look at. It's simple. It's nothing too difficult, and it looks quite good for something we created in a few minutes. Now, before we move on to the next lecture, let's do another task. With the knowledge you acquired, create materials and decorate your scene. Good luck and see you in the next lecture. 10. Lighting system: Welcome back to the course. In this lecture, we are going to talk about lightning, their differences, and how to place them in the scene. Before we discuss lightning that can be set up in the scene, let's take a look at the one that already exists in the scene by default in this template, which is directional light. And this lightning here is the sun. If you go to the settings, details panel to be more precise and change the intensity. I will increase the sunlight or decrease it depending on the value you put in. At zero, there is no light, essentially. And at one, it is very low. I personally prefer three, as you can see, but you can change the value as you want. The light color, as it is understandable from name, change the light of the color. Sorry, color of the light. You can see, we can give our scene a different vibe, or now we will keep it as it is. The source angle does not really matter as much. The default angle here, the source angle is the same as the sun itself. And if your main source of light is the sun, you might as well keep it at this value. This is also not something you should be worried about. You can increase the temperature or decrease it, which will affect the color hue. Again, not something you should really be worried about at this point in time. And we can ignore the rest of this. We could remove shadows, which will remove all shadows cast it by this source of light. When you have multiple sources of light in the scene, you may prefer one specific shadow from that specific lightning source. So in that case, you can just disable other ones and keep that one, or you can have multiple lights casting shadow from multiple sources. And this object will have multiple shadows from them. But it's better to not have hundreds of lights, which all of them are casting shadows in a tight space because that's just a waste of computation, like optimization for your game. And obviously affect world is kind of mandatory in most cases. Okay, now let's talk about the lights that are actually something you can just place into the scene in a smaller manner. So if we go back to this set we have here, it is very dark. And let's say we want the sun to be not this high up in the air. We want something like sunset. We can change the direction of the sun easily by pressing Control E, sorry, control L and rotating the sun's direction. So let's something like this. I'm moving around my mouse while holding the control key down. Yeah, let's do it Lexis. Every time the darker side, and now it makes more sense to have lightning here. You could always play lights, click on this icon on the top and go to lights. Or you can click on the Window tab here, place actors, and go to the light tub. I will keep it Lexis just to have an easier time explaining what each of them does. We already talked about directional light. You personally wouldn't want to have too many directional lights in the scene. So usually one directional light from the main light source, the sun is enough, but you may want to have multiple smaller lights. So let's talk about point light first. This is point light. This light has a radius. Let's take it outside, the camera for a second. The circle around defines its radius. Let's hide our sunlight for a second, so we can have easier time seeing. Source radius and soft source radius are interlinked. If your source radio is zero, soft source radio does nothing. So for demonstration purposes, let's make it smaller and increase the source radio. It doesn't have to be this big to have any effect on soft source radios. It can be literally one. When I increase this or decrease it, you will notice the difference in the lightning on these far objects. Let's do it like this. What it changed is the fall off at which radius it begins to have less and less light. Usually, it's not something you have to mold too much over. You can keep it simple. And for now, let's take a look at the last one, which is source length. So if we put source radius like this, that's too big. Let's make it this do this. Essentially gives it the height. So rather than a bulb here, now it is a giant it looks like a giant elevator that emits light. It's not really something you will have to meddle too much, and you can ignore it most of the time. And let's restore this light to something proper. It gets bigger. Let's make it a bit bigger, I guess. And again, it's the same as before, affect world gets shadowed or not. We can ignore all that. Now, let's take a look at the next type of light, which is spotlight. You may be wondering what spotlight does. It's a lightning source that as you can see from the shape Let's increase the intensity of it. Is a light that affects only a certain area. Xis. Let's move the detail panel up so it's easier to see. You can increase the attention radius which increase the lens. You can rotate it. As you can see, the X axis doesn't really do much. But you can rotate it in Y and Z axis, take a look at M to place your light the way you want. It is the most commonly used type of light in games in general in scenes because if your lamp is in a certain direction or your light source is supposed to fox on a specific actor or direction, it is easiest light to use for these purposes. And we have additional things here, which is inner core angle, as you can see, increases or decreases the co angle. What inner cone and outer con does is inner cone is where the light is at its brightest. So the intensity of 160 we have here is applied to the inner cone. So let's do it 40? And outer con is where the fall off begins. So if we are 40 40, we will have a very sharp flow. If we have inner core at 20, while f off at 40, we will have a soft softer light with a f off after inner core of 20. If we are at zero, all of it will be soft. So you could make it essentially into five to focus on a certain object if there is any. Let's say we have these cubes here. And if I stop clicking on the light, so now we have a light that focus on the objects. So we can increase the radius because it seems a bit too small, and we can do outer cone angle even smaller. But not as small, we have an object that's suspiciously lighted up in your scene. Rest of the options are same as before. Source of length doesn't really do much in this case. And we can move on to our next light, which is rectangular light. So what rectangular light does, it is a source light in the shape of a rectangle. So let's rotate this to shine the light on the ground. And let's increase the source size so it's easier to see. And also, let's change acenation radio. Of easier time seeing. Unlike previous slides, this is a particular shape. So if we change the source height or source width, we will have a specific shape for our light source. So light now is focused in this direction. If you change this, second, like this and put your barn door angle like smaller, it will be a very crisp rectangular shadow. Then decrease the length or increase it depending on how crisp or square you want your shadows to be. And you can do it like this to get a very specific kind of shadow. Now, before we move on to the next lecture, add some light spots to your scene. This will be your task for now. If you don't have any light sources, make sure to just add some. Be creative. You can add anything. It can be a lamp. It can be a torch. It can be a fireplace. Do whatever you want with it, get creative. Don't overthink it and go way to complex. Just keep it simple. We will talk about how to do complex lightning with interactivity in the next lecture. So for now, just make sure you have some space where you can add your lights and move them around. Maybe add some color to your scene. You may want to make a disco, color, whatever up to you. Have fun and see you in the next lecture. But 11. Blueprint Basics: Welcome back. In this lecture, we are going to talk about blueprints. So to begin with, where we left off, these lamps in the wall, we want to add light to them, but we want to add light, let's say, of different colors or different strengths, or maybe even shapes. We could just manually add one to each one, like we did with this lamp in the ceiling. But this is very time consuming. And what if you have not six but 600 lights in your scene? This is where blueprint and functionality comes in. To make this object into a blueprint, let's click on this button here. This converts this actor into reusable blueprint class. So let's click this. This will ask you for a subclass. You can just click Select. This is a static Masacor and this is a actor, going to be a static Mahcor anyway, so it's fine. And we get this view. This is viewport where we can look at our object, modify it, et cetera. And perhaps what's even more interesting is this event graph. We also also have a construction script, which I will talk about in the next lecture. So this is our event graph. Before we move on, I need to explain what is a blueprint, what is an actor, and how it all works. Blueprints are a visual code system made to help people who want to save time or who have trouble coding, do their job without having to code in C plus plus or C sharp in some other engine. The way this works is these blueprints are essentially a function built into your actors. And the question, what are actors? Every object in your scene is an actor, and the scene is your level. So this vast emptiness, you see, which is my level, every single cube, glass, light, Everything, even the spoil pieces of grass, are all actors. While it may create a misconception by actor like actor humans or characters in the language of the code in the engine, actors are everything in your three D scene as with some small exceptions. For example, this material, the color is not an actor. It's just a visual addition to your actor. It would be the same for decals or particles that are produced, like all the byproducts of other actors in the scene which are not really interactable. Or purpose, even if interactable, they are not something you can just place into your level as they are. For example, let's say we have a character that shoots fireballs. The character itself is an actor. The fireball that it shot is an actor if it's made as a projectile. But the flame visuals around the object, which is a projectile are not actors. They're just components, and that particular component is particle. The next question is, what is the purpose of actors in the level? Actors, as I said before, can be anything in your level. There are grass, their walls, their floors, their characters. They are everything that you need to have in your level. And actors are different. Some actors are not even visible. Actor does not have to be visible to be relevant. And what are blueprints? And let's see what's the difference between this lamp, which is just a static mesh and this p lamp, which is now a blueprint. The difference is this static mesh is limited in functionality to what a static mesh can do. So as you can see, we have our details panel. We have our parameters, transform, et cetera, some base settings on how engines should interact with this object. It may be quite complicated to suddenly go through all of them, so we are not going to touch upon it at this moment. And quite honestly, you do not need to touch most of the stuff in the details panel unless you know exactly what you are doing. But actors, which are blueprints, can contain any kind of functionality. For example, if I want to explode this lamp, I can. If I want to make it move around or fly or do anything, really, I can do all of this through the blueprint. Obviously, there are limitations what you can and what cannot do it and how you want to do it. But the freedom is yours to do whatever you want with this object. In our case, we want this object to emit light. This is a lamp. And what we can do to do this is the same as we did in the previous lecture, we can add a light. So let's add a directional light. Oh, my apologies. Spotlight. And we want the spotlight to be looking up, and we want it to be exactly where the light source is. If you have trouble moving around with your mouse and zooming, you can scroll down, reduce or increase the mouse speed, or you can just click on top here and reduce it here. Let's put it like this. You will see mouth speed is now lower, which is quite useful when you are working with smaller objects. Also, if you get lost and you are not sure where your object is, you can always click on it and press the FK. And if you just press FK, it will zoom in and you can see your object. This function also obviously works in the love. So if you have the selected and move around, press FK, it will snap back to the object you have selected, which is quite useful when you have multiple objects in the scene or your level is too big to keep in mind where the object was or you lost the object while you were dragging it around. Maybe it's under the floor and you miss selected and you can no longer see it. And you can just press that key or your object is correctly. So now let's go back to the blueprint. And we added this light to the scene, right? Correct. And you may notice this spotlight is under the static mesh component, which means the spotlight is now attached to Static mesh itself. If we scale down the object, et cetera, the oldest children of it will move around. So let's add a cube. This cube is too big, so let's make it a bit smaller. This cube is now attached to the stack mesh component. So if you scale up the stack mesh component, while it's five, this cube will increase in size as well. So this is quite useful because essentially you are creating a scalable, uniformly scalable actor that will inherit all its properties from the parent when you modify it in the level. Let's delete this cube and compile, save just in case. Now we have the light lamp and light source itself, the spotlight. We can edit it here and now by let's changing the radios, et cetera. So let's reduce the radius. I don't want it to be a too strong lights. Let's put the value of 500 and compile. After we compile, you can go back to the level and take a look. Oh, we have a very weak light. I would like it to be maybe a bit stronger. So increase intensity to, let's say, t. And come up. It's still a bit stronger, but I don't like the shape. Maybe it is because I misplaced it. A bit, yes. It's a bit better. And let's say I want it to be red in the color. Now it's red. But we could have also done this by the usual method just by attaching it, correct? Here. Why would we do it like this if it's too bothersome? Because we can add functionality. So instead of making it red by default, I will make it white, and I will make the intensity 20 K, just so it matches the selling lamp. Pardon. Attentiation radius is fine with me, and I will compile it and move on to the event graph. And this is where the most interesting thing happen. Before we move on, I will explain what events are. So these are the three default events that Unreal will put for you right away. And events are essentially triggers that start as script. So for example, this event begin play is going to begin when this actor is in the level and the level starts. So if this actor is not in the level, this will do nothing. The actor needs to be in the level for this to start. So this starts, and let's say add a print string node, we can add a print string node here and just have it say hello hello. So print string is a bug function that lets you debug essentially test the functions if they trigger or not. In this case, we are just going to keep it at hello hello and compile and go back to the level. When we press play, we get hello because the event began the moment the level we if I were to remove this from the level and press play, there is no hello because the level the lamp itself is not in the level, so this will not trigger. If I somehow spawn or create this blueprint in the middle of the level, this will begin again. Essentially, this is what happens when this actor is initialized and is created. Next is event actor overlap. So to understand overlap, first, we need to understand collision. If we look at the object, let's pick this store. Let's say this store. This store has a collision. So the way easily you can see it is just click on here and click on player collision, which means collision that affects the player character. There is also visibility collision. You may have noticed there's a slight difference between visible collision and player collision. This is because this grass on the ground does not have collision against player. So if we move around, they do not stop us, cannot interact them. But with this story and quite honestly, rest of the objects in the scene does. This is because of the way the collision is set up for these objects, which we will go through in the next chapter. But regardless, back to the point, this object has collision. And by default, this object does nothing. If you want to add functionality to the store, first of all, we will need to convert the store to a blueprint. So what we can do to do this, we click on this button here, and I'm just going to keep the name right now as it is. It's a good practice to do our name files by naming convention. Usually blueprints are named BP. And now we have this new blueprint, and this blueprint is a door. If you close the project and you cannot find your blueprint, you can always go to your content browser and find your blueprint. In This case, I don't like that it is in this folder specifically. So what I will do, I will move it to the content folder and move here go to my content. And again, it's not organized if we have multiple blueprints here, all taking up space, so I will create a folder, call it blueprint. Um, let's make it blueprints, just to be. And let's rename this lamp, as well. And put them into our blueprint folder. So it's easier for us to find in the future. Okay, now, this door has no collision. To be more specific, it has a collision, but it is just blocking the player. We cannot really open the door. If we want to open the door, ideally, when we approach it, the door should just open. We could have added some interactivity like press E to open the door, like in most games, but we could also make it an automated door. So how do we do this? So first of all, we go to event Craft and we will not be ing tick or event begin play. So let's remove them. 12. Event Graph: Before we actually just start coding here, whatever, it's a good practice to just test if your assumptions are correct. So let's put in a print string saying hello. So we are hoping that when the actor overlaps with the door, we get the hello trigger. So let's move to the door and nothing happens. We may ask why? Because there is a difference between collision and overlap. Overlap assumes the objects go through each other and essentially overlap in at certain point. But collision stops this from happening. So what we do we go back to the blueprint and take a look at the viewpo. As this door is a solid object, we cannot just go through it to overlap with our player character. By the way, I just noticed the door is reversed. So let's just. This is embarrassing, but let's just apologies. Look, rotate it in the right direction. I don't know, maybe there are some doors that have had one on the left. I have never seen one so far. Other than double doors. Okay, so let's go back to the door. And here, we need to add a collision box. We will not be using this box for collision specifically. This is just a box to trigger an event. So let's scale it the size we want. Where it will trigger if the player character hits it. You can just make it like this. And I don't want this to event to trigger after we entered the room. I want it to remain open. So let's just do like this, so I don't have to worry about the other side of the door. So logically speaking, now the purpose of this is when we the player character overlap with this invisible box the door will open. But before we can do this, let's remove this and click on the box that we created. This is the box we have created. And on the right side down on the details panel, you will see we have events. These are made automatically by unreal to make your life easier so you can just save time and just click what you need. In our case, we need component begin overlap. You may ask, what do you mean by component and that component is everything inside the actor. This blueprint itself is acting as an actor. This static mesh component here is the core, essentially the root component of the actor. It cannot be deleted. It cannot be removed. It can be changed but ideally, the root of the component is what everything is centered around. And the door part itself is part of the door, and door frame is actually the root of the scene. So this internal part of the door is just a touched static mesh component. And same goes for the box. We could add infinite amount of well, not really infinite because of computational reasons, but a lot of additional components, but in this case, we don't need them. And we can see here, it says, On component begin overlap, and in the at the very end, you can see there is box. This is just a name of the collision we have created. So if we change the name to let's say, you will get this. I like the box better, made more sense. We put this now to here, print string, and to test if this will actually trigger the overlap event. So we go back to the level, press play, go back to the box. Oh, we have the hello on top left. We have as you can see, this triggers multiple times every time we enter the overlap. So let's go back to the blueprint. Now we confirm this actually works as we want. We could add a lot of limits on what can specifically trigger this door opening or how many times it can be opened, closed or do we want to open it and close automatically afterwards? We can do every single one of these scenarios, but we're going to keep it simple. We are just going to open the door when we approach the door. So now, how would you say the door is supposed to open here? For the door to open, let's say we want this door to open let's say in words, you would just need to rotate this at an angle of 90. Maybe realistically, it would be something like 80, but I prefer 90 degrees. So what we can do is we can go here, wreck this SM door node here. By the way, this tor node now is a variable. Act here in the event graph. And before we moon, let me explain what variables are. Variables are the most basic part of the coding process, not only in unreal but also in simplusPlst sharp and everything else. Variables are essentially you could say place solders or content of information that are used to code. For example, like in the let's say mass, you would be like X plus Y or X multiplied Y, Y equals Z. This is the same logic. This is our X. This is our Y. The other one will be our Z. And when we code, we don't have to every single time somehow reference or put all the information associated with the object. We can just put this as a handle or a tag or however it is you want to accept it easier for you to understand. This is now our door. The AEM door here, this is a reference to this AMDR and this asm door is now referenced here in the blueprint. Now, what we can do with this before we need to understand what we are trying to do. We want to rotate this door in 90 degrees in the Z axis. -90 degrees to be more specific the Z axis. How can we do it? So for this, we need to get a timeline. So timeline and add it here. Now, you may ask, what is the timeline? Essentially, the overtime triggers like events, the door. We don't want the door suddenly snap open. So if we, for example, take this SM door and let's say, take a note from it and set sorry, rotation. And put in the set relative rotation to -90 on event trigger. It will instantly open, but this is not the look we want. You wouldn't want to have this kind of sudden trigger on your door. So now, how do we fix this? So we want this door to open over time. So over, let's say, 2 seconds. And the way we do is with a timeline. So we have this node which is set relative rotation of the component it is attached to. In this case is a SM door. This door is the target for this function. And what this function does is rotates object in whatever value we put in. We can make it bigger for the additional nodes, but it's not relevant now. So let's take a look at what we are modifying here. We are modifying Z axis. We don't really care about X and Y. So what we can do, we can right click and split this struct pin. So what we did is essentially split this vector value of rotation into three float values, which this automatically converts back to rotation. The reason why we are doing this this way is because we are only modifying one specific value out of three, so we don't need to plug in three values. We take this execution pin and put it into play. The reason why I put it into play and not play from start is because we want this to happen essentially only once. This will play, it will finish, and it will stay finished. If we put it into play from the start, it will begin every time this will trigger, this timeline would begin from the start, but we don't want it, so we're just going to have it on play. And now we have this ASM door set relative location, and we need to update this set relative location with a value we will get from the timeline. So we need to decide what value we are going to output from this into this relative flotation. We double click on the timeline and this will open like this and we click on this plus track. Because we are modifying only one value. We don't really need a vector track which contains three vals. You can just use a simple at flow track. So we have this track, and let's rename it Z axis. And here we need to add a time. So length of the time is currently 5 seconds. Let's test it with 5 seconds. And the value, we don't have any values here. It's just a straight line, nothing happening. So the way we do it, we shift click once to add a node. So the beginning is going to be zero. It's no rotation. So we put it into zero, the value also will be zero. And let's add a second node, which will be at five marker. Let's zoom out. It's going to add 5 seconds. Can put manual time, and the value will be 90 -90 because we are going a negative number. So this is a very straight up graph from zero to -90 in 5 seconds. And let's compile it, go back to Event graph. And now we have this Z axis from the timeline. It's an output of the value that this function is going to give us every second, not only every second, like every frame that we will need to input into here. So now, this Z value that this set relative rotation function is responsible for is being updated by this timeline. So we compile this safe just in case and go back to our love. Now, when we trigger this, the door will slowly open very, very slowly. And now we're here. If we have done not play, but play from the start for the trigger, and press, go back to the testing, we would have this weird situation where, this is opening, and I move out and I come back and okay, it's opening again. I come back and okay, as you can see, this is at best, a prank. At first, a malfunctioning automated door. So we don't want this. So we do this play. And you may think, what if I want to close the door? And it's a reasonable question. What if first time I go through the I when I go inside, I want it to open, and when I go outside, I want it to close. It can be done. The way it can be done is quite easy. So we could add additional variables that say if it is true or not that we are inside or outside, et cetera, in case there are multiple exits from the building. In our case, we have only one entrance, so we are going to just keep it simple. If I exit entered from this point, and I need to also exit from this point, correct? And we are going to have the door remain open. Maybe we just want it to have some air. What we can do is we can create a node here called flip flop. Flip flop. What this node does is the first time this event is triggered, this will play from the start. And the second time this event is triggered, it will reverse from the end. Now, let's test it and take a look. As you can see, this is triggering every single time. The actor overlaps, and this is not what we want from our door. So what can we do to fix it? There are multiple ways to do this as always. What we can do is add a very simple variable that says if the door is open at the moment or if the animation stopped playing or not. So what we can do is we can create a variable who says I can open close doors. The bullion value. So the bullion values are values which just say yes or no. So in this case, can we open the close and Bulim value? We want this to be yes when the animation has stopped playing. So how do we implement this? You can press P and click, which will create a branch node. So what branch does is you put this into branch. And add this value to here. We want the default value of this to be true because door is usually closed. At the very start, we want this to trigger at least once. And if it is true, we want this to play. And if it is playing, we want it to be false, so it cannot trigger a second time. So what we do before we move on to here, we create and we drag this and set open closed door here and put the value of I too fs. Create a copy of this, second one, and do the same. We want this to be false in both cases because this way, this cannot trigger the second time, but we want it to close after it's finished already opening. So what we do we do this again. On finished, this will set this to true, and this will be the end of this line. Now, let's test it this way. And let's go. A. This does not trigger again, as you can see. And when I trigger it again, it closed. So we can trigger this. Go inside. And when we go outside, we will re trigger it, and this will close again. Obviously, this is not the most ideal solution to this. You wouldn't want to have your door open and, okay, I will go back and come back, and now the door is closing to your face. There are more reasonable ways to do this. We can add triggers on both sides of the door, for example, you can duplicate this and add another one here. This one will open when we come in, this will trigger and we close the door after we are inside or vice versa, or we can reverse them by using the combination of blueprints or nodes. But this is good enough for what we are trying to achieve here. This is a very basic, non optimized way of opening a door. And this is there are too many details to this simple function that is just all about opening the store. We could have done it in a much simpler way, but there would be less to explain, so we had to stick with this weird over complicated solution. Now, this is how we opened the door and we got into inside. As you can see, this is thanks to the blueprints. The blueprints enable us to create functions the way we want. I could do this is just a simple door with opening and closing animation. We could do it multiple ways. We can have this door recognize this character and open only to this character. You could have, let's say, MPCs or non playable characters in the game, and these characters may or may not trigger the store, depending on the access level they have. Maybe you want a specific character to go through this store, but others know. Maybe you need a specific item to do this. It all depends on how you want to do it and your creativity. 13. BP Variables: Well, this is usually called just exposing the variable to the editor, essentially. This is not really the correct name of it. It is instance editable. You may ask what does Eposon spawn do? So if we have an actor that spawns other actors into the level. So for example, in this case, let's spawn actor from class and select the spawn actor as this same lamp. Now we have this lamp which we can spawn, right? And if we set this. My apologies. We just need to put a value here. And in this case, I'm just going to skip the process and expose on spawn. If I compile, but this expose on span is not available. Let's say I just select it. This will not show up here, even if I compile it. But if I put exposed spawn, now suddenly I have this function. So this means I can create an actor that spawns a specific actor with the parameters I want. How is this useful, you may ask? Let's say you have a game where you shoot projectiles, fire, ice, electric, I don't know, laser beam. The color is the only thing that's different between your projectiles. And this color is defined per actor upon spawn, similar to what we have here. When they come into existence, they set their light color, et cetera. But if you want to set the light color for that projectile upon spawn, specifically, depending on the parameters, certain parameters you may have in your game, you can use this expose on spawn to have that option available to you when you expose it. And obviously, unless you need this, you leave this off. Okay, now let's go back to what we are trying to do here in our level. Going back to this blueprints we have, what if you want to not set them individually, but every single time to have a random color? You may just want to search for it and search random color, and you will get this. Linear color set random hue. What you need to do is put your light color here. And this back here and put this s to here and press play, and they're randomized every single time. To understand what this node does, every single time this node is run, it sets a random value to this variable, and this variable is set as a light color on a event begin play. You may wonder why does the color set are not same for all of them. We only edited one option, one blueprint, and they are all in the same blueprint. So why is the value different for each one? This is because this process is called for each actor individually. So if you play play, and go to the Blueprint. You will see this node. Let's repeat this process. This red line is a function that just was triggered. And if you take a look at the top side here, we have different labs, and you can select any of them. Let's select second one and click on the light color, et cetera, everything is in place, and you may notice a difference. And you can even check the other ones. But if you pay attention here, when I hover over the light color, the values here are different for each one. And this is because while they are all the same blueprint, they are individualized their individual actors in the scene. So when an event is run, event is run for each one separately. So if you have an object with, let's say, this specific very simple two node event, and you have 100 of the same object, you must keep in mind during event begin play, you run not two nodes of complexity function, but 200. So make sure you don't clutter your scene too much. There are ways to optimize this, obviously. You can sequence. You can combine all actors into group actor. For example, instead of having 100 individual one light blueprints, you could perhaps have a light system for your whole city and have them all the lights share the same blueprint. So in reality, it becomes one blueprint that's being applied to all lights in your city. But again, whether it is optimized or not, easier to use or not, if it is necessary depends on your game, your creativity, and more importantly, when it comes to optimization, your ingenuity. Now we have this function that is not bad. Every time we take a look at this room, it's a different color, and perhaps this is classy enough. Perhaps this is all you want. I want it to be a bit more brighter, so that's 240. Let's see if that changed anything. Just a bit. Let's change the atentan radius and angle a bit, maybe 16. Yeah, this is more to my liking. But I want this not to become stale. So this will remain exact same way for the rest of the game until I shut it down and begin it again. This was a game, this would be akin to entering a room, and the room has all these different colors, and each time you enter that room and that room gets loaded into the game or level opens up, you get different colors. It may be a bit boring. So let's make them change colors constantly. If we remember Event tick, if you add this everything here we have in the event ik, instead of events begin play, we will get something very different. But I believe we can all agree this is too much. This is hurting my eyes. As such, this is not ideal. Yes, it changes constantly, but I don't want it to change that much. And this does it only once. We need a middle ground between overtime, refitting function, and just single ones at the beginning. There are quite a lot of ways to do it. You can add timelines, you can call events, et cetera. But easiest way in this particular case is to add a delay note. What delay does, it waits a certain amount of time, and that time is referenced here, duration by duration. And after that time has elapsed, it executes. Let's say, let's put it in 1 second. Now, let's take a look at this and think what it does. During begin play, meaning when this actor is in the scene and game begins or when this actor is created or spawn, this triggers. We set a random color to our light color variable, which is set as a light color for our spotlight component. And there is a delay. Here. And 1 second elapses and this delay executes, but there is nothing here. We want to repeat this process. We want to select a new random color and select set it as a new light. So what we can do is take this execution pin and put it here. But suddenly this is very uncomfortable to look at. What we can do here is add a rewrote node. Let's add this node here and let's track this all the way here. Track this node from here to here. And organize this a bit better. Now, we have a node that re executes here by delay after 1 second. And let's see what happens. Let's go back to the level and press play. This is much more pleasant to the eyes. Now, let's talk about a bit about blueprint organization. If you are not the only one in the team or if you just want to keep it organized, which is a good practice in general to always have your code organized, there are things you can do. One of them as I've shown before, is a rewrote node to make it easy to see where the execution pins go. So in this case, execution pin went from delay to linear color set random hue node. But this doesn't really explain what this does. And for a person who first time looks at it, they will need to go through the code to understand it. And if you have a very complicated code that has hundreds of nodes in it, which is not uncommon, you will have the person who takes a look at the code will have a hard time. To make it easier for them, you can select all of your code and click C button. This is common. For people who are familiar with coding in plus plus or C sharp, or any programming language, this is doing exact same thing. This does not add any cost to the project that is packaged for deployment. Here in the comment section. We just name this. Let's say Light But change function. I'm not sure what is going on with my keyboard. And now we have this and we can change the color as well. We want to make it different or just color code or functions. I prefer green, and we don't want to add this events begin play into this because event begin play will function regardless of this code inside. And now, since this all inside this command section, you can just move them all together. Which is useful when you will have a lot of notes in your lave. There is one more thing about this I need to mention before we move on. This delay note here, you must pay attention. This has icon here. If you read it, there's a text at the end latent notes can be only placed in event graphs. You may wonder why this is here. For this notes familiar with coding, I will have to explain what a macro is. A macro and functions are they are pretty much the same as what we have here, but the difference is they have they are happening instantly and cannot be time sensitive. By that, I mean, let's say we have a function, and I don't mean this. These are nodes in a sequence. A function, if we were to create one here, let's say, we create click on this plans icon and create a function and call this function, let's just call it test as we are testing. Now we have a function called test. A function can be called as an event or a node to be more precise inside your blueprint. And I want to have this all happen inside the function. I could just copy this and drag this into the test. But it's much easier to remove this and click all of them and right click and collapse to function. You will notice this will fail. The reason why this failed is because of the delay node. We dismiss this. Let's do it again. This time without delay node selected, collapse the function. Now we have a new function, and let's just copy the name of this. And rename this new function into light change function. And then begin play this looks more organized, and it is also very good way to do this if you are going to reuse this function specifically in multiple places. Imagine you have a light and you have multiple possible triggers to change color. Usually, what you would need to do, you would need to copy paste. You can remove this rewrote node, really. You would need to copy paste this function. To each one of these triggers. So for each event that has a possibility to change the light color to random color, we would need to copy paste them and place them around the event graph, which will very fast, make it very disorganized. But what's more important an optimized. An optimized function is a slow function and a slow function makes for a slow game, and no one likes a slow game. Now we have this light change function, and we can trick this exact same code by multiple means. Perhaps you have a game where, let's say, when you touch the light, it changes to a random color. When you perhaps perform a certain action like jumping it changes to a different color. Or perhaps you shoot it. And let's say you have all three mentioned possibilities in the same game and you want to do all three with the same actor. Will you create three separate events for and copy paste that same spaghetti of code to everywhere? No. What you will use is this light change function. Now, you may wonder, but, okay, if I have multiple ways of triggering this function, I would want to have more control over it. For example, in the after mentioned scenario, if you can shoot as a light, and you want the light to change into, let's say, red color as if it's damaged, You cannot do this with this function because we set it random every single time. So there would be no real difference between by shooting this, let's say, lamp, which triggers this function, or let's just say walking around, or maybe there's just another trigger, doesn't matter. You would need more control over it. You would want to set this light color depending on how event is triggered without copying all these function everywhere. This is where inputs and outputs of the functions come in. So as you can see here, we have light change function, and there are no inputs there. Target is self in this case, obviously, but it can be something else if it's cast, cast cast will be explained in the next structure. We can click on the light change function and add an input. Also, we can add an output, but in this case, we're going to focus on input. Let's add an input. Input, in this case, is a variable. Now, this light color is a variable called light linear color. So we want this to be exactly the same. So we can just type it linear color. And let's call it just color. And now suddenly we have a light change function with a color node that we can put into set light color instead of using light color variable. I will for now, detach this. We may reuse it later. And we can compile. Now, if you go back to your event graph, you will notice, wait, we have a color. We now have a way to dictate what color it will be through a function. So let's make it. Let's say, during events begin play when the function is called, it turns red. Save, compile, go back to the level, press play. Okay, it works. But we used to have random colors. So this is what was enabling us to do it. So what we can do, we can cut this from here, compile, get back. And this got here for now. 14. BP Functions: Now, we have this as a separate function. So this is let's do collapsed function, call it random color. And we now have this random color. And for this random color function, we want to have outputs instead of inputs. Now we have this output return node. And when we drag this here and light color this compile, save just in case. And now we have this function with an output. To test, we can easily do this. L et's make sure everything is attached. Let's make sure. Okay. Let's go back to the level. Yes. It works as it should. But there was no real reason to separate them, you may think. They were one function. It was more optimized to be one function instead of two functions. But this is where utility comes. What I am trying to do now, when we open the door, all colors will be red. When the door closes, all colors will be green. And when you are just inside the room or even outside and the door is not being interacted with, they will change their colors randomly from time, let's say, in a five second delay. For this to happen, let's reorganize our code. We have light change function, and this light change function, all it needs is a color input. We have event begin play, and what we can do is let's get this in here and add five second delay here. Perhaps even not five second delay, let's. Yeah, we will work on it later on. So what we can do here is add a new event, and it needs to be a custom event. And we're going to call this event Open Door. Door. Let's create another event, and again, custom event and call it closed door. Let's make sure it looks fine. Here, we have this function that takes this random color. Now, do we need to have this function here? Is the question. Not really. You can remove this and this. And let's detach them all from each other and sing about this logically. Game begins, we get a random color. So we get this random color. We're going to not add randomization for now. The door opens and we get green color. Okay? So we need this slight change function again. But this time, we predefine it to let's let's say open door, red color as in a warning sign that someone is entering the room. And for closed door, let's say it is just green. Yes, I agree. And let's say we cannot change the color or to be more specific, randomize the color of the lights while this is opening or closing. So let's add a variable. Door is interacted. And add it as a bull in. And let's do branch. To the end of this color. If the door is being interacted with at the moment, pitch by default value should be false. We randomize our color and change it to random colors with delay. F delay. And let's have this delay be 30 seconds should be fine. Or, yeah, it should be fine. If the door is not being interacted with, it does nothing. For open door and closed door. When these events are triggered, we want to set this door is getting interacted into true. So what we do, we get two sets of set interaction. We set them true, so it does not get randomized in the middle, and we continue on our process. And if we check our door blueprint, we had a timeline of 5 seconds. So for door to finish opening or closing, it takes 5 seconds. So what we can do is add a delay for 5 seconds. Once second time or you can just combine them because these two operations cannot happen at the same time as we have set up in the Tor blueprint with this plop, as it cannot get interacted with while one function has not finished operation. Now, let's go back. And after 5 seconds of delay, we trigger set again. And after we set it to falls, and 5 seconds have passed, we want to get random colors back. So let's re purpose this and drag this to random color. And to make it look good, maybe even at a re rot node to make the curves a bit more easier on the eyes just to have easier time. Okay. Now, will this work is the main question? The answer is no. Why? Yes, the lights are changing colors, but they did not interact with the door. The reason why this happened, we did not really trigger the door. We named it open door closed door, but that's just a naming thing. We just named it that way. We did not really add anything to trigger this. Now, question is, how do we trigger this function? This is where we for the simplicity of the course, just will not use interfaces and use casts. And I will explain what they are in a moment. But before that, let's take this and this when we have this blueprint here, we have on the A, playing from the start and on the B, reverse from the end. So when B is happening, we are closing the door and A is happening, we are opening the door. We want to have red color on open and green color on closing. To do this, we need to add execution pin here that lets us do this, but it's already aquied. The way we do it by sequencing, right click sequence and click on it. And what we do is we put it in here and we put in first our play from the start. We want this to happen first, and we do this again, and at a sequence and zero reverse from end to our blueprint. This is turning into spaghetti code, but we are just doing this for the purpose of learning, so it's fine. Ideally, you would optimize all this code, but it is good for fast prototyping. Now we have this in place. The question is what we do here. Sequence lets us do certain executions one by one. It does not really wait for one to finish start the other one. It is more of a trigger. I will these triggers zero first, 1 second. Obviously, we want to open the door, so we put zero to seven play from the start. And in one, we need to somehow call these two functions. We need to call this open door function. The way we can do this, in our particular level, this store and this lamp will always exist at the same time. As such, they're already in the memory of your PC. So we can use casting. Let me first cast the cast two lamp blueprint. Class. The reason why we are not going to lamp and class because we want to use it on all lamps on not a specific one. So we are casting to the blueprint class, and obviously we need lampll blueprint. This does. This casting, even if you do nothing on the other end of it, or even if you just leave it like this, without execution pin, this will always load the lamp into the memory. As such, you need to be careful when you use it, not only casting to class, but also casting to individual instances of the same actor. As it loads it to the memory, every time the store will exist in the scene, the lamp will be in the memory and take some space. And even if you don't have any lamps in the scene, if you have this specific blueprint door, which has a cast to the lamp that will be in the memory. So if you right click and go to Size Map, this will show you how much it takes space in your game. This is not much, you may think. It's just 3 megabytes. Again, this is very simple blueprint, but this is on disk size. Essentially how much space it takes in your hard drive. And if you want to check how much space it takes in your RAM, your memory, you click on here, memory size. And as you can see, it takes 11 megabytes of your memory. If you have only one such object, it's not that much of a deal, but if you have hundreds of objects which are all casting to each different objects, and usually they will be bigger than 11 megabytes, suddenly, your RAM is filled with files and data that it's not even going to use because these classes are not always in the level. So you need to make sure if you are going to cast to something that something always is in the level, with whatever actor it is actually doing the casting. For example, casting to the player character is usually always okay because your player character is in most games, always loaded into the level as your character you are playing as. It may be an issue if you have multiple characters and each of your characters functions differently and have their own blueprints. But in the case of just having a player character, one same player character for all levels, you can safely cast your player character. But as I said, in this case, this lamp, even if you remove it from the scene, the door can remain but the lamp will still be loaded to the memory. So you must make sure to keep that in mind. Okay, now we cast it to the lamp, and from the lamp, we want a specific function. But you may notice we cannot really do this directly because this blueprint class is all blueprints of the lamp. It's not an instance or a specific instance. So we would need to get all actors of class instead. Which is doing exact same thing, but we will get an array instead. So we do exact same thing, which again, is very simply. This is going to get a reference to all of them, to all the actors. This is just not getting the reference to the class itself directly. So let's do lamp and we have now all lamps here, but now they are array in the form of array. So what is an array? Array is a set of multiple variables in one place. For example, an array of, let's say, meshes can contain infinite amount of meshes, and they're array beginning from zero, like by indexing from zero, one, two, three, four, et cetera, to infinite. And arrays are very important to understand if you are going to make a complex game or even a simple game. Now, in this case, this array here that was being generated by this function is getting all assets, to all blueprints of this class. So all references of this class in the level. In our level, we have six lamps, and this will get us six actors in the array. What we're going to do, we are going to add for each loop, which means for each item in the array, we are going to cast to lamp blueprint. Now, you may notice this has a different color because this is now not a specific class. This is a specific object in the array. So for example, in the first loop, we are going to get lamp wall on the index zero. Index zero lamp this will give a note, but the reason why this is giving us this note is because we are casting to something that's already casting. But you may notice there are no other errors. You could put it directly like this, and to keep in mind, this is still casting. But the this is just a way to use casting on an individual actor. If you have only one lamp in the level, vol blueprint, you can just use direct cast. There is no problem. But if you have multiple, you may want to use an array element and see if it is the same object. For example, if you have, let's say, an array of multiple actors, but not all actors are the same. For example, we have an array that contains five doors and five lamps. If you just drag this here like this, it may not find the required actor. But if we do it like this and do this like this, this will only trigger if the cast was successful. And if the cast by that successful, I mean, if the cast is lamp and not the door, this will work. And if it is something else in the array, this will fail. But keep in mind, you can create your own variables in the form of array. You can click on the variable. Let's select a variable of float. And here on the top right, you can click on it and convert into an array. And you can use after you compile this array, you can add as many instances of this array you may want. So we want, let's say, an array of values, five, 12, 14, eight, two, and one. And if you add this array to the low and get new R, for example, like this, you can use for each p function for each loop function to get next value in the order of zero, one, two, three, four, five, for any other purpose you need as such, keep in mind, arrays, yes, you can get an array of items, essentially getting multiple items by some kind of function as an information and use for each loop on them, or you can make your own arrays with specific values or actors references, and you can use them. Regardless, in this case, we are going to use this note because I want validation that the array I'm getting is actually the lamp fall blueprint, even if it is unnecessary in this case, because we all know we are specifically getting the specific array items and all of them will be labs. And we're going to compiles now, what this does? When we open the door, we get all actors of the lamps, and all lamps are one by one in the same essentially frame instance instant, go through this loop, and these loops calls the function called not all function, my open door event in the blueprint. So let's go back to the lamp pole and press play. Okay, now we are seeing everything is okay, everything is being randomized. Oh, while the door is opening, it is red. Now let's wait. After the door has closed, it begins anew. And let's say wait 5 seconds, and it works. And when we go outside, it's not working yet because we did not add anything to that. So let's see and do it again. We can just copy this to save some time. And we can call the same event and at the very end, change it to close door. I believe named it. And if you see context sensitive now is kind of an issue. When you have enabled, while you are searching for a function name or an event name specific to a different blueprint, it may not show up. So we can just disable it and you see class Pvolve blueprint, and we will use this and we can do this. Also, you can drag it directly here and close door. Again, as you can see, it will not show up. So we have this now working as well, and everything is as it should be. And we have this. The door is opening. When we enter it. Now, it's again, random colors. When we exit this, it is green. Now, let's just add one more small modification to our door so that we can have a more functioning door. We have this on beginning component begin overlap. And when we first time we enter it and exit it, this flip flops. We had two exits or if we want to close the door after we go into the room, we would need to do it in a different way because the trigger for it is outside. And even if it was not, the door closing into our face, would not really make a lot of sense. When we are trying to do something weird like, let's do this once, wait for it. Let's say we open the door, go somewhere else, and next time we come back, the door closing to our face. This doesn't really make sense. So what we want to do instead is to have a door that opens when we get close and closes automatically when we go away. How do we do this? We use something similar to competent begin overlap. But instead, we are going to click on this SM door, go back here and Uncompetent end overlap. This does the same thing as this function. But we need to make sure we get it for the right event. We need it for the box. This is the exact same functionality. But now, when we finish overlapping, this will trigger. Which means we no longer really need this branch at the very beginning or this flip flop. Because it's no longer a question if we can or cannot do it being flip flopped from in a sequence. Now, now we have a different issue. When we want to begin this functionality, we need to have now two branches. So we copy this and this added here, and we do this and do this. But let's test it out and see how it works after we edit our box. Now, because we want it to contain the door on both sides, we need to precisely it and let's just make it bigger in case we have someone saying, Let's not make too big and do it xis and test how it works. We get close, it starts opening. If you get anywhere near, it begins again. Now the reason for this happening is we don't have our previous, it can proper trigger for it. Let's take a look at our event graph. So when it overlaps, if it can open, close the door, it triggers and sets this. No, you cannot open close. And this timeline begins and when it triggers again, this happens. But what we need now is a bit different. We don't want this to happen anymore in this manner. If we separate our open here and expand it xis. This is where your second monitor comes very handy when working with unreal blueprints. You could dock it to your screen. Personally, I like having screen. To myself. Let's begin. And it's kind of hard to see, but we are opening the door. Okay, now it's opening. And we move, it's closing. But when we come in again, it doesn't trigger. But it's begin again. And now let's give it a second and come back. It's instantly shove to our face. Now, the reason why this happened, the we always have play from the start and play reverse from the end, which does not make a lot of sense in this case, because what if the door is half open when we approach it? So instead, we are going to do it play and reverse. What will happen now is when we play or now it is playing And then we go through verses. But now we have a different issue. When I go away, it doesn't start closing straightaway. It finishes it. And next time I go away, it closes. You may want to keep it like this. This is more than functional, and it closes and opens up. But let's tweak it around a bit. Instead of having this branch now, which tells us when we can open or close the door, let's remove this and have it directly into sequence like this. This removes any conditional opening of the function, and let's see what happens now. We press play, we are closed, and it opens, and when we go away, it closes. And we can go in. It's lipless and we get in and it opens. The only issue is we made it too slow. So let's go back to our timeline, and let's make it 3 seconds instead of five. And we need to also change the value of the second one time wise and make it three. So it rotates in the 3 seconds. But that means also we need to edit the delays on open door, and let's make it 3 seconds as well. This is inside lamp bull function. So let's see what happens now. We begin the game. We see the lights changing randomly colors. We get close the door. It is opening. While opening, it's all red. When it's closing, it is green. And now we're in the loom with a lot of lights. Now we can also change the material for this box here and let's say, add this one. With reduced emissive. Emissive material is as we mentioned before, it's a bright material. Material brightness is multiplied here, as you can see. So we can reduce it. We just divide this value. Something I would recommend doing on the material instance instead of material itself. But let's say let's divide it by ten times. Let's see what happens. Yeah, it's less bright. So there's less brightness, but maybe a bit too much. So let's eat four times less apply. I still want some brightness to be there. Yeah. And let's apply the same material here as well. Perhaps not. Again, up to taste. I will leave it here as it is, save this. And now we have a weird scene where we have this to some random lights in the middle of nowhere for our pleasure. The blueprints are a very, very expensive subject. You can make anything in the blueprint. There are myriad of nodes you can twitch, twit around, and add your own creativity. We did this simple door function in multiple ways. We took a look at the lights, how we can do it in multiple ways. And the most important thing you need to understand is how flexible everything is in game development. You will not find simple solutions, and even if you in the future, try to find information on how to do a specific thing, for example, we have these cubes here, and when I touch them, they drop down. These are simple cubes with their physics enabled and no blueprints. But you could also do this with blueprints. The difference when you need to do this is blueprints and when you can just enable physics, which will be explained in the next lecture, is what differentiates a good developer from a bad one. You need to understand when you need to use what and how and why. There are infinite ways of doing the same thing. And the complexity you want to do it as depends on what you need and what your time frame is. In this case, let's take a look at our lamps. Yes, this works, and this is how I showed it to do it. But this is not ideal. We have a lot of nodes. Again, we did not organize them. We have variable that instead of getting here, we could have inherited from somewhere else. We did not have to really use casts for this. We could have used interfaces, which will be explained in the next lecture. And all of this was up to create freedom. You've done multiple things in multiple ways, and it all boils down to what you want to do and how you want to do it. Don't limit yourself with your blueprints. And when you search for information on forums on community forms, maybe on YouTube, Google, and you find the specific thing you need, do keep in mind, you may have a better way of doing this. As I have showcased in this lecture, this store and this lamp, and we did it multiple ways. It's such a simple thing, but it still has infinite ways of doing it. See you in the next lecture where we are going to actually make interactable, small scene, which can be used to prototype a simple game, and you will have complete freedom on what you want to make and how you want to make it. But before that, we will have a task. This task is going to be a bit more difficult. And in this task, we are going to use all our knowledge we have learned so far and create and enliven your scene further. I've shown you a few things with how you can do in blueprints. It was not much as blueprints are a very expensive topic. But you can apply what I have shown in the lecture so far to your scenes you have previously created, or you can just get creative and experiment with blueprint functionality and create whatever you want. Don't be afraid to make mistakes or experiment. The only way to really learn unreal is to actually try to do it and see if it works. Even best developers will test things multiple times before they can get it working. See you in the next lecture. And have fun. 15. Create Landscape: Welcome back. In this chapter, we are going to go through on how to make a scene from scratch. We're going to try to create some gameplay elements using all the knowledge we have acquired so far. And also, I will cover some more functionality of each aspect of unreal. Until this point, we have created materials. We have learned how to apply them and instance them, how to set up the lightning in our scene, how to create blueprints, and how to create interactivity between blueprints and actors. But we did it all on top of our already existing template. What if you want to create something from scratch? So to do this, let's first of all, decide what we want to keep from this creation we already did. If you have any actor or object in your scene, you would like to transfer to the next one. Keep it in mind. And in my case, I want to take some of these cubes with me to the next level. And I'm going to use them as blueprint, so I will just click on it, turn them into a blueprint, switch the name, and just call it Cube PMC. I'm going to save it. The reason why I'm doing is because I will need it in the next section of the lecture. So to create a new map, first of all, let's keep it organized, create a folder, call it level. And now let's create a new level. You could create a level from here and just click level, but this is always going to be blank as it there is nothing in the level. If you want to have a template for a level, you can click on New level on top, and you will get a choice. Do you want an open world partition level? Do you want an empty open world partition level? You want basic or with some assets in it or empty basics level. The difference between partitions and basics levels are partition levels are usually meant for open worlds which are too big. And you would like to optimize your game play by essentially cutting this world into partitions, essentially parts to unload and load into game depends on the proximity or the state of the game. In our case, we are not going to do that. We could just use basic, but I'm going to select Empty level to show you how it's done from scratch. Let's click Create and save. And now we're in the empty level. Maybe hard to see, but there is nothing here other than this grid. And first idea maybe let's add some light to the scene. But if you just add light, let's say, reactional light, it will not do much. We need to add the sun, the sky sphere, everything that was by default existing in the previous level. Do this, you need to go to window and environmental light mixer. Click on it, and you will get this. Let's first create the skylight, atmospheric light. You could edit settings already if you want, but I'm just to keep them on default for now, create atmosphere, create volumetric crowd, and create height fog. And suddenly we have something very similar to what we had in the previous level. These are just placeholders for in the outliner where we have our light sky. So let's put them all into a folder. And let's call this folder skylight. At next, we are going to learn how to create environment for our scene. There are two ways we can create our environment. First is just to use some basic measures to create floor walls like in the previous template. Or you can create a landscape. To create a landscape, click on the top here, selection mode and click on Landscape. You will get this grid on your viewport. And on the left side, we have our options for the grid. This is how big your landscape will be. This may seem small, but if you keep in mind that your meshes should not be too big in the first place, this is quite big. And landscapes while optimized are still allowed on your performance. So unless you need them, you should not make them too big. I want this smaller. So let's reduce this size by let's divide by and divide by two again. This is more than enough for me. We could make it smaller, but for now, it should be fine. And we can also pre select our materials. So let's select ground. Let's see, gravel. I like gravel better. And let's click on Fill world. My apologies. No Fill world. Create. Let's click Create. If you click Fill World, it will fill the whole world with the landscape, which is not what we want. Great. And now we have a landscape. As you can see, now it's more apparent that it's quite big. But this is too straight. And I want to add some mountains and stuff on the side so I can block vision to make it clear. It's not this. There is no southern end of the Earth. This is not a flat Earth. So what we can do is we can use sculptols. So let's click it. And we have a brush. I want it bigger. So I'm going to increase brush size, and I'm just going to click with my left mouse button. Perhaps my brush was too big. Yeah. Let's increase brush tool string. And let's just sculpt this landscape just randomly. All I need is to not have a end line that looks bad and something like this. Maybe a bit more here. Now, if we look from this vision, let's make it bigger here. I by mistake, clicked on this spot, but we will fix it. I could control to undo it. But I can also Shift click on it to reverse to instead create this pit. Or I can click on this flatten tool here on the top and click on it. Now, the way flatten tool works, you click on a spot and after you move your mouse while you're holding that mouse button, it will flatten them to. So we will click on here and we will move, and as you can see, everything is being flattened to this point. Fy word click here first and move my mouse around, it would flatten to the initial position. So now we have this land. Now let's just add random hills and tops, just kind of fakes that we are making. Let's add one big one here. Maybe it's a bit too big, so let's let's add some dents on the ground, fall offs. And now we have a Landscape you can use for our purposes. Obviously, this is just something I did in a quick few minutes without putting much thought or effort into it, but you can create anything you want. There's a lot of tools here available to you. You can erode it. You can use hydro to create a simulation of erosion. For example, let's pick this rock here, and you may see it's changing shapes slightly. This is simulating erosion by rainfall. This one is just erosion from soil moving around from higher to lower. So this is just a lot of tools you can use. You can just use noise. You can select what type of noise you want, et cetera. You could use height maps if you know how to get them or use them. There are a lot of things you can do and you can create. And for now, we are going to keep it here. And what we can do also, if we don't want to have all just this ground and maybe we want a different color or mountain and maybe we want the higher up to be this gravel, but below some grass, we can do that. For these two, we need to create a layered material, which we will do shortly. 16. Master Material: Now, let's create our material. The way we will do this, we are going to create a master material for landscape. So let's go to the materials holder. We have created previously, create a new material called M underscore. MM stands for master material, and let's call it landscape. Underscore Matt. Save this. When we save something in the new level for the first time, it will ask for a name. Make sure to do this in case you're on real crashes and you'll lose all your progress in the level. And we're going to call it deem you are free to call it whatever you want. And now this is saved. Save again just gase or save all materials. We open this material slot. We don't really care about substrate at this point. We will leave it for later. We need to now create a material. So the way I decided to use gravel and grass and we will have two layers. You can have as many layers as you want. But keep in mind to not make it too complex because of performance costs. The way we do it is we need layer blends or landscape. Landscape layer blends. We add this, and we drag this to our base color, get a and we add elements equal to the layers we want in our case, too. And we duplicate this and copy pass again for normals. If your game does not have normals, as such, if everything is just flat, for example, as in Minecraft, for example, you don't really need normals as much. And because it's a landscape material, it's good to not have a lot of shininess on the landscape. So let's just force down value of one. This can also be modified with layer Billions as all other things, but we are going to keep it very simple. And now we have two layers. Let's say gravel for the first one. I should have probably named them before duplicating just to not have to do this process twice. And we will call this one, second one brass. Just copy pass to here and t for now. We save this, and I have already opened the grass material and gravel material I'm going to use. And what I really need to do is copy what's in here for base color and normals. These two materials are made by default by unreil. So they have conveniently for us separated them already. Everything on the bottom here goes to the normal together with the text coordinate note So what we can do, we can just copy this all of it. Go to our landscape material, paste all of this here. Let's make sure we have everything correctly. So out of larp node, we have to base colors. So we do the exact same thing. We add it to the grass layer blend. Or the larp node. And from this lp node on the bottom, we have it normal. This may seem a bit disorganized because this default unreal material has a lot of nodes in it. But let's just keep them a bit to side. And let's put them all a bit below have a clear space. Close this grass material now. Yes, we don't care about this material. And let's do the same for gravel, and we do the exact same thing. We copy this. We paste this here. Let's drag it to the material. And here, we drag this. Let's take a look at this. We have multiply to base color. And let's see what we had here. We had roughness modified. And we have this normal. May have known this because this gravel material has roughness and grass has a roughness of default one. We cannot use it as it is, so we will add additional layer blend this time for roughness. We will add this roughness to gravel. And because grass has roughness of one, we will just add the value of one. No need to overcomplicate this and we save. We give it a second we go back to our Demo map, we select our landscape. We go down on the details panel and we have a landscape material. Click on our master material and put it in here. You will see we don't really have any color on our master material. Let's go to landscape and go to paint. Currently, if we try to paint, it will not work. To do this, we need to create layer info. Click on the plus icon. You can do a weight blended layer, non weight blended layer. We don't really care about weight too much in this case. So let's do demo map. We can put it in the material folder as well, just for convenience. And we do it again for the grass. And again, I will put it in the material. And now I can select a material, let's say, gravel and paint. You realize this looks weird. If I press here and I grass, this is very shiny. This is a bit too shiny for my taste. So let's go back to selection mode and click on directional light, reduce it to three, as I prefer. And now we have less light. Save it for a second. And let's take a look at our specular value metallic and roughness. Our roughness should be fine, especially for grass. We need to take a look at our weight of the map. So we have gravel, but let's first paint the places we want to have grass. We can take care of it later. I want these areas below to have grass with lower elevation. Ira elevations can be just full of gravel. O. Interesting. I will just shift click it and remove this part. The fact that gravel does not look correct is concerning. Let's preview the node. You can preview the node of the material by clicking this icon, and we have it black. Which is concerning. Et's take a look at the gravel material. Okay. We have a node that's not attached. Oh, we are missing a note. I may have messed up and copying the node. Not may, I have messed up the node. Let's see how it looks now. This still does not look correct. Let's take a look at it again. For simplicity's sake, I will just remove this part of the node. Go back to this crowd node, copy all of this again, go back to the material. Copy pass. We have a Okay, A needs to come from this, and B needs to come from this. I believe I have missed this note here last time. Apply. Let's take a look. Yes. This is more in line with what I wanted. And I can now shift click to erase this layer or just click to add. We're not going to paint it perfectly here. But as you can, we still have these values here, brooches, flattens, et cetera. You can also assign foiliage to generate on a certain layer if you want. In this case, we are not going to do it for now. We will save. And for now, this should be fine. For now, this should be fine. 17. Foliage: Now, this field here looks very barren. This is because we don't have any foliage. We don't have grass, we don't have bushes, we don't have anything. We could go to foiliage too, and create a foolage or get an active foilage. We could create it. We could make it ourselves and manually plant them all over the place. That is not a hard thing to do. We can create just, let's say, static mesh foliage. And let's see. Let's create a new folder. Call it. Foilge. And let's call it Folage Underscoe. Mm. Wolage actor underscore Bush. Let's open this and go to mesh and select some Bush. Now, we save this. And if it clicks and start painting, we will manually paint this push around the level. Give it a second for it to finish downloading. Compiling shaders, be more precise. And now we can just put them all over the place. We can remove them if we want and erase them, et cetera. Removing is quite different from erasing. And you can add parameters here. Let's say we want it less density. So let's say ten radius or 100. And what is it here now? My apologies. I should have selected paint. Now we get less foliage. We have additional parameters here, or it is scale. You may not have mean and max. This is to randomize. So let's say we have zero dot five, and just for demonstration, let's say eight. Some foils are now very big, some fools are very small. We can make them movable, et cetera, but quite honestly, it's not recommended to have them movable. It's better to have them static. And we have collision. You don't really want to have collision in foliage because of obvious optimization issues. You don't want your car to move around and be stuck on a piece of grass unless a particular kind of foliage is required to have collision, you should not use collision. Regardless, I don't want to use this this way. What I will do instead, I will go and remove part of rays. The way remove works, you need to select the foiage and click on Remove, but we don't have it saved there. So we will just erase it manually to clean up the scene. We could manually paint the whole level with this, but this is not really efficient way of our time. Obviously, if you're trying to create a beautiful landscape, you want to micromanage every detail. Manual placement makes a lot of sense. You can place them in singles by just clicking this single button, or you can place them in fill, just fill the whole area with it. But I don't want to waste time on it. So what we're going to do is instead spawn foilage with the material. For that, first, we need to create an actor called Landscape Grass type. I already created one, but I will re demonstrate. Let's go to Foolage. Go to Foolage section, and we have Landscape grass type. We create this. Let's call it LG. Let's grass and T and call it push. The reason why I call it push is because we're only going to have push, but you can have multiple grass here elements. In our case, I'm just going to add Bush, so I just called it Bush. But you could have a set of different grass together, so you can just spawn them with one grass. Here, we select our Busch actor. And the reason I'm using is because it's only one available in starter content. You can create your own Bushes. You can add something from Asset Store, from Fab, anywhere you want. And let's save this. We can edit the density of the grass. We can use, again, the same similar concept here, maxmin size. And let's make max size two. Calling distance is important. At what distance you want to see your grass. I will leave it for now on ten K, but you may want to reduce it or increase it depending on how important this grass type is for you. And you may notice there is no collision in here. The disadvantage, well, perhaps disadvantage, depending on your game of using this to spawn your grass or foilage you cannot add collision to them. So let's go back to our master material. I don't even know. That was gravel. So let's go back to our master material. Right click and call Grass Landscape grass output. You may notice there is no place for this. There is no output node for this. This acts additional final output node. And we need to add our grass here. LTG push. Now, let's take a look at our Just give a moment. You may notice nothing really happened. This is because we don't have anything in the input section. Now, we need to explain to the materials where to generate the static messages for the bush. We have previously converted into grass type. We cannot just put in this information here because this is a combination of layer blends, and there is no real way to generate placement from our previous nodes. To do this, we need a sample node, sampler. Or layer Landscape layer sample. And we need to put this in. And here we need to type in the name of the layer. That layer, in this case, is grass. You can just copy pastes or type it in. And safe. Let's see. Suddenly, we have a lot of grass generated where our grass material was. I still think it's a bit too bright. Let's me reduce the brightness a bit more. Yes. And as you can see, I did not have to paint this, and you may argue it is too dense. We can reduce the grass density. So let's say I don't want a lot, I just want ten and save. And now I have some grass. I want them generally to be a bit smaller. So let's mean 02 and max at one. Now we have grass that is optimized to a degree, and we can just place them automatically by using a material. Obviously, we can create multiple layers and each of them can have their own notes. To produce meshes. So let's do another one this time for gravel. I want small rocks. Let's see if I have any rocks as meshes in the starter content. Rock. We have a rock, I believe. Let's take a look at it. It's a rock. So let's go through the process again this time faster. Let's go to our foilage, create a filage landscape dress type. Call it LGTUnderscore, rock. Open this, add an element, make this element rock, reduce, let's say, size 0-2 to one as before, and I don't want it to be dense as well, but do it 20. Save this, and let's go to our landscape material. Here, we can add a second element. And we can create a new parameter name, sampler, put it in. We could straight up make two different foolige type spawn in one layer sample, but we want there to be dirt on gravel layer and grass or in this specifically bushes in grass layer. So what we need to do is same as before, we copy the gravel, parameter name, put it in a second node, go to here, go our second element, called gravel. Enter, save. Let's go back to our level. There is nothing. Maybe wondering why. We go back to our material. We have gravel, grass, and we have landscape, but we don't have this second landscape type selected, LGD rock selected, and we have rocks. Now, you may notice it is producing rocks in grass as well because these materials are layered on top of each other. They are layers. Which means the information the material is getting here is incorrect. We do have rocks, and we have rocks and grass. You may wonder why this is happening. First of all, let's reduce the amount of rocks and their size is too much. Let's make it maybe four and size can be zero dot one. It seems I have undoed it by mistake and zero dot f. I don't want big rocks. I want small rocks. Maybe maybe let's add a bit more rocks here or maybe too much. Yeah, small rocks here and there. They don't look good. The fact that they're all the same scale, I don't like it, so let's add a free by making it free, it means their scaling in all directions are randomized. Let's do this like this, save, and probably rocks will look more different. And I don't like them being tall, so let's introduce this scale to zero d two. So we don't have tall rocks. Yeah. We have now pebbles, et cetera, and let's edit their clusters as well, which we can do here, maybe. No, this is hardly I need hardly any difference. Let's restore it as it is. Make a bit more. I don't want cool distance. I want random rotations. Sadly, this is more or less a limitation of us having not a lot of rock variations. Regardless, let's leave it as it is. And now the main question is why do we have rocks on grass? This is because the way layers work. When we were painting, we had these two strengths here on zero dot three, which means this grass here is weighted. Despite us using non weighted layers, this grass here is actually weighted and we have now the value of zero dot three on the grass and zero dot seven on the gravel. The easiest way to fix this is to remove the gravel information from here or tool string one and click grass and just paint it again. But even if we have one grass, it's still not ideal. We want to remove the gravel information. So we click Shift and remove the gravel information. Now, if we remove gravel information, we will not have rocks, and our grass will get more green. Unreal is blending our two materials together, which is a great functionality to have. But when you use this to produce rocks and grass, this may be a demurred. So it's up to you to whether you are going to use them as a material to produce the foliage, or you are going to use foliage to paint the tolete and place them manually in the level. Now, let's clean up the scene a bit in a fast fashion. Let's I don't want any grass here on the side. We are going to have a main leak let's remove gravel here. We also remove the grass, it will be black. So it means black, which means there is no information here. So if I put gravel and grass here, you will see in the middle, they blend together. We can use this to first of all, let's remove this. Shift click to delete the layer information. I don't want gravel here to be. What we can do here is we can add a gravel layer. The sides. The hills and grass layer on the sides as well, and only grass in the middle. What we'll give us is a layer with grass foliage only into a blend of grass and gravel. So rocks and foliage and only rocks. You can, again, use multiple layers, use them however you want, create whatever you wish to create. Now, we will save this. We will not waste any more time on this landscape generation. And do keep in mind the layer info for this placement for the painting in the landscape is these two files. Make sure to not delete them or move them from where they are supposed to. Generally, it's not a good idea to touch them. You don't really need to do anything with them, usually. As such, don't touch them unless it is absolutely necessary and you're aware of what you are doing. Now we can move on to creating in our scene. So now we have a landscape. And next, I want to create something to where we can create our game elements, but we don't have meshes. And by that, I mean, we don't have blocks, et cetera, and quite honestly, I don't want to use multiple box for this. So we're going to go back to modeling tool. And a modeling tool, let's create ourselves. Let's create ourselves a platform. We can begin with a cube or a box, if you wish to call it. Let's put it here and we can make its height 100. My apologies. Thousand. Perhaps it's a bit too big. Let's make it 500. And let's see, we can align it to the ground. We align the targets in the ground directly. Should I let's just keep it locally. No need to get too creative here. Now, we have this enabled. Let's put it a bit into the ground and we can model this further to create ourself platform. We can poly group edit this we can enlarge to be precise, extrude this pace. Select the space, and let's see. What we can do here is push or pull this face here. Let's do this further. Let's make it a big platform. None real reason to make it small. And extrude it again. I may have misclicked something. Let's click on this pace again, extrude it slightly and click on this, extrude it again. This will be our part of our platform. Now let's push this phase. Perhaps I should have pushed a bit more. I'm making it big just in case we need it. But quite honestly, you're free to do it anyway you want, any shape you want. You may have noticed I made a mistake. I don't have legs for this part because I did not extrude a proper face. I could add additional edge, et cetera, but instead, what I'm going to do, I'm going to click this and extrude all the way here. And I'm going to extrude slightly again, create additional pass. I will click on the bottom face of the newly created phase extrude it again, the ground. And now I have this here, which I can easily extrude again. Look keep in mind. The reason why I'm doing this is just for the sake of saving some time. As I do not wish to model, the whole platform. This is very useful for blocking and creating the samples for the environment, which later on, you can ask your modelers or creative to make or if you are going to admire yourself, yourself can make. Now, we have this, and the ideas this is attached here to the mountain and have this. We should probably move this part inwards. So let's do this. What we can do is we can select all these faces. And just move them to here. Now we have a platform that's click Accept. And we can further poly group edit, that's creating pillars. If you want, as you can see, you can just not move this. You can extrude after you select it properly, unlike what I did. So let's extrude this, make just arena of some kind. That's the idea, at least in my case. It's just a bit bigger. Extrude again to create additional polygons or to be more priced faces, I need to push all the way here. This may have been too long, but we will know in a second. You can push it again. Edit this just a bit. Can do the same here. Now, in this case, I'm just eyeballing the whole process. So it's not ideal. No. I'm just going to at this here. At the pillar extrudes slightly, is a lower face extrude again. Deep into the wall. It's bit misaligned, so's it is and Let's move all of them together. And it's should be fine. Now, let's be polygroup edit, extrude the face. Select the pillar, extrude it again. The height is a bit off. So let's make it a bit taller. You can also select the edges. To move them around, you want to change the size, and you can shift select them to select multiple edge at the same time. You want to modify the size of the face. This is common knowledge when you are experienced with modeling. And now we can extrude. Again, it's a bit misaligned, but we are not trying to be perfect here, so we can just do this. And I'm going to leave it at that. Going to modify this placement of these vertices a bit by reducing sitting them here. Yes, I'm not the best architect, but this is fine. Except now let's select a material for this platform. I think something like a marble should be fine. We could Let's see how it looks. Not ideal as we don't have proper UVs. So let's just create a new material for this. Go to materials. Let's see how our basic material looks on this. Yes, basic UVs are fine. You can create a material. Call it underscore plat form. Save Los a platform material. And now we can work on material for this platform. Save. 18. Scene Setup: Now, we are going to make a substrate material for our platform. You may ask why? Because we have never touched upon on the subject, and this is a good opportunity. Substrate material is a new material type or you could say material function they introduced in unreal, and it is a way to layer materials without actually using multiple material sources, and it looks and computes the layers with their alphas, with the lights and reflections together to give us very high quality results. So first of all, we need a slab since I removed the previous default material inputs, and we need a second one if we are making two layered slab which we are going to do. And we need a vertical substrate layer. We put it like this, this here, and this here. This is what we're going to do for now. Now, this has some similar and options to the original one. So let's first add our colors. Diffuse albedo is the same as your color note previously. So let's make it for now sin blue, add different one and add it to diffuse albedo here. And let's make it yellow for now. We will change it later. Let's add a roughness because I want this top material to be very shiny. Let's make it 05005. And we have it like shining blue. But we cannot really see the yellow. To do this. We need to add this particular node helper. There are two of them. We need the second one. And here we drop these to here. And give it a moment. Now, suddenly, this material looks very different. Let's save it. You can see this is a layer of two materials. And if you look at from the top where light is reflected, you can see the shine quite easily. And if you look at the bottom, we have a darker color. We could change the color to make it more clear. Let's say, dark blue and let's say, deep purple. It's quite easy to see this way. But what's more important is we can add normals. Normals are for adding textures, so we can just add a texture node sample, add a normal. And I believe we had some from unreal Sartbrek for cobblestone, or was it? Oh, yeah, we have normals. For cobblestone we have smooth ones as well. Let's add smooth ones and give it a second. And now we have a layered material with smoothness to it. Let's now make color something we would actually like to see. I want brighter color with some darker hues. Let's make it on blue. I want essentially two layers. Now we apply this. Let's go back to the level and see how it looks. Let's give the moment. And let's select our new material and put it in here. Obviously, we need to adjust the tiling, but now we have a very different material. It's adjusted tiling. Significantly. So extra coordinate. Add TUE, the only one I have here. Let's make it very high number. Let's tie up ten times. Save Saving automatically also applies. And we have this material now. It looks like there is a sheet of glass and you look it from one direction, which is the point of substrate materials. This would be very hard to get this specific effect if you were to do it with regular materials. But this may be quite hard on the eyes. So what we can do, let's test it with different colors. But we have black with some, let's say, bright red underneath. Let's go back to Well, black itself is not much of a color, but the fact that we have this roughness parameter here affects how it looks. So if we were to increase roughness, let's say to one and apply this material suddenly we have a rough material. But we don't want it this rough. Let's reverse it, and we don't really want it black. Let's do something fancy and have two bright colors collide with each other as such. And we have this styling note. Let's increase it even more. I want even more smaller rocks in the pavement. And let's give it a moment. And now we have this material, which I think I'm okay with it. You could add multiple colors, multiple layers, and be creative and obviously the substrate by itself has multiple options. You could, for example, edit the roughness of the second layer as well. So if you make second real roughness zero, the second layer will be very shiny. So now suddenly there is more shine on the second layer, and if we reverse this a bit Top layer will not have any shine to it, but bottom layer will be. So it will eat the shine. But if we can also do this, and roughness here can be of a similar value. And add a sickness to the layer. So how thick is the top layer. So when we have this top sickness at zero means essentially top sickness doesn't exist, we will not really see it. So let's just prove a point, apply, and see. We have a very glossy yellow material. But if we put it into something like one, this is too sick to see the yellow. But if we dot zero dot five, still too sick. Zero dot one. Maybe it's still too big. The logic here is too sick to see through the object. At zero.01, you can barely see it and barely see the yellow. And if you reduce a bit more, bet I mean ten times. Now it's all yellow. You could just put it at something five and you can adjust how much you want the material to be Cro. But it should be very small number. Sadly, unreal doesn't have a documentation on how small the default value should be, but we can just test it out and take a look at it as we are twiging around. 02 is too thick, and maybe we should have a value of seven And again, we could also disable it and see the difference, as you can see, bit more yellow, bit more blue. Sadly, I'm not aware of what's the default sickness of it, but I'm going to assume it is somewhere 1-2. Most likely one.500 15. Yes. Something along the sides. I want it to be more yellow, so I'm going to put it at 05. Apply. Take a look at it. Now, the blue and yellow is not a good combination, but we are going to leave it for now because I want to test and show you how it looks with a different normal applied. So second layer we have essentially looks like a layer of rocks because of this normal we have here, normal texture. But we can also add a texture on the first layer. So if we put this here and plug it into normal, my apologies, we need a texture node. We put it here. And let's add a different texture node so we can just search for N. We don't want clay. Is there any interesting normal? Let's take a look at rust. Rust as a normal texture. Let's apply it. We may need to add tiling. Now we have this weird rust thing on top. I don't like the tiling of this, so we are going to add a texture node. Let's dentitize this as well. Apply it. Rust node normals may not be the best, but suddenly we have these imperfections in the material. It feels like a block of water is frozen above the cobblestone pathway, but the pathway itself is also layered. And all of this is done by simple material. If you were to just remove this material, it looks like a block stone. But here. Now, what we can do is instead select something that would make more sense. With a cobblestone, basalt normals. And let's change the colors as well. Blue is not a good color. Let's make it something like brown brown color mixed with Let's see. Let's make a color to colour material, apply this Perhaps it's a bit too bright. Yes, this is a bit too bright. So let's reduce the saturation of it and have it a bit darker, maybe a bit more. You can pick the color this as well. Let's take saturation and put it below. They are very similar to colors which is completely fine for our purpose. Yes, this should be fine. This now looks like color scheme is not that far off. We could make it a bit more dark on both accounts. We can, which is more important reduce increase the roughness to make it less shiny. So let's make it that far. And this one can be straight up one. Save Okay, now it's much less shiny. We don't want it to be metallic or anything. There are additional parameters like for example, if you put fuzz roughness here and let's say fuzz amount. Let's take a look at them and put it into one and fuzz roughness into zero. Let's make it one as well and add a color. Let's say red. We will get an additional tint. But this is a bit too much, so let's reduce fuzz amount to zero dot five, perhaps even zero dot two to just add some redness to the material. And now we have a material that's a combination of three colors, two normals. It has multiple parameters for roughness. And we did not touch a lot of additional settings here. And the there is multiple ways you can go about this. We can add additional vertical layer and add one more substrate slab and layer them again and add even more normals, even more colors, even more like additional roughness, UVs, et cetera. There are infinite ways you can use this to make good looking materials, and Unreal has a substrate material demo you can download for free and check it out from their education and tutorial section in fab or in the Unreal Lunch, there's samples. Section that you can click on and take a look at them. I do not believe Unreal has substrate samples in the starter content. Yes, they don't have it, but you can download them and take a look at them. Anyway, for now, let's say we are finished with our scene. Next, we want to add gameplay element in the scene. So first, we need to make sure our character works. Let's press play, and our characters spawn in the middle of the screen. Why? If we go higher and press play, our character spawn from where our camera is. The reason why this happens is because we don't have a certain indicator in the scene. And that actor is called here, let me see. Character. 1 second. Player start node, this one. So this player start node defines where your character starts again. Obviously, you can overwrite it like in game by save files or just some triggers. But usually, this is just a starting point. And now, regardless of where our camera is, our player always will spawn in that point. Make sure to this doesn't really is in a proper position. If you put something like this, you will fall through the ground. So you need to make sure your player start is in correct position to not overlap with other objects too much. And yes, we have this now we can do some gameplay stuff. We can move around our scene because we create these rocks with our materials. They don't have collision, which, to be honest, we don't want in the first place. And before we start, let's add some kind of way to climb this part even if we are not going to use it just for visual purposes. So let's go to our place actor tab. In the windows, go to place actors. And let's go to basic shapes. I believe we had a stair somewhere yes. Curve sir lines sir. And let's use this. This is a brush mesh. So this is not really a mesh. It's more like a modeling tool combined with static mesh. And you can just increase the amount of steps it has. Let's increase the height for 80 and number of steps to, let's say, 50. Oh, I may have overdone it. Let's say number of steps should be something like 35, 32, one. Make it. It should be fine. Maybe let's make it wider. It's less of the scene. And let's use let's just keep it Lexis. And after we have aligned it as we want, we can create static mesh, and let's see, keep it in the generated mesh. And now this is converted to mesh, and we can use our material, which we used here, you can just click on Bowe, click on this mesh, and click on Use Select asset from the browser. And now we have the same mesh applied here. Because this mesh is much smaller, the tiling is very small as well, but it's fine. And now, in case we fall off, as I did just now, we could climb, but this mesh does not have a collision. So we click on it, click the collision, and we need to selet collision preset to block all as it's a mesh. And I just wanted it. We have some empty space there. We can fix it in a second. But it still doesn't work. Now, the question may be, why doesn't this work, which I will showcase you in a second. So this is a brush. We created it from the basic brush, right? And if you check the lit and go to player collision, this doesn't have a collision. The reason why we created this mesh, but we never set collision on it. So what you can do is you can go open the mesh we have generated and click on player collision, and there is nothing, and click on the collision bottom on top to create one. So there's at sphere collision. There's capsule, there's box. So if you click on the box simplified collision, this is not ideal. So just to demonstrate how it will look, let's move our play start nearby so we don't have to walk too much. Now we are moving on air. The reason is because there's a collision, it's the shape of a box underneath us. And that's not ideal for our purposes. Just a general rule, keep in mind, the only things you can touch in the scene are scenes that have collision. Unreal generates certain collisions by default, assuming you will need them. But there are certain cases where like this, it's not being generated because this is usually used for prototyping, not actual layout of the scene. Now, to make a proper collision for this, ideally, you would custom create it in a modeling software or just move around your collision by yourself using some tools, modeling tools, et cetera. But instead, what we are going to do, we are going to remove our inefficient collision. C on the collision and convert bookis collision and We will click on Oto box collision, out convex collision, my apology. And on the right side, we select the quality, and we don't really care too much about this quality, and we will click Apply. You may want to reduce certain collisions until but now this is misshaped. If you make it very low, this will look very bad. As you can see, this is not even a full collision. So let's just put in defaults and pre supply. This is not really ideal. As you can see, there are extra vertexes, et cetera. There's collision lines that don't make sense, but this is just for prototyping purposes, so we can just leave it as it is, and now we can move around. Now we have this ladder, which, to be honest, we are not really going to use because I intend to encompass this whole area with a collision box. So player cannot just jump out of the layer. A lot of games, you may remember if you're a proficient gamer has out of bounds areas with invisible walls, et cetera. And the reason why it is done is the developers don't want you to go where you are not supposed to go. For example, in this case, I'm climbing this mountain and if I go beyond this mountain, there is nothing there, and I will fall out of bounds and when I reach a certain point in the map, the actor will get destroyed. I will be infinitely stuck in a following animation. Obviously, this is not ideal and we don't want that to happen. So usually we add invisible collisions, so you cannot move outside it. Again, this can be easily done, going to place actors and we can just search for it by typing blocking. We have now blocking volume. So we add this drop to the level, can remove our play sectors. You could also click here and go to volumes and go to blocking volume or just search here. So we have this blocking volume now, which all we really need to do is size up scale up to be more precise, and let's do this. And just for demonstration purposes, I'm going to make it very big in all sides and put this invisible wall in the middle. So let's press play, and let's try to go into the middle of the scene. You may see something familiar. I am not able to move beyond this point. Visually, it does not make any sense, but there's a blocking volume here that's preventing my movement. So what we need to do instead, we will just shrink it down, make it longer, and put it so it encompasses the level. The easiest way to do we can use player collision to see exactly where player cannot is not able to move. And we don't want the player move any further than this. Let's make them more bigger. And we can shift out clicks with all the way around. We can shift click this again. Rotates is 90%. Nice. Degree and shift out again and move it all the way here. And now, while this may look like one key because they are not perfectly aligned, to be honest, they don't matter as much as we are not going to see them here. Obviously, you would want to have your collision boxes precise. But for prototyping, you're seen, you should not really worry about it. On the topic of prototyping, during the game development, it's very important to prototype and test their games fast. In most cases, the reason why game is released and it's not fun is because it was not prototyped and tested properly at the initial stage. And when the developers realize their game is not actually fun, they are met with a choice. They need to either continue developing the game that they know is not fun or they try to somehow make it fun. Or they just push through and release it as it is, or while the most ideal from the standpoint of, you know, morality, they need to restart the whole project. So the best way to know if what you're making is fun or not is to make a game. And to make your core concept of gameplay, even if your models look like nothing, what you need to do is just use what you have at hand, make a fast prototype of what you are trying to make and make it into a game. So what we are doing here now, we just have a random environment with some random foliage and debris, et cetera rocks, and this very random, most likely, in opinion of most people, very ugly platform that we're going to use as a gameplay area. I'm trying to make sure I use every chance possible to explain the additional functionality of the tools available to you in the scene. As such, we are going to do some things different. We don't want it to be light time. So what we are going to do, we are going to control L and make it darker. I will make it even darker later. We are going to add light sources on top of here on all these lines. And these light sources will act will be our main sources of light. And this will be mostly visual element, and the light color will change depending on what we do in the game. So my idea currently is very simple. We're going to have some physics objects like spheres, and we're going to push these physics objects into a certain part of the arena that will move around. And your goal is to get certain amount of balls into the arena, and after you are done with that, you are free to go for this platform. And this will be the end of our game. We are going to have some interactables. And we are going to have a gateway here where our ladder is. And most likely we will add some walls here to make sure you cannot really go out without overly relying on the blocking volume that's just straight up blocks here. We are going to add some framework, essentially, and we're going to add some doors here, something that functions like a door, like something that's gate or a fence. Yeah, fence is most so now let's discuss what we need for this. We need a light source. We are going to reuse our previous blueprint with some differences. We are going to use a fence to just add an illusion that say have a collision and it's blocking our movement outside. We are going to use props we have at hand and we will need physics objects, which will be regular basic shapes like spheres. And we will need to create some blueprints to move around our zone that is essentially going to act as a gate. You need to score points in. And this is going to be basic gameplay concept of this demo. Sentially this is a very simple prototype game we are making just to see if it is one, which is most likely the most important part of the game development to see if you can make something fun. While I'm showing you how to do all this, you are not forced to repeat my step step by step. You can create something fun straightaway. I'm trying to make sure we can learn as much as possible about game development process in the unreal, well, also trying to not waste too much of your time. And to keep in mind, these are all bare bone basics. Every single element in the unreal is very complicated if you dig enough, dig deep enough. Instance, the way light works, how the shadows work? How the material functions work? How can I create materials that move around? Imagine every single game you have ever played or seen in your life. Every single even relatively simple stuff in the games, logics, functions, if you try to implement it in a game, suddenly, a lot of points that pop up that you have no idea how to do or how they work. The most important thing as a game developer to understand how gears click together. How one object interacts with another, how a material reflects light, how shadows work together with the light, how landscape, the meshes, the static meshes, the characters all can interact with each other. How can you just open a simple door is different for each game? Do keep in mind how it's all done. And in the next lecture, we are going to create our game elements. For now, let's finish setting up our scene. 19. Blueprints for games 01: Now, let's begin by adding some lights to our scene. I already used our previously created lamp, scaled it up, rotate it down, and depending on your scene, feel free to do the same. Just to find a relative position where you would like to have your lights. Now, you may take a look at the screen and realize suddenly, Oh, there's a lot of space to cover. I would have to manually add this light, let's say, every hundred units or every 500 units to cover my whole scene. You may, by all means, do that. But the issue is these lights we are going to add to our scene is going to be there's going to be a lot of them because of the size of the scene I made, and it would take a lot of time for me to just manually place them all. Instead, what we are going to do, we are going to create a function and have a construction script that run for that function that can place these actors in our scene. So let's do this. Let's first of all, create a new actor. And it's going to be just an actor. We will call it BP light spanner. Open it, save it just in case. For visual purposes, let's add something here that can act. Let's just add an arrow so we can see what direction the X is. If you're wondering how it would look in the level, if we just add this here going to make default syn root, compile. We're going to have this red arrow that shows where this blueprint is looking, which is going to be useful. We can scale this up, so it's easier to see. The actor itself will not matter as this is just going to be used for construction. So the reason why we created this actor is because if we create it here in the construction script, this will run on every copy of this blueprint. But I just want an actor that will spa certain amount of light actors, and after that, I will just remove this actor so I cannot do this inciting. So what we're going to do is we're going to go to Construction script, and some of you may have already tried, but if you go to spa actor from class, you may be thinking, maybe I will just click Lamp, Blueprint, and for, let's say, get actor transform, attach it here, and here. You may be thinking, Okay, all I need to do is this. And if I go to my level map and press play, there will be a second light. I will simulate it, so I don't have to cool that way. Well, you are technically correct. It is spawned. Obviously, we did not tell how to spawn, but there is an issue. I still placed only one actor and that actor is attached to this actor. So we just did it with an extra step. Now, your idea may be, okay, what if we use construction script? This is what it is about. You cannot copy directly spawn actor into construction script. This is for comp reasons, computational reasons because it can easily break the engine. If you create an actor that creates an actor that creates an actor, so it is usually not a good idea. Now, what can we do to make this happen? We cannot use this, and we cannot use this because we don't want it to be in game, we want it to be before game. And construction script happens before the actor is created. It happens before beginning the game or even doing anything in the gameplay. To do this, we need to create a function. So let's create a function. We will call it spawn actor. The somehow managed to mess it up. And we are going to go to construction script and call spawn actor function. And we will copy this and put it inside our spawn actor function. No here. Span actor. We're just going to do it like this for now, Compile and go back to the level, and you may see, wait nothing happens. This is because this function is not something that should be callable by the construction script in the first place. So what we're going to have to do, we're going to click on spawn actor and click on call in Editor. This means this now can be called before event begin play during the editor. So we're going to go back. And we have this actor selected light spawner. And we have now a button called spawn Actor. You click on it, we have actor that spawn. This is exactly what we need, and you can just now move this actor, click once again and spawn again. Now, this is still not exactly what we need. But first of all, let's get value or resist rotation and scale. Here we need to make sure we get the right values for the spawn actor. So actor we are trying to spawn. To understand how it works, first, let's take a look at this node. This node is called get actor transform. Transform means the rotation, location, and scale of the actor. In this case, the target for this node itself. So it means it is getting these actors. By this, I mean, this arrow actor we created. And it is getting its values for rotation, location, and scale, and we are putting it into this new node here, which is creating the lamp node with the parameters descent. So it is essentially copying the exact same values from the actor itself. But this is not always what we need. So in this case, particularly, we need to edit it is rotation and location. We can keep scale as it is because the default scale for this actor is five, as we have previously set up here, and the scale for the lamp is five as well, so we don't really have to change it, but we could do it from the function here if we want. First of all, let's split struck. The reason why we do it is because we cannot edit all these nine values at the same time easily. So we split them, and we now have individual parameters that we can attach to each other. We can just put in scale as it is, but we need to modify our location and rotation. So what we can do for rotation you may want to Oh, okay, I will just add the value I want on top of it and maybe even just plus. But you may notice this doesn't work with rotation. If you do it with vector, it will work. Now, the reason is because rotation is usually not just a value. So actors rotation is in degrees and not actually float values, usually. So what we need to do instead, we are going to put this here as it is for now and we will further split strtin and we will spit strtin here as well. So if you take a look at our rotators, here we have a -180 rotation for lamp and 179, well, which is actually just a float error, 180 for our Z. But if we move our actor here and let's say, rotate it 90 degrees. Now it is 90, 180 So what we want it to be is we want it to be -180 always, but we want axis to be modifiable. So what we are going to do, we are going to keep Y as it is. No real reason to change it. And for X, we can just put in the value of -180. As for Z, we are going to add And what we're going to add here is, let's take a look. If we were to revert Z, this will look up and we need to look down. So make it 108. I may have made a mistake, but we will know it soon enough. So let's take a look at it by going to our level. That's for now. And click on this and clic on Spawnctor. Yes, I have made a mistake. You may notice this is incorrect value. It's 90. The reason is because the default value for this is 90. So I should have calculated the difference in between them instead, and for 180 and 00 hundred 80. So for it to be exactly way I want it to be I would need to rotate it extra. I need an extra -90 degrees. So let's do it -180 and see how it works now. Again, this is not correct. We are getting the correct X, but we are not getting the correct rotation here because we are adding the -180 on top of. Let's try -170. Compile, and let's try now. Let's remove this one and spawn actor. Now it is as it should. So the issue was we had positive 90 degrees by default on this actor, and we need the difference between this and this span vector to be 270. Now, let's go back and let's try to make use of this actor. So if I want all actors to line up with this one, I need the aces for this and put it here. Copy paste. And let's try it now. Yes, it is more or less the same. Now, to make sure our other excesses are correct as well, we will just copy them and place them until they're on top of each other and after that, we will just move it around. Now, their origin points are the same, and we can now move it and click Span actor. Now, it's just span sector, and it's full of functional actor that we can use. Now, it is still not exactly what we need. This still means will technically a bit easier than dragging the required actor every single time, it still means we need to drag this arrow all around and repeat this process. There's a way to make it even easier. So now that we can spawn this sector anywhere we want, let's put it all the way here as the origin point and modify our blueprint further. You may have noticed we have this transform location node. So if we put in additional value here, let's say this is on Y axis currently. So if you put additional Y axis like let's say 500 units and press spawnctor we spawn it 500 further. Let's say we want to spawn 500 a lamp every 500. Units. Now let's take a look at our blueprint here. We have this here that's responsible for our Y location, Y axis location. And what we want it to for the first actor being created, be at 500. Second one be at 1,000, third one at 1,500 and so so, so on and so on. That means we need to add 500 to this value each time it repeats, but also we need to add some kind of limit to it because we don't want it to happen infinitely. So what we can do here, we can press N key and click on the blueprint. This will create this node called D N, meaning do certain amount of times and that certain amount of time is this value over here. We will get this and put it into a very start. And this is going to be our counter. What we're going to do is do it, let's say, for now three times. And each time we do it, and the integer is going to be obviously zero, one, two, three. The reason why it begins with zeros with the integer and integers begin from zero. And we need to make sure we edit this value, right? So we are going to split this structure, and we are going to get this value multiply by 500 and put it here. What's happening now is depending on which iteration of this process it is, it will take this value, multiply it by 500 and place this actor in the value of that location. So let's go back to the level and see how it works. Let's remove this lamp first and click Spawn Actor. Now, you may notice this is not working correctly. Because we don't have this going back to the. This spa itself does not repeat it. You need to have the end of This just limits how many times this can happen. So what we're going to add, we are going to add a re root node here to make it clean, and we're going to put it back here and we're going to move this to have some sembolans of organization, which we can use more of in this project. And now we go back, compile, and let's remove this now and click Spactor we have now if you take a look at location value here, the difference is going to be exactly 500. Now, this is exactly what we need. Now, we just need to have some kind of calculation on how many of these actors we need. And let's say, I'm just going to eyeball it and let's say I want 15. I can just click 15 here, compile it, save it just in case save it as well. Spawning multiple actors can crash your PC depending on your logic you have put in and your PCs specs, spawn actor. And I believe I bolded correctly. Yes, now we have 15 lamps with one. There is some shine going around from the lights we created because of the materials we have, which we will fix all later on. Now, we want this to repeat again but this time on other walls, and we can just take this actor we have, move it around. And now this time we will put it here all the way on the left side. Now, when we click this bottom again, we will have this spawn in this specific line. You may be wondering, Okay, why did it spawn this way and not in the same direction as arrow at the previous time? The reason why this happens is because while rotation of this actor in the blueprint we have created, we control theses. Is from the actor transform. We are forcefully adding transform location in a different axis. We are not really using any directionality on where it should spawn. We could make it happen. We could get the actor's current rotation, get the arrow's rotation, for example, and put it in as a value. But all we are trying to do here is to do them in a straight line. And this green line is Y axis, and blue one is Z, and red one is X, and our big red arrow is on the X. So if you want to spawn in the X, all we need to do is really just put it here, compile, and press spa nectar. Now, the placement of my arrow is bit flowed. So let's put it like this right again. Let's see if they look okay. They are fine. And now what we can do, we can just move it all the way over there. Now, we need to rotate this and make sure you ignore the light fluctuations. This is because of the skylight and exposure settings. And now, again, we need it to happen on Y axis. But this time, If we do it like this, compile and click Spawctor, it will be reversed. The reason why this happens is because we have a positive value and we went from the positive Y X to a negative one. My apologies from negative one to positive one, higher value. So instead, what you can do is put a minus here, compile, like spactar and now we have lights. Obviously, they're not placed correctly at the moment. Yes, much better. And now we do the exact same thing. Again, we move it around. The reason why we're rotating this and moving around is because we are getting actual rotation from the rotation of the actor. This way we don't have to re rotate it every single time. And now we will spactor again, and obviously, it will be wrong. We need them to be in the X axis now. So what we're going to do as before, we are just going to move this from Xxxs and if we try it again, well. So by making a construction script once, and I believe I misplaced these lamps slightly, so I have to manually put them down. Oh, no, I did the geometry a bit wrong. It should be fine. We're not striving for perfection here, we're just in a prototype. And the best part here is of making a construction script, just a spa actors as we did now is the span actor itself is not necessary to remain in the level. We can remove it from the level, and we have all these blueprint actor lights set and now we can adjust them. So before we do that, let's select all of them. And I would like to add them all to folder. Lights. And now we can just go into any blueprint. Sorry, not any blueprint, click on any lamps blueprint, we jump straight into it, and we can now adjust the spotlight. So let's adjust the values. We could make these values editable and do it from the editor, et cetera, but we can just do it also programs here. So let's do it. Let's see how it looks when we do it this way, compile. Because we have a lot of vectors, it may take a lot of time to compile. And let's reduce the cone range. I want them to be like spotlights and make it 30. I want it to be 30 as well. Compile. See how they look now. I would like to rotate this spotlight a bit so select this spotlight specifically and rotate it. Let's see the faces here this way. So when you seven degrees, compile with the moment, I don't want. I believe we have extra light here. Remove it. Just to check if they have any extra lights here. We do. And now we have the light setup perhaps even a bit more 60. This slides now need a bit more radius. So let's make it 35. And as for a adhesion, let's make it 35. Inner core can be Let's just one. Suffering can be 25. Compile it, go back. This is not what I want from the cone. Let's go back to maybe 25 and 2,500 should work. And now if you play, there are different colors, and they should change colors because this is how we set them up in our previous blueprint. Now, let's take a look at our spotlight, and I changed my values for 15 15 in 2004 autentation. And now we have this result where we have spotlights, these colors. And now what I will try to do is to move them around as they are moving the scene. But before that, I do not like the fact that our material is this color. If you have moving lights around, I would like to have my material a bit darker. And perhaps this is a bit too dark in the first place. Let's make it a bit brighter but not that bright. So we can see everything, but not have some blinding our eyes. I don't want shadows from the sun, so let's move it around till we get to position where we're happy with. Something like this? No. This kind of thing you just tick around until you get it the way you want. Yeah, this is much better. Now, I don't want because we will have a lot of color for lights, I don't want the colors to clash, so I will make it a darker color. And let's I put the roughnes to one because I don't want the material to shine too much. Let's do it a darker color for the let's you know, let's do C blue. Let's see. Dark blue. The first one. The second color can be much darker. Perhaps you could do it even darker. Save it and take a look. It's fine. And now press play. Now we have colors that are quite easy to see, and now I want to move them around slightly. So we're going to create a new function for it. And let's do it here with a timeline. So what we are going to do here is we're going to create a timeline, and we're going to add a sequence node here. We'll have a sequence. We're going to do this once, and we're going to add a do once node. Do once. Wait, apologies. We don't need do once. We just need timeline. Time Yeah. My apologies. I am not sure why I have to search for it so long. But let's do it like this so it's not in the way. We are going to have a timeline. And this timeline, we are going to play it from the start and we are going to after it's finished, we are going to a delay of, let's say, 1 second and we will Play it again. Now, we will do a play. So the reason we are going to do this, we're going to add a track, and we're going to add a vector track. And we're going to get a bit creative with the timeline. So we can we have now Z, X and Y, and we're going to do something quite a bit different. We're going to create a variable and we are going to randomize these values the timeline. 20. Blueprints for games 02: Now, if we take a look at this timeline we just created, we have some vectors we can put in here, and we can transfer these vectors to our light spotlights rotation to move around the lights. But because this is just a set of values you put in they would be the same every single time. So every single time timeline would finish. We would play from the start or where it stopped last time, and it will begin again. This is not what I want for this level. I want lights to move around a bit in a certain directions randomly and go back. So we are going to change the way we use our timeline. We'll open our timeline, and we will remove this track we just created for verte vectors and add a float track. And this float track will be between let's say for now, let's keep it as it is. We're going to call it Alpha. We're going to compile it, go back to Event graph. And now we have an float value that goes nowhere at the moment. We're going to do it Let's put it into Let's make it. Lights rotate for 8 seconds, and in 8 seconds, the value will go from unity shift clicks. The value will go from zero, 28. Eight second. Eight second mark, we'll go to eight. And let's make sure we have it correct set up. Yes, we have it's correct set up. So we shift click it at the keypoint at zero time value zero to at 8 seconds value one. So now this Alpha node here is letting us put the value 0-1, and the value will go 0-1 in 8 seconds. Well, let's remove this lines to keep it organized. And we're going to add a arp vector node. So arp vector. And we're going to put in our Alpha here. Now, to explain what arp does, arp function essentially goes from value A to value B gradually depending on the Alpha value. Alpha is usually a value 0-1. And at zero, it is A, at one, it is B. And this is useful when used this timeline to gradually change the location or rotation or anything really. You want to do over time without using eventi. As eventi is, first of all, will not be as smooth as using LAP. And secondly, it's more performance. So we're going for now, test it, we're going to have a value. We will play from start and we will print string this value. Oh, no, we cannot predict. We have too many lights in the scene. So instead what we are going to do, we are going to move the lights. Now, we need to get rotation, but by my mistake, made a larp vector. Let's fix this arp rotator instead, as we're going to work with rotation. And we're going to get the rotation of the spotlight. Get not get sorry, my apologies. Set rotation. Set relative rotation, I believe, is the correct one. The difference between a relative rotation and a world rotation is the rotation relative to its parent would be the rotation of spotlight relative to static mesh. But world rotation would be it is rotation in the world itself. It may be a bit complicated to understand right away, but it is just what it is. You need to test it out the differences as you use unreal, so we will put this here. So what this will do, we will get a value between zero and B and the Alpha will do it for us, slowly rotate. Now, for now, let's put in fixed values. The spotlight value currently is 90 Y, and rest of them is zero, zero. Let's say we want this to go 90-30. We'll compile it, save it, go back to the level and press play. Nothing is happening. Now, the interesting question is nothing happening because we are not changing the value or Interesting. Let's stop. Yes. The issue is the spotlights are currently not movable. So let's go back, click and movable. Now this is more computationally heavy, but for what we are trying to do. Now we have spotlights that move around. As they disappeared because they don't have enough radius, we can increase that radius quite easily. So let's go to viewport. And currently we have 2000. Let's make it 8,000 for now, rest compile, go back. Let's see how it works now. And let's see how lights are set up currently. So we're getting this weird light. Again, it's mostly because of the way it's rotated. Now let's take a look at our lights and see why this weird artifacts start happening. We don't get proper shadow. So when we rotate this, the light itself, it's a fine, but we are actually rotating the blueprint spotlight only. We don't actually rotate the lamp. So when we do this, we get a cutoff and the reason for that cutoff is because the light is colliding with the mesh, and it's giving us this weird cutoff. To prevent this, we can modify light channels, et cetera, to not collide with the light of mesh, ignore it on light channels, and perhaps we can even create a new mesh that doesn't give us this problem. But the easiest way to do fixes is to go spotlight, move it a bit outside the mesh, save and prespy. And now, We will have this kind of range. Now, it's fully covering the whole area, which is exactly what I wanted. But we don't want this to happen every single time exactly the same way. What we're going to do now, first of all, I'm going to organize this a bit. I did not like how cluttered it is. And we're going to have this lenode and we're going to move this all down. Spotlight here. Now, value we get from that we put in forcefully is original location or rotation of the light, which is 90, and we reduce it to 30 to move it around the scene. But if we wanted to give the wider range, we need to also change other value. So if you put it like this and increase rotation on the Z axis, we can also give it left and right movement. So let's look now, the rotation we would like to give it is between 90 and -90. So we have a range of rotation. So what we can do, we can give a Z minus rotation, for example, and P 90 rotation. Again, this is not final. I'm just doing it for a demonstration. And if we press play, we now have rotating lights. 21. Blueprints for games 03: We have our light here, and we want to replace all our references of this with this. So what we can do is we can go to our lamps, select them all, right click and replace selected actors with BPight. Can copy properties or ignore them, we are going to we're not going to copy properties, so we're just going to click this, and we are going to replace them. We will give it a second, and now we have all of them replaced. They're all scaled up with too much. So let's scale them down. Let's do a scale And now all of them are scaled way too. I also would like to make them a bit yes, let's just put some of it down and let's change. No rotation, reset rotation. Also, let's rotate 90 degrees -90 degrees. And now we have all our lights newly replaced, and we can test our cube logic again. Let's put it this way and reselect our lights. And we can just click Target and target this cube. Press play. Nothing happens as we removed Even tick from this. Let's just add it for a second. Rest it, compile, save, save as well. Now, all lights in our scene follow this cube. Which is quite nice. Now, we are going to leave this eventiq these notes alone for now. This is our function to follow the target. Let's add them all under one comment. Follow targets. We're going to keep it like this for now. And we're going to go back to our lamp blueprint and start copying some functionality. Let's remove this as we don't need it. We will need this for random lights as such. Let's use this. I do not wish to use array for it, as I will use random integer, float values for it instead. So I'm going to copy this and put it in here. If I compile, I will get some errors, create variable, create variable again, compile again. Now it's work as it's supposed to. And now we do have a spotlight, so this just gets value from our spotlight here as they share the name. And let's just test this and see how it works. From the start on event begin play, there is no value here currently, so we're going to add something soon, let's press play. Nothing is happening. Not really. The lights are just looking in a weird location. So let's do it flex this. So it's supposed to be -90, let's see. Our lights are Interesting. Oh, if you don't have it attached to Evan's begin plate. My apologies. This is not the correct one. I keep mixing up the lamp blueprint with a new one. Let's way. It's still not working as it should. So let's take a look at it. Went play timeline. And in the timeline, we are doing something wrong by going straight to this value, we were supposed to go to set relative rotation. After that, going to that value let's play. Okay, now they are looking all down. We don't have random colors or whatever set up yet, so we are going to fix it in a second. And we have our timeline, our delay. This is unorganized too much, and it makes it more complicated than it should, so we're going to organize this a bit. Let's change this whole placement of it. Let's add a comment on top of it now and call it random mover but. We're going to compile this, and now we have it organized. We're going to split this structure pin, and we are going to randomize it. Random slot in range. X, as we found out previously, doesn't matter for lights too much. Mm. Now, let's look up our values. What? Let's select the spotlight rests values just in case we might as well select all blueprints as they may have check actation is correct for all of them. And we will make sure our spotlights are Our spotlights here a weird rotations. Let's fix them as well. We fix it from the blueprint. I will fix it for all of them. So just make sure we don't have weird random rotations. Let's click on the spotlight to test it and take a look. Y X clear as the XXs matters as well, and Z will matter when we are taking it from scratch. So all our Xs matter in this case, as it should. Now the question is how much is the range we want them to have? So let's say this is I don't want the lamp to have more than 40 -40 or zero. Now, -90 and 40. So for Y axis, which is this one, minimum should be -90, MX should be -40. Let's restore it. For our X value. Again, let's do 40 and -40. I don't want it to have too much of a range as it causes the lights to blur into each other -40 and and as for Z axis, it's 180 degrees pretty much. So let's do -90, still positive 90, it's just gradual rotation, and we want it only on one side, so we're limiting the range. So now, save everything just in case, spy. I got lights moving around randomly. See what's going on with our spotlights here. We have two. Let's see, make sure. This is a value of zero at the moment, light, spotlight and such This is zero, and it's -90 and plus 40. Did we make a mistake with YXS? Minus oh, oh, this is the issue. -40 to -90. I made a mistake of putting weight. This should be correct, I believe. The number we want is between -90 and -40. Let's test again. Interesting the way they move outside the radios. Z is fine. X. It's fine, as well. I am guessing it's a combination of three randomized values is creating this issue. So if you put X into zero to No, zero, not. So let's maybe make sure we cannot even get into -90. Let's make it minus let's say zero. Zero may be too much. So let's say minus and get a value that's Okay. The reason why some of the lights start going outside is because of the way Spotlight is getting their numbers. So if you copy this number, paste, and click on Spotlight and paste this number, we are going to get the same value, and X value is not the reason. The Y value is. As you can see, now we copy this value because unlike previous light actors, these actors share the way they are shaped. And the way we implemented our actor this time around makes it difficult to go outside using the same parameters. So what we need to do is we need to manage Y axis. Let's do it this way. We have X and Z axis for our Shenanigans. So if you put Y axis to 50, for example, I'm sure it will not even work properly. Our spotlight is going 50, which is 50 all the way up in the sky. So let's make it -50. Compile and press play. Again, -50 in this part of the scene is all the way ups. The only way we can really fix this is by going to our spotlight here. We part. We change the rotation to zero, we will have it looking upwards, which is not what we want. And if you remove it from the mesh itself, compile and reset. Now, because we removed it from the static mesh, it no longer takes in the rotation of the static mesh. So now they're at zero. So let's try it now. Now we have the issue of them going only on negative direction, so we are going to go back to our spotlight and see the values we need now. The value -60 in this side is inside. And if we look at this location, now, positive 60 is inside. We don't want it to randomize too much and go out of the bounds on Y axis. So instead what we can do is we can do a value in the middle. Two axis and have it minus cert and cert. We will compile this and play. This will have. While there will be some lights that go outside just because the way the randomizer works. This is fine. We are going to reduce the value cap for all of them as we don't want them going out of the bounds too much, and I will even reduce this to 20 and 20, as I would prefer them to remind inside the x is fine as it's just rotation on the hundred 80 degrees. And we will have this weird lights going around, some of them going out, which is fine. As you can see, they're just going around randomly. Not the most ideal solution, obviously, but it is fine. We could also add additional functionality to make them target only this location in the middle, but that would require us to do a lot of complicated vector maths, which we are not going to do. In this case, we could also make calculations based on the forward vector. So for example, we could make them calculate their forward vector and only aim in the location where they are looking at, but that's not what we're going to do in this case. Now, let's test this. We have our cube selected, and now let's get event B and play. And here, let's for now add event tick and see how it would work. And it works as it should, other than this one light, I believe, and this is because I modified its light settings, and I forgot to put it back this one as well. Make sure to keep in mind which actors you have modified. Have this modified, which was not working properly, and this one, which was not working properly. And now, everything should be as it is. Now, we are essentially done with random light placement, which is fine for now. We are going to add a sequence here, and this will be 01. For zero, we are going to add our random color. Let's go and begin play and on zero, we had this random color change function enabled. So we're going to copy this and copy it back here. When you are copying function, they will ask to create or do nothing. We create it and we will have this on top. We're going to put it here. Remove this note for now. We have this first and we have our branch. We are going to create this variable as we will need it later. We will change the name later on. And we have this random color functionality built in and compile just in case. Let's make sure our variables are named correctly. We have The rotation with relative rotation, we have target. Plants are not necessary. Compile, and let's take a look at our random color node. And let's take a look at our random polar function here. We have this, which we are just going to copy. You could probably copy everything and put it back here scale. Turn out, remove back in. We're going to create this variable, create variable light color. Compile. Go back to light can change color, set light color, Poppy, go to be polite. That light change function, that light color, pop pile that is going to put its. Now let's test it. And it is working. And we have random color change every few seconds as we had previously. The lights going out of bounds is while annoying will not affect our gameplay as much because we are going to have additional light functionality, which makes light follow certain actors. Now, we had this functionality here for open door closor as well. We're going to copy this, but we are going to repurpose it later on. Change function and we could not copy delay. We can just add it ourselves. We cannot. My apologies. We cannot because it's in the function. We will need to add ere. And let's comment this section as well. Random color. Let's make it purple. Tesaro random color. And we have now open door event and closed door event, but I'm going to rename them. One of them will be target located. The other one be Target score. And we're going to change this is two. Let's see what would be the correct name for a target being Target spawned. Called target spawned. And we're going to have this. For now, we're going to leave it at this. We're going to later on repurpose this now, we have our system for light. Let's go select a Speedbard, press play. And from first person view, this looks fine. There's some light going around in the scene, and we have our cube in the middle. One of the things I want to do now is for light to target our character when the character is moving around. So we're going to add an I node. And if the target is nearby, the light will follow the target player. And if the target is not close enough, we are going to randomize the light. So if you remember this target we had, let's remove this target node from here now. Or to be more specific, we need to add a set actor node, set target node. So let's set target node. And we are going to set it to we need an input here. We are going to set into player character. So for now, let's do this this way. When events begin event play begins, we are going to set it into our target. Event tick will make the actor's rotation follow. Or now we are going to remove the timeline. And press play. So game begins, we get all lights focused on the player character. This is not we want. We want only the closest lights to be between, let's say, closest 500 units to follow the actor. 22. Actor Interactions: Now, the way you calculate the distance between two actors in the three world is by vectors. So what we need to do for this is let's get player character. We have it here. So let's just for now copy it. And we will get actor location. Copy this again, place this and here. And we're going to subtract one from another and get vector. Oh, we don't need vector vector links. So let's for now, print string this value. And let's put it into a ventiq now. Compile, save, res play. Oh, my apologies. We need to make sure we put it into the string, not the duration. Compile, press play. So as you can see, the lights are calculating the distance between the character and themselves. And the closest unit I can see here is like 1,400. Now, what we can do is we have this value we are getting. And if this value is less, h then let's say 2,500 or even let's say 2000. It is true if this value is lesser than 2000 on eventi, let's do it this way. If it is true, we will have the lights follow the character press play. Now you see we have lights that are following us, and if we move around, the closest lights follow us instantly. And when we go out of the range, as distance becomes now gives a bulling value falls, it's no longer following us. Obviously, we don't want it to be instantly on us. We will use a timeline for it in a moment. But for now, this is fine as we're just testing the targeting system. Again, I'm noticing we have a light here which I twix values. We're going to restore this, save it, and another one here. I'm not sure why I tweaked so many values, but this is what it is. Make sure to clean up after you edit the values for testing purposes, and don't do it like me. Now, this logic works. We can get the location, distance, act distance to be clear. But we don't want it to be on Aventi This is fine. And what we need now is a proper follow target functionality. We are going to expand this a bit and have everything inside, and let's add some extra space so we can work. Issue we have now is when should we get this check and when we should start getting the rotation and how? We don't want to do it with the eventi, as it's very performance at. Instead, what we can do is we can check it instead of every frame every few seconds. And the way we can do it easily, we can do it then the sequence here and actually prevent this timeline happening. Second, let's remove this. Sure. So we're going to get this around as well as we are going to need it later. We we have these random colors which we won't always trigger, so we are not going to touch it, but we only want this to trigger. Let's make this seconds outside if there is no player target. So you can put a branch node here and run it through the branch. And if it is false, we are going to have this function as previously. And if it's true, we are going to drop this to the bottom section where we are going to follow the player character. Now, the way we can do this is let me put it back in the value here instead of having two branches, it's unnecessary. Let's add a timeline. And this timeline no can function in a similar manner. We are going to have a larp rotator. And we are going to have our Alpha set here and find look at rotation. New rotation will be this one and the actors rotation. In this case, we want the light to follow full on, not only the spotlight. As such, let's change some parameters here. We were moving the spotlight only. But with our new light, we can move the whole light itself. We are not limited to our spotlight, so let's make sure we fix this up before we move on. This relative parameter is fine, but it should be just rotation, not relative. And we are going to get actors location. Actors rotation. Get rotation Actor. We're going to get these actors on rotation. We are going to apply. They're going to set it, and we are going to at the very end, not rotate the spotlight as there is no real reason to only do it with spotlight, we're going to copy this again and set rotation actor rotation, and actor itself, we get a new rotation value and we update this. Now let's try it out again, press play. Lights are moving around as they should. Some of them remained on the spot because we had the branch node. We move around here and the lights we're closest to will not move around. But the list of it is working as it should. Let's take into a look by using simulate and see how lights. Yeah, they are moving around. All. Okay. Now, we had an error and this error mode because we were trying to access player character and player actor did not exist when we were simulating, which is fine. We don't really need it during simulations. And here, true, let's try it on true. This will trigger here. Our second timeline will trigger. And this timeline can be shorter. So let's make it 1 second. And the value for it can be one as well. We want lights to react instantly the player being close to show him to shower him in light. And we have this larp node, which is now calculating the actor's location and targets location, and we are setting our target as a player character, which is what we are going to do. So if vector length between is close enough, we are going to set our target After we set our target, we are going to play from start. We are going to larp our current rotation which we'll do by justice. By setting it, obviously, we're going to set our own rotation. And this rotation will be used for lurk as we move along the timeline, we're essentially doing exactly what we did here, but with just some slight changes. So we're going to do this this way. Now, let's test it. PlesPlay and it is not working as it should. We have our Alphas, we have our play from starts. We don't have our updates. This is because we did not add this node here. We need to update this, and we should also probably, if when it's finished, add go back to the branch node on top. Press play. Now, it is quite weird. We are not getting the proper values, and as you can see, the lights on top are in a weird direction. Let's take a look at what's happening here. We are getting actors rotation by which I mean self, and we are getting the location between self and B. But we are updating it every frame, which is not what we want. We want to set the rotation or RB. We can just copy this value. And put it here. But recombine structure pin. Put the rhythm value here. B rotation value here, play from the start, put the value to B. Let's organize this a bit more. There are too many spaghetti codes. Return value into this. Compile, save, is play. Now, as we move around, when they are no longer close enough, they will randomize themselves. While they're close to us, by them, I mean the light sources. They will start reacting. Now, the issue is the lights which are in the middle of randomized rotation will not go back to trigger and take a second look at us. The reason why this is happening is because the way we set up our branch node. Our branch node begins here, and our randomized lights are checking it not every second, every 8 seconds because the way our timeline is set up. So now we have a slight issue where we need to interrupt this process in the middle and get this branch node activated to check if it is going as it should or it should just follow. The way we can do this is we can call this another branch in the middle here. I really don't like the way this packet code is looking, but we will leave it for now. Sadly, we cannot turn our timelines into functions. Now, we have this light that is being updated every second, every frame, actually. So after this is done, after each update, we could recheck our branch. Let's compile and see what happens. It created an infinite loop. As such, this cannot be applied. Infinite loops will instantly crash your PC. So we need to come up with a way that's not generating infinite loop, and easiest way to do it is to get a delay node. At the very end here, get it to trigger every 1 second. We could do it lower, but this should be fine. And put it in the branch. Compile, play. Because there is a delay node there. This is no longer an infinite loop as it doesn't trigger infinitely every single second. So now we are targeted and when we are no longer targeted, they randomize themselves, or at least they should. Let's see what's happening. In the center of the map, it should not be able to target us. Let's see what happens. Lights are now randomized. But because we did not give them a big range for randomization, the lights move around at the last location where we walked. So they're trying to follow us, and after they finish tooling us, they're trying to only go in that direction. So instead, what we are going to do is we are going to edit the values the random range. And the way we have these values, here, right, correct? We have these random values in float range, in Y, and Z axis. But what's more important is, like, are axis? As this is the one responsible for to be more clear, Y and X Xs are the ones responsible for lights going out of field too much. That's the reason why we reduce their random float range value. Now, we need to figure out a way to make sure what just happened does not happen. What happened here was we get their actor rotation, and after we set their actor rotation, this A here became their new actor rotation. As this A is their new actor rotation, they are not resetting to their initial parameters. As such, what we can do is simply instead of getting actor rotation every single time, or to be clear, when we are finished with this rotation, we can run a branch node again on the same branch. As I do not like the way this is set up, we are just going to we purpose this again, we are going to copy it, put a version of it down here, we're going to add branch node, and we're going to test the same thing if it is true, if it's false, and this is finished, when the 1 second elapses when targeting the character. If this is false, as it is no longer in range and when it is in range, if it's in range, we are just going to reset everything here on the bottom layer. And if it is false, what we're going to do is we are going to reset the rotation for A, so it can begin from its initial point. So initial rotation for our spotlight is zero, zero, zero. We can do it exact same, so we can just set our rotation. Here at 000, and this should be all we need to do. After that, we can just plug it in here. Now, let's see how this will work out. We have them all trigger on us. They move around, they lose their target. And after they lose their target, they are not functioning properly. They're still pretty much very high up. And the reason is because I took the rotation of the spotlight instead of actual mesh, which we are using, it should be -90. Always make sure to double check your values And let's try it again. We are doing it again. The moment they lose the targets, they should go back to their initial values. They should not interesting. Again, they do the same. They do properly follow the target, but they are way too much. Oh, this is another issue we have because we change the values later on. Initially, the light range was calculated from the spotlight. Again, I have few spotlights here that I have touched and I have not restored. Always clean up after your testing to not end up in a situation like this. This is quite common, but nevertheless, it's not a good practice not clean up. Let's restore it. And we have our mesh which is sorry, the actor is, which is being completely rotated. So if you look at our rotation minus xs, this goes all the way back. We don't want it. -90 to so we now have you can take a look at it, as well. You have minus nine. T the original rotation for this actor is 180. Y. I zero, zero, again, this is all issues from my testing that I have not cleaned up previously. This one is more correct. So we have the same situation here. You have X axis that goes all the way negative. We have zero and again zero. Not sure why. Kips opening. And we have this issue here. None of this really matters too much. As if we just simulate, we are getting a similar result to what we previously had. Now, the biggest issue is when the player is not in the level, so what we can do is add an is valid node. So we have what we can do is we can add an is valid node. So if the target is valid, what we can do instead is if the target is valid, it is not valid, we just continue here. If it is valid, we go to branch. This is temporary, as I don't want to get the same error every single time. We're just going to check the lights again, make sure we are doing everything correctly. The lights are moving too much in certain directions. Again, the biggest issue, Z is going very high in number, while it should just remain at -90. We're going to uncontrol. We don't need this anymore. We tested so we need it and made sure the issue was not. So instead of having these very high values, we are going to have minimum of -90 and maximum of -60. Let's see what happens now. They're moving very close to the range. So instead, let's do it a bit more. Let's do positive for five. Let's play. We could also just take the middle ground and make it 45 to -45, which will randomize it in all directions equally. Which is fine. Now, let's play this again, see how it works. And after the moment, they lose the directionality. They should go back to how they should function previously. Mm hm. So let's see what's going on here. We have our station. So the moment this is finished, we check it if we are beyond the range of 2000 as when this is false, et's simulate this and take a look at what's happening here. Let's select this light, which is number 28. Let's expand this and press play. And for our debug, actor, select 26. What's happening now? This is just repeating itself, setting its own rotation after it's finished, and the delay is created. Oh, okay, this is the issue. We never reach the finish note as this is always going all the way back and creating this issue where it is always constantly playing Okay. As such, what we need to do is we need to do this delay actually happens. Sorry, the execution pin of this delay doesn't go all the way back and just goes the correct way. So what we can do is, so we have this. When it is finished, we have this delay, and when we have this, we get set actual rotation, and we need to after this all is finished, check the branch node. Instead of straight up forwarding it all the way back, what we can do is we can add this branch node again. And before we move on, let's properly organize all these nodes. The only way what we need to do is we need to get this value and make it a variable so we don't have to do all of this again, every single time. So what we can do is we can get this into variable, make it into a variable, and we need to set this variable. Not all of this. By turning all of this into function, we will collapse it to function. Call it distance to layer. Distance to clear. And when we do need this, we need it before this branch. And every time we need this, we can just put in this function. Instead of having this spaghetti of a code, that's just inefficient. So what we do, distance to player, drag it drop in. And we do it again here, distance to player. This will just check the distance to player if it is So the way let's look at it, if the distance to player is less than 2000 units. Less than 2000. We set this value and we return this note. So here, if the distance is less than 2000 units, all of this happens as it did previously. And here, after this is updated, second passes, the delay happens, and after the delay, we get a distance to the player. If the distance to the player currently, after this 1 second of delay during the update of this timeline is less than 2000, we go all the way back and recheck or we don't even have to check, we straight up go to branch as we already have set up already. Checks the distance to the player and we go if it's falls, nothing happens, and all of this just keeps functioning until this is finished. So now let's try now again. And let's see them and press. This happens. This is checked. We wait until it's finished, which will be 8 seconds. After 8 seconds, it's finished and restores itself. Perfect. You might notice if you test it that your lights will not work properly, and this is the reason. The way these functions work, they only produce this value when they are actually triggered. And when we have the true here and we go all the way back, if we don't check the value of the distance to player, this function will not work properly. And what we need to do is we make sure we only have all nodes that come to this should actually come to here, and we should make sure before branch triggers, we trigger the distance to player event. This way, we will be able to make sure the value, which is true or false from the distance to player function is actually accurate. So we are going to compile, play, and go back to the level and let's see how it works. And after they cannot find us, they go back to their random rotations, and when we go close, they notice us and they start following us around. Now, obviously, we could tweak it around to make lights more accurate. Maybe you won't want to limit the range further, et cetera, but we're going to keep it like this for now, as we are going to change the lights, functionality depending on the gameplay as well. This will not be actually this randomized constantly because surrounding lights will focus on the objectives if the objectives are nearby. Before we move on to actually start implementing gameplay elements, let's modify our light once more. We have lights that move around the level and we have them go outside the level. The reason why this is happening is because we give them randomized numbers. As such, they don't really have any point in the map they are trying to focus on. It's an easy fix, especially what we have already implemented. Stop the simulation. And we could give them a value and modify that value by this random value to make sure we get them in a certain area, all lights focus in a certain area. What we can also do, we can use our already established target get target and use this as a placeholder for the light to focus on. So we have this logic already here that we previously created. Let's take this and apply it here. Now, we have this final look at rotation, and we have this random floats that gives randomsms to this rotation value that's being set here. What we can do is we can combine these two rotators, which will give us a value that's not completely random. Now let's combine rotators, A and B, and we pitch in this combined return value into P. Now let's take a look at our level. There's still some randomness in the level, but they are going to all try to focus on the light on the target. And when the target is moving around, they move with it. Obviously we don't want this cube to be the target. As such, what we can do is this is still center of the level, more or less, and we can force down this value. And what we can do is we can copy this location. Go back to BP Lit, remove get actor location from the target and split the strcm let's take a look at our values here. X Why? And Z compile presblow. They will behave in a similar fashion, but they are no longer targeting this specific cube. They are now just rotating in the general direction around where this cube was initially located. You could also target the level itself, or you can also just make this cube invisible, put it down and call it a day, but there is no reason to over complicate when you can hard code the values, you we could do it in multiple ways, but this just works. Now, let's organize our code so we have easier time for the next time we actually need this. Let's convert some of the things here into functions. We cannot add timeline to functions. Let's do this, convert to function, collapse function specifically. Let's call it rotation, generation random. This is here just to keep everything organized. And I will rename this function. Properly. Make sure to test your blueprints always. And if it works as it should, you can just continue on. Yes, most of the lights are directed inwards. We can also reduce the values of randomness so it doesn't go too far beyond what we want to this should be reasonable enough. Let's make it 20 to 20. While random numbers are fine, having them going too far upwards is not ideal. And now we have this disco like effect. We ignore the error. It's because the player is not actually in the level. You can add an is valid node, but that will not be actually necessary when we are done with this. So let's take this as well. And this time, what we are going to do, we're going to collapse into a function as well, but it's a different function, as it's a function that's looking at the player, and we are going to select them all, collapse the function. Found player location. Just going to name it that way. Everything is fine. We can go back to Event graph, see if we need to organize anything else. Command sections are now too big, so let's reduce them. Let's see. We cannot put this timeline into the function as it's a time related event, and there is no real reason to collapse these two nodes into function, as we are not going to really reuse them too much. We have them in a certain manner here, but they are not really efficient way of us to put into a function. This can remain as it is. These delays cannot be added into function or macros. And now we have a slightly more clear. We still have these nodes going all the way, but it's fine. We could probably make it look better if we reorganize more, but I don't want to waste too much time here. We have our color settings here, and next, we are going to edit them when we actually implement gameplay elements. So 23. Blueprint Interface: Now, let's start making our interface. Right click in the empty folder. I already created Interface folder, create your own and call your Blueprint BPI for Blueprint interface, and I'm going to call it call underscore SCORE. Compile it, save it just in case, and we get into new function here in the interface. We are going to rename it and call it goal score. Why did I have L? I don't know. So we have this Interface now. Let's create one more, and this next one we are not really going to use, but I'm just going to demonstrate how it can be used. We are going to call it interacted. And this time we are going to add an output node and an input node. An input node will be, let's say, layer arctor Let's see what we can. First, what we can use, we can use such person character. This is just going to be for demonstration. We are not actually going to use it, and for output, let's just add a bulling value of something. We are not going to actually use it. I will remove it later on. So we're going to save this. And we have now one with output, one without output and and let's see. Our goal score does not have an output and our Interactive has an output. So what we're going to do go to BP Goal and in the class settings, go to implemented interfaces on the details panel on the right side and click here and let's find our PPI goal score. We compile it, and now we have this step here. It's called interfaces. Expand it, and you will see two new options here. First of all, let's go to event graph and click on Interactive. We have this function that has player input and something output. The purpose of this is to create an widely available function that can be modified in each blueprint. So the interacted function we created can be used to, let's say we have our inputs and outputs, obviously, and we can in our event graphs, call this event for example, let's say, who interacted, can be this actor itself. And in the player node, we can add the reference for the player that did this. Or you can add an interactable event that says, for example, coins. Imagine you are using a shop in a game and you have an interactive event, and this value says coins, which is checking how many coins your character has. And in this here, let's say the item you are trying to buy costs 100 coins, you can add less than node. I'm actually going to change this bullion value here to float, just to demonstrate. Coins. Compile and compile again, compile it recompile. And the reason this error, there is no value here. And let's say the coins we have is less than 50 or equals the item you are interacting with. This will be true or false value, that this will output as through all false. So the input for the coin you are getting, this is just remaining this way because we did not save this yet, so we are going to save it. Next time we generate this event, this will work fine. This lets us get information or variables, et cetera from other actors that have the interactivity enabled by interface and easily get their variables without having to actually cast to the actor and get their values by getting from here, get coins, et cetera. We will not be really needing this. What we need is this goal. You cannot drag this what you can do is implement an event. Now, what this does, when event call score is called via interface, essentially by a different actor, this event will trigger. In this case, what we want to happen is to have this event goal score. Let's remove this interact it as we will not be using it in the light blueprint. So let's go not balls phon blueprint and light blueprint later on. We're going to go to class settings at interface, again, at the same interface as they're going to have the same interface all around, compile it. We don't need to have an on event we can play. We want to happen in goal scroll event. So we're going to get this and put it in we are going to compile this save. And here in the PPG. Let's remove these things, go to event graph. We don't need this to trigger here. We need to trigger it all around in other interfaces. So if we go to the score and click Call ScorR message, this will call this event in the target section of the actors that interacts it. Now, you may be wondering who is the one triggering this event. In our case, it's this bow. So we're actually going to just for demonstration purposes, I'm just going to put it as we're calling this goal event, so we're just going to drag this from here to here. And you may be assuming this will work as intended, but it will not because we are targeting the ball event, and ball itself doesn't have anything to do. It is an empty actor with just a static mesh component on top of it. But we need you to interact with this light spawner sorry bold spawner. And for that to happen, we need to interact with it directly by putting it as a target. But that would involve casting, which is fine, in this case, as we have already established that they will exist in the same level. But we can also skip that by getting all actors with interface. And the interface we want to select is PPI goal score, and we will put it here. So what this will do is when this is triggered, it will check all actors in the level, and all actors in the level who has this interface enabled will their goal score event get triggered. This is not recommended to use on time based operations, if you on eventing, it will very likely crash your PC if you have a lot of factors. And if possible, you would like to directly target if it is an available option. And actually, casting may be fine if there is a guarantee that they will be in the same level as we have established here. Now, you may ask if that's the purpose, why are we doing this this way? Why can't we just use casting? This is because if you have a player character, and your player character has an interface enabled, and let's say we have this function called interact, let's say to pick up objects. So for this ball, when I interact with it, let's say, I just pick it up. But I can also interact with this gate and make it explode or interact with the MPC, talk to it, or interact with some other things. I can have one event call, which calls interact. And the way that event is functions is not defined by my player character, but by actors themselves, which we will do right now. We already added this event. Let's see if I did not forget to do anything, this should just trigger, and we should get a new ball. Yes. We got a new ball. And if we can repeat this process, infinitely, as every time we do this, we will get a new ball. And we got a new bulb. Let's modify our bowl spawn rabbit. Let's add a node, make it three. So when this is triggered, we go back and go through the process again. And every time this is triggered, let's go sequence. We reset our count here so it can function again, and we redo it. Let's test it out. Res play. It blows up. We get three new balls, and we can do the exact same thing again. You get three more balls, and you can repeat this process as many times as you want. Now, you may have noticed they spawn directly on top of each other, and that's fine, but not exactly what I would like to see every single time. As such, I'm going to change their you know, I will not only change their size, but I will also slightly change their location upon span. So I will add this vector. We'll not touch the Z too much or actually actually, we might as well. So let's make it randomized again. Let's get random float in range. Load. In range. Again, let's copy this three times. We don't want to touch Z axis too much. We don't want it to go below. As such, we are going to have it go between zero or actually that's mix drop from the sky zero and 200. Y axis can be -50 plus 50. And X can be the same. You could increase the numbers to make more variations, et cetera, but this should be fine. And let's not forget to put it in, compile, press, play. We have our begin play. Nothing happens. We have our ball. Let's do it once. We get three balls. And the spund Now let's change their sizes randomly. We can do exact same thing as we did here. But we will instead of using three range nodes, we are going to use one, and we are going to make minimum one, and maximum, let's make it three times the size. We're going to input this into all three values here. Compile, save, press play, and test it again. We are going to again do this. And now we have cerebrals, and they are different sizes. And we should still be able to interact with them. We are. And now our gait confined, we get three more balls, and we can repeat this process to fill our field with balls. As we have not set any limits to it, it will go infinitely. We could add infinite number of balls or we could limit it by certain amount by doing the noding again, but there is no real need as we are not going to actually publish this scheme, as this is meant just for demonstration purpose. Now, we have our interfaces being called. Let's do it with lights as well. Go to class settings, implement interface. Again, we will implement the exact same interface. We only have one, compile it, save. You may wonder what are the other ones. They are default engine provided interfaces that we are not going to go through in this course. But anyway, so we will want to add this interaction to here. Specifically, we have target score here. So let's first of all, move this around. And we will remove this at our interface and implement it. I wish they would just pop up in front of you, but this is what it is. We will drag this in, and what's going to happen is we are going to modify this a bit as we have random color generation here, and we have target spawned here. We will keep the same logic as we used in the previous level. If the target is being spawned for 3 seconds, for 3 seconds, it is set false and if it is false, we will continue with our operation for random colors. If it is not, we are going to keep it at green. Let's try it now. We will press play. And when we put it in, all lights will change into green for 3 seconds. And when the next time the randomizer is supposed to kick in, it should all go back to the random colors. But the issue is, we don't actually have a re trigger for this random color operation. As such, when it is true, we will go back to the delay node and go through the process again until it is true, and it begins the loop again. Let's try it again. Let's play. Let's get our ball into the circle. One, two, three, four, and we get our lights back. Random colors. Now, it would be boring if we have this huge arena, and this goal is always going to sit in one place. So instead what we are going to do, we are going to add additional functionality to the goal, and we are going to teleport it around the level. And each time it teleports around the level, the lights around will take a look at it, which will let us essentially instantly recognize where it is. We are going to essentially combine the interface and targeting, we initially added to lights. With the gate itself. Now, we have this gate, and we would like to it to spawn on, let's say, four different locations. We could do like infinite random locations, et cetera, but it's not a good idea to have it be completely random. What we are going to do, we are going to create an array, and in that array, we will have possible locations for this gait, and we are going to go through them one by one, and when there is no longer any elements in the array rift, we reset this. We could do it in a controlled fashion to be exactly the same every single time, but we could also do it randomized. So there's a random possible variations, and we will get a random choice out of the possible variations. Now let's go back to our goal. First of all, let's do it every time the whole operation here is finished, we will teleport this actor. So let's custom call and create a new event. Custom event. Let's call it teleport. And what we're going to do now, we need to set transform form for the actor itself, which is self a new transform value. And what we are going to do, we can calculate the places where we are going to put it every single time. And in this case, I believe I somehow managed to now it's because there is a compilation error, so it cannot throw up. Far down, let's remove this. So I could manually calculate the space here, space here, space here, and space here and use the blueprint to directly put to predefined locations. Or what I can do is I can go to basic shapes and find I believe there is a node called target unless they removed in the latest version. Yes, we have it here. Target point. What we can do, we can use this target point. And I will call we have this one target point here. There's a mark here. It's quite small, but let's go all the way here on the other side of the screen, and let's get another one of these and put it back here and move it all the way here. We will arrange their locations afterwards and we will go all the way and put the last one here. Now we have four target points. We can set. We can go back to our goal. We can create get location. First of all, let's make sure we have reference for them. So target. Cast to target point On and we are going to promote it to variable. Or now, I'm going to remove this. I'm going to convert this into array. I will compile it. I will add four elements. And after I'm done adding four elements, we are going to get this array, get a stargt point. We're going to add for each loop For now, we're just going to use it to test it, and we are going to expose this. And what we will do, we will select target. And we should have this as target point here. We are going to select them one by one. Going to target point. One, two, three, and four. Now we have targets one, two, three, four. We will save, go back and save again just in case we are going to get actor transform and put it in here. And this teleport for now, just for testing purposes, we are going to run it once on event begin play. I believe we have it on top, but we are not using it. As such, we can just test it, compile, save, rest play. So it should disappear from our location, and it pops up here. The reason it pops up up in the air, first of all, because our target is not colliding and let's do it like this. Now let's play again. Perfect. And we need to make sure it is rotated in the correct fashion. And now we have it. It's still a bit in the air. So let's just drag it down the target bit to the ground. Let's see if it is fine now and if it is, we will simply, it looks fine. Now, we are going to take the Z transform of this target. Let's Copy. And we're going to apply it to all others. This was around 75 705 such I just use this directly. Now, we need to make sure our rotations are correct as well. As such, what we can do, we can get a specific one first by going through a. In this case, I guess we can just get a copy. And if we put it like this, this will always get first one in the line which we already have. So let's do one, which is actually second one, compile, let's play, and let's see where it spawned. It spawned in that direction. Transform is obviously incorrect. As such, let's go and click on this second one and rotate it integrate to the left. So red line is on this side. And let's take a look at this one as well, and this will most likely be the same, so we're going to do. So let's try it with second one, compile, save, and press play. Okay, I made a mistake. Let's try it again. Let's go back. It looks fine. Now, make sure we have the same for this one, which is number three. Compile, press play, and it is working fine. I initially put this a bit backwards, so it would not trigger, but because we're moving it around too much, we're just going to keep it in the middle. Yes. Compile it, save it press play. Now, let's fix the logic for it. And to not clutter ourselves, let's close this one and go to BPG and grab at random. Interesting. Random array item. Let's make sure it is randomized each time. We are going to get a randomized element from these four points each time. We already have preset them. We already have the rotations, et cetera. And what we are going to do next, obviously, first, we are going to test it. It disappeared into that location as we added Evans baking play. We need to trigger this by calling the teleport event, and this is quite easy. We are just going to call teleport event all the way from here. We're going to call function Telepot. We are going to save play, and let's see, we have it in front of us. We put it in. B three balls and new gate. And next what we are going to do is we are going to go to our interface and call a new function and call it new interesting. New gait or gold. Compile it, save it. This will automatically adds this to all actors with the interface. In this case, we want them in light, so you can just click on any light, go to their blueprint. Expand the interface. And instead of target located, we're going to move it and implement event called New goal. And event New goal will do multiple things. First of all, we will get this happening a new goal. And we are going to target the new gate. But first, let's go to here. And after the teleport is done, we will get all actors with the interface and list it here and call this event New goal message. The target is all actors who have this interface enabled. Now, let's just test it. The moment we put in the ball, all lights should go red. They do. Now, we want the lights closest to the new gate, focus on it, so we can instantly shift our focus to the new gate. And the way we do is let's go to our light. We don't need l spanner logic anymore. Here, if you remember, we had this functionality where we had distance to player. We're going to copy this or topcates and call it distance to gate. We'll compile this and go back to Avent graft. We are going to use this distance to gate here. The way this is going to work, we need to get a player character here, initially, but what we need to do now is get the actor. We could hardcode it, but as I mentioned first, we don't want to hard references. So what we are going to do instead, we are going to go BPG, and in the interface, we are going to add an input, and we are going to call it target sorry, actor reference. Let's get actor object reference play and call actor ref compile it, save it. And if we take a look at our BP goal, we now have an actor roof. And in this case, it's going to be self. As we are getting a new reference we want to get is the gate itself. We go back to the blueprint of the light, save or no, go back to event graph. If you for whatever reason, lose or you have too many options here, you can just close them and find your event graph here on the top left. And in the distance to gate, we need an input. So we are going to add input. My apologies. We are going to need an input, and we are going to call this input an actor reference, actor reference. And this new actor reference will be the gate. And if you go back to graph here, what we're going to do, obviously we are going to trigger this to make sure our random colors stop and we get the red color for a second. And as this all happens, we will get this reference event Ni goal, put it into gate. The one triggering this event is the gate, and the gate will reference itself, and the interface will transfer that information to our event here in the lights. So we're going to have this here. And what else we are going to do, we are going to add additional output, and that output will be also gate or we could actually skip this part because we already have the reference in the blueprint. There is no reason to over complicate it. What we are going to do is we are getting a distance to gate. And if the distance to gate is essentially by branch, true, or this is a distance of if it's closer than 2000, right? We are going to put this here. So if the distance between itself and the gate is less than 2000, it will get this value, bullion, and this bullion will define if it is close or not. And if it is, we are going to get our set target node, which I believe we had here somewhere in the player section. Set actor rotation or distanced player after we set it? Yes. We had this get actor location. Oh, yes, we did not set there. We set it here, and we will set our new target which by the way, I could have just find a note, but it's always better to go through your blueprint. We will set our new target. Essentially, if it is close enough, we will set our new target to the gate and we will run this event similar fashion to what we had here. We are going to get we are going to set our new rotation and get our own rotation. What we can do easily is we can duplicate this function as well and make it found gate rotation. And add an input here or actor or actor, call it gate just to make sure we only input the gait reference here, scroll up at our gait function, gate rotation. We set our target. We get it as a reference We are going to your move get player character and set it as a target. You'll get the targets new rotation. There's no reason to set it anymore as we can instead get this And in this case, the self here is not being used as we did not need it. And we can copy the exact logic we have for the timeline in the below here for timeline. And we are going to copy this We're going to copy this place here and use it from the start. Our outputs will be A and B, and everything else should remain as it is. For now, let's test it. We do this. We put this in. I explodes. Gates nearby should focus on it, but they did not. Let's see why this happens. And let's go back to nib print. Now, this gets triggered. This gets triggered as well. We trigger this. We set target spawn and the reason why this keeps triggering is we are not actually stopping this from happening. By this, I mean the random light movement. We need to add this note here and add it here. And if this is false, as we said it here, this should not trigger, and this only should trigger if it is true. And by default, it seems to be let's check it just in case. Okay, it's not happening currently. We are going to my superior game skills did not shine through here. We are getting red. And these actors are looking in a different directions than what they should. Let's see what's going on here. Our output A is here, which is our current rotation. Oh, we don't need to get the targets rotation. This is a mistake on my part. Let's try it again. And now we get this interesting interactive. We have B rotation here. Let's put it down, and we have a rotation, which should be its own current rotation. Let's take a look at our event, the way it's played out here. We get our output values, A and B, put it in and we have Alpha we have Alpha rotator, and we get setter rotation, the same way we do here. The only difference would be is when we update it and we finish it, we need to make sure set this back to true finished. True. And the timeline for it is 1 second. Let's make it 3 seconds. Compile, save, go back to Event graph. 24. Gameplay: Let's take a look at what's wrong with our blueprint. Just to double check. We have this target span when it is true, this should stop triggering, as we do not want to topin so it should not trigger on span. It should rigger on false. And in true, nothing should happen, and we should be getting random colors unless it is already spawned for the next 3 seconds. Here we do exact same thing. We have a delay. After serial delay, it falls again, so this all can function as it previously did. Let's take a look at our distance to gate. It is as it should be. Let's look at this, and here is the issue. We need to put it in here as well. Sample it, save it. Let's see if it works now. We only need lights closest to the gate to fox on it. Which they did, but it was quite delayed. This may be mainly because we have too many timelines running at the same time. And while this playing from the start is fine, we need to stop these other events or timelines from playing when we do this, as they need to be paused or stopped. Now, the way we can do this is make sure, first of all, we have a way to interact with them. So let's add a sequence. And in that sequence, let's drag this in. When it is well, essentially, there's a new target being located, we stop all existing timelines first. And this should not happen on event to begin play. No. This should happen on event, new goal instead. So this should not happen here in folds, where you are going to do. Why did I remove this? We can just pull it up here for now. This is very disorganized at the moment, but let's not waste too much time on it. Let's take this and put it here. So when new goal is triggered, these two are stopped instantly and we get our lights to focus on the lights instead. So let's do this. They show up. And let's see. They start their random movement. No, as we did not add any additional information. So first of all, let's make sure more lights can Fox gate as we want it to be apparent that something is going on. Next, after all of this has been finalized and we have finished our play, we need to go back all the way back to sequence zero here. Let's play it, and let's see it again. We do this. Me let's focus on it. Now, let's change some settings again. This is a very disorganized code, which we will organize later. Let's take a look at what our code does. We get our lights, we get our rotation, et cetera, and do remember this is per light basis, so it is not like all lights are affected at the same time. Lights that are not close enough should not be affected, so we need to change the placement for this. Node if the target is spawned and if the distance to gate is true, this should trigger. And after this stops the other two, we repurpose this and lights that are close to the new gate should function instead. Our gate focused instantly. In this case, our gates respond here. Let's make it sure we are doing it again. We will repurpose it also again, and what we are going to do is we are going to make sure only the lights around the gate are red instead of all of them, as it doesn't serve purpose for all of them to be red. So instead, what we're going to do, we are moving when this triggers and when goal is scored, when goal is scored, all of them turning green is kind of cool. Cool. It's like cheering on. And we are going to make sure we have enough time for the lights to go green when we score. Let's go to blueprints. Let's go to our goal. And before the teleport happens, let's give it delay. Delay and we have 3 seconds of green light. So let's make it 3 seconds as well. Teleport green. So before the teleport event is called, which we'll call this and all of this will happen, we will have 3 seconds of green light. I am really bad at this game. We will modify the speed on the player a bit later on. And we do this, 3 seconds of green light. It disappears, and after it disappears, all lights should focus on it. Yes. Now, let's see what is the issue here. This event, distance to gate has an error, and let's see why this error happened. Our distance to gate event is called all the way over here. But for this to be functional, We don't really have a lot to go on. So let's take a look at the. Access node Roy red probably gate gate. Less than 2000, we get auction. So they're trying to read the node called gate. And by the way, this is now less than 3,000, but it's sin. And instead of less than, let's just call ss. This is the value it's trying to read. And if you take a look at the graph, the target after new goal is created, it gets a reference for the new goal, and this reference goes through distance to gate. And if it is closer than the certain range, first of all, let's make sure our light change values actually come after this. So we will save this for now and get this branch node to be before all of this. We get this distance. If it is less, we go through, and from through, we go to do this, and from here, we go to sequence and this sequence of operations should be more correct. Let's test it out. We have this, we drop this. We have this screen, one, two, three, it disappears. If they're close, they should change their color and turn red. But for some reason, they did not Now, let's fix all the issues we have with this light and be done with it. The reason why this is not functioning as the way we want is because there are multiple interactions here just don't follow the sequence properly. So first of all, let's make sure we don't just while we do need event begin play, we don't want to have these nodes come all the way from all over the place every single time. So instead, let's click constant event. That you can just call. Let's call constant event, and we can just call it restart. Essentially restart the whole operation from the very beginning. This will get triggered every time the restart is called, and we can put it here, for example, art, call function. And we are going to clean up our scene quite a lot here. We have this sequence trigger and we have this sequence trigger from here, go back to our distanced player. Let's make sure this instead of going to our distanced player, goes to restart. So we will call this function here again. We can just copy this and paste this here. So when this whole everything here ends and it is finished, we test our distance to player and if everything is as it should be, we restart the whole operation. Let's take a look at here again. We have restart, we have sequence that differentiates here, we have events that run. And when this all finishes, we restart our node. We stop these two events here. But instead of using this we can create custom event. Call it stop and we can control my bologies we can wrack this all the way down here. And instead of having this node, go all the way here, what we can do is remove this. It is true, this just follows. We use the stop node to stop this one, and we add a sequence here. We stop this one on top and we stop this one on the bottom. Much cleaner. Spaghetti code. We don't have anything we really need to clean up here anymore on the bottom row, and we can just move it around a bit. And here, let's take a look. We are stopping it when we need to. We have this delay that goes all the way back to random generation. Instead, let's call our restart function again. So for it to check. There's a delay after it's all finished and we restart everything again and the restarting everything. We'll go through all this process once more. We'll get our new random color. This will trigger. Let's make sure everything here is inside comment section. We have double branches for distance to player and distance if the new target is available or not. This is just a cleaner way of doing it, so we don't have to get that nightmare. We could create functions, et cetera to even more compact it, but I believe it's fine. You can, by the way, alt right click and left Alt click and right click hold and move around your mouse to change your zoom levels. And everything here is fine. Now, we have it organized, but let's change something. We should move this forward. And let's for now, destroy our references here and unattaches. Let's drag our whole larp, et cetera, rotation, everything here, to the event graph, New goal event. And let's use our target variable and set it here. That way we don't have to reference the interface every single time. We get it once. And every time we need it, we just get it from the set here, and we do this for here as well. And when we play, when we are finished playing, we set the target spun and go to restart. And before we move around the lights, we want to turn them red. As such, we are going to move them here. And at the right found, we move it and we play from the start. And when this is finished, again, we target spun, delay. And I believe we will need to modify this again just to make sure. But let's compile. Select press play. Let's see what happens. We move our ball, everything turns green. We get new balls. Everything is focusing this. But now they're stuck on it. The reason why this happening is because this value here. Let's see what happens again. We move it around. I am a very bad player, so let's just drop it directly in front of it. We blast it. Everything is green, it gets re triggered. And we have them here, but they're not the correct color. So this is partially because we have a lot of restart nodes. This happens when it is finished and it is 3 seconds. This trigger advance and next trigger happens in BPG, in BPLte. If we take a look at our event goal here, 3 seconds delay target spawn This is not actually retriggering anything. But this has a delay instead. So instead of this, let's remove this. And we remove the branch here. We add this delay, but after this, let's add our restart node, call. And here, let's make sure we don't get our restart called when we don't need it. We have our branch going all the way here. This should never go to distanced player. T should go to branch initially. And if it is true, this should not trigger. Or let's recheck our bullion. When it is false, this should trigger. When it is true, it should not trigger. And when random radiation and generation is in place, detector rotation, we are delaying it. We are getting distance rotation, we are getting through. And when we get this, let's remove this from here and add additional restart node here. If it is true, compile. We have the sequence that stops these two timelines and after they're stopped, they are not being updated real time. As such, we can just move it around a bit. We are getting actual transtation, and when this is finished, it checks if it is close to the player or not. If it is false, we set our rotation to default, which we don't have to do anymore because we modified our light system, and if it is false, we restart our light system. So let's try it again. Everything is working as it should. When I'm close to lights, they aim at me, I put it in, and let's see how it reacts again. They are reacting to gate and focusing it as they should. And after it is finished playing, they should start moving around. And the reason why this is not happening is because we are not stopping this operation at any point in time. So we're updating it, and when it is finished, it's restarting. But we need to set target spawn to false before we finish it. You need to make sure it's set to falls so the lights affected by the gate can go back to being operational. We put this ball in, give the moment. Isappeared. The lights are looking at it, and the lights are functioning again, but now we have an issue of colors. Now, let's fix that one as well and we are done with the light system. When event color is triggered, we get our target spawn, set the lights turn green. Let's reaffirm it. We get this done, one, two, but the lights target player instantly change color. Now, this is happening due to very simple reason. We have our restart note repeating this random color sequence as well. So if we just drag this down from here and put it here, this should solve all of our remaining problems. Let's get this done and we get our green light and our green light is here, we get our random colors and gate colors. Now, we are not getting our random colors back. The reason is no event is now re triggering get random colors, which we can quite easily do ourselves by making sure when this sequence ends and this sequence ends here, we call an event that starts random colors. So let's call custom event. Call it random caller B set. Again, not the best naming sense, but we are just going to roll with it. And we are going to call this event here on the very top where we edit our light. And here when we click the goal, in this case, we don't really have to because after we trigger this event, we get this event on top, so you can just not restart it here, and it should work fine. We trigger this, lights follow us when we are close. Gates spun there, lights turn red around it, and they move around again. The green light here is remaining as it should because after this green light is triggered by itself, if they are not close by, they don't get restarted. So we do need to add this green light reset here. Now, if we add it directly, this will kind of overwrite it. This is why understanding the sequencing in blueprint is so important. You may think, Oh, I did it already, but the sequencing itself may be an issue. They get random colors and this one turns green. Just to make sure the rest of the remain green while the green one is being focused on. Let's do it delay of 6 seconds. This says 3 seconds and we have three second delay before this begins. So the lights that are not closed will turn red. And just to make sure we are being able to definitely see the green my red. Let's get the spot and set intensity. We're going to reset it. Again, so usually we have 40,000. Let's make it 80,000. And we will copy this again. And when we are finished and we are doing all of this, we will set it back to 40,000. So when we are done with our operation and for gate event, we get them back to. Let's get it down. We get it in. We get our color, whereas the gait. The gait has the luminoity increased, and let's get our atentan reduce is fine as well. Now, the only thing to change is the color itself. And let's not make it bright red, make it darker red, combine, play, save. And we put this in. We get our lights, where's our git. It's our gate. Difference, but this should be enough. We could and I guess we should change the default lumen intensity level for this 20, and let's make it shorter range so we don't get too many lights cascading all over the place. And now let's try it again. We have these lights, and suddenly we get red lights here. And I guess we could make red lights remain longer, but again, this is just a matter of choice at this point, and I don't want to waste any more time on light. So we're going to stop randomizing everything on the light here now, and let's just use comments and stuff to organize the event. So score green light. And this one will be new targets. We're going to make this one red. And this one green. Let's alter them out, see if we have anything else. We have our target, follow target or to be specific. Follow clear we have our random light movement and our random color for the lights. And this is enough. We have our new events, we are our event dispensers that call these events. And now let's make sure we have enough pools in the scene at the beginning of the game. So what we can do, we can add No, we can leave this one on the field. The error message was because we have referenced it by default. We don't really need to at this point, but we can leave it in. It's no issue. So let's just have it here. I want to spawn multiple balls during the event begin play. So let's just add a lot more balls into the scene. Just to do have ing the scene. And what I'm going to do because I added so many bolspwers and I don't want to actually make a balanced game. We're doing it for demonstration purposes as well. After all, what I'm going to do is instead of doing this event N times, I'm going to add begin play and on begin play, I will do N, essentially doing this event three times. And on event goal score, I will reset and do it again. So at the very beginning of the game, this will spawn a lot of balls for me to use. And if I score a goal, which is kind of hard for me for some reason, let's try it out. We add this ball and Bam. We have a lot more balls. What we can also do, we can take all our ball sponers here. Shift click and put them up in the air. And I believe let's center it a bit more. And now they will drop from the sky, and let's add them into one folder, call it A underscore Spooners. I don't have to use underscore in folder names, but it's just a force of habit, and we will have one green ball at a very and our starting ate is there, so we can just begin by placing these two here, and we can begin our game lexis. And as we begin our game, we have a lot of balls to work around with. We can move them. And as we put one in, we get even more balls, and balls cannot go out of field because we have collision there. And now we have a game of infinitely generating balls until you drown in it. Now, we are done with lightning, the gait and gameplay elements, the interactions between them, and we are going to stop gameplay additions there in this course. 25. Third Person Character: Now, let's talk about third person character and what we can do with it. In this case, third person character is our unreal mannequin that's provided to us by default. I will explain some of the parameters that you can add into it and some useful components that we can use for our actors, and perhaps we may even put few as decoration in the label. If you go back to your content folder, third person blueprints, you will find your third person character, open it. And you will notice there's a lot of things here for jumping, movement, enhanced input actions, which will not be explained in this course, but they are the unreal new way of adding input into actors. It's a topic for the next course. And here we have our viewport, our character, our characters collision box or capsule component, and our camera that follows the character our character movement component. So this is what we are going to focus on today. We have character movement component here, and if you take a look at the details panel, you will see a lot of things you may find useful. So we have our acceleration. We have our movement speed, swimming speed, et cetera. We will not be focusing on each one of them. What we need is our speed. So we have maxw speed of 500 at the moment, which I do not find particularly high enough to navigate this huge area. It feels very slow. Let's increase it. So let's increase it by, let's say, and make it 1,500 and make it 2000. Let's see play now. Now, our character is moving much faster, and we can perhaps even score something. And when we hit something, our movement speed drops a bit, but we can catch our balls and navigate them. Let's try it again. We can now find our different gait and do it again for yes. And we can repeat this as many as we want and fill the whole screen visible. Now, you may notice we now have Max lk speed of 20 k as I put it in previously. But if I control Z and put it back to 500 or control Y, too, the differences here is huge. The fact that you can just go at a higher speed higher and higher speed is because we have a certain amount of acceleration, and unless I hit something, it will drop we are going to decrease max speed, let's say, let's just divide it by two. I believe that number was too high for our purposes. So let's see, and we still have a high enough speed. But what if you want to have a certain amount of acceleration but don't want to instantly go to high speed possible. This is where our acceleration comes in. And if you take a look at our acceleration, our max acceleration is currently 1,500. If we put it into a higher number, let's say, 5,000, compile, press play. We will get instant boost speed, and it will go higher and higher and higher until we reach our max speed, which I believe is already too high. So let's put the acceleration to 3,000 and make sure our max speed is nowhere near this ridiculous number. We reset it, it is very slow, so let's put it like what can we do here? By default? It was, I believe, 500. And let's multiply it by let's say six. And our max acceleration can be multiplied by two. We have additional options here for gravity, how much gravity should apply to this character, we could reduce it, which would let us jump higher and our drop will be slower. What we can do, we can increase our jumping velocity. So let's double our jumping velocity, and let's say triple it. Compile it, press play, and now we have a Superman jump, and we may actually jump out of bounds, which is not something I would like to have. So let's reduce our jumping by 300 defaulted, and let's do it 800. Step. So let's go back. We have high I would like to have high enough jump to jump over the balls, but not high enough so I can go out of the level. I could always add a walking ball on top of the level, but we are not going to do that, as we purposely limited our jump. Instance. We have air control that lets us adjust how much we can control the character while it is moving around, and we have a lot more settings for flying, for swimming, for physics interactions. And this is what I want to focus on. We have a game where we are moving physics based objects. So we are going to hide all of these options we don't actually need. And we are going to focus only on our physics. As you can see, there's a lot of options here that would take forever to go through. So let's just search for physics. And we have our physics interactions options. We have enabled physical interaction, which is true, we need it. And what we have for Alvin bounds into a physics object. So when we hit an object or collide with it to be specific, we apply a force of 500 to it. If we increase it to something like 5,000 compile and play, and we interact with an object, let's say, it's getting much more force applied than before. And if we add a ridiculous amount here, let's say, it will happen, they will just instantly evaporate the moment we touch them, which may look funny, but it's not ideal when everything you touch explodes and goes into oblivion in a second. But I do want some extra impact when we touch the spheres. As such, we are going to press play, and let's see. Our force is now enough to drag down multiple balls at the same time and we can just move around. And with our increased speed, we can repeat this as many therms we want. Now, here we could also click on this and if we increase minimum touch force, essentially the minimum amount of force we can apply to something like let's say 2000 and let's say it's also our max now. If you compile and press play, we will get this weird interaction. We are not actually doing much different. You may wonder what is this in this case. Is this the amount of force applied, not the push force. As such, it's not exactly the same thing. It is a calculation based on amount of force. If you are trying to add additional force per kilogram, which is useful for physics simulation, but it's not something that will help when it comes to pushing actual objects. Let's make sure we still have our options enabled as we wanted, and we will now exit this section. And we are going to talk very briefly about objects, components, actor components to be clear. So we created few blueprints already. And let's create one more. And this one we are just going to make a actor, we're going to call test for now because we're not going to keep it. We are going to add a mesh, and let's say we add a static mesh here, and we can make this static mesh into let's do this pyramid. Let's also add the material for it because why not? We compile this. And if you click Add here on top, you will find a lot of components you can add. We have AI elements, we have audio cues, we have additional shapes, camera, spring arm, et cetera. All of them are very useful and they're topping of their own. But what we are going to talk about here are movement. We have floating, interment, projectile movement, and rotating movement. Projectile movement when applied to an actor, let's go and put it back to the level. If you're a projectile movement, here. Applied. Then we go to project speed, and let's say project speed is 10,000. Let's make it a smaller number so we can we don't have trouble seeing it, and max speed is like 2000, same point as before, acceleration and max speed. And what we can do is we can disable gravity on this if we want to so that it doesn't never has gravitational pull or anything, but we are going to leave it as it is and press simulate. These events are going to give us a lot of errors as there is no player character, but you may have noticed, instead of staying in one place, it pushed itself forward. The reason why this saving is because of projectile movement. This is regarded as a projectile. And if we reduce the gravity scale to zero, compile, press play. This will just move forward to infinity as it doesn't have any project gravity applied to it, unless this actually hits something and destroys itself as a projectile which you would need to add in the blueprint section of the projectile, this will just go infinitely in one direction. This is quite useful for making games, obviously. Where you want to have projectiles, bullets, perhaps some kind of sphere or objects, if you are making two D, not two D like A games, where you want to have some interactable actors that you can spawn and destroy and they need to move in a certain direction. You can use just projectile movement. Now, let's take a look at the other movement option. This one is rotating movement, and what rotating movement does is, which is it rotates in a certain rate at a certain direction. So if we go back to the level and let's make it bigger, let's make it much bigger. And let's press play. You'll notice it is moving around in its space. You can use this as a decoration in the environment. If you want some objects to just rotate, or you can use it as a gameplay element. It's up to you. But all this does is just rotate the actor in one place. It is most commonly used for pickups, such as coins, heltrops, met kits, and stuff in the games where you have this pickup just rotating in one place. This can be used for purpose of not you don't have to add additional elements to your blueprint other than just rotating movement to rotate them around. And that's a time saver for a very simple thing, which usually takes a lot more because you need to call an event that rotates an object in a certain radius in a direction, every frame of the game. You can just skip all that and just add this. So if you need something to just rotate in one place, use rotating movement. Instead, you don't have to use complicated vector math. And that's pretty much all we need to remember that Unreal is a very, very expensive tool for game development. It has everything. Like, it has so many things we have not even talked about, even mentioned. I tried to cover as much as I could, and I'll keep it to minimum, complexity. But you all need to start somewhere to learn this engine. And to move forward, you need to first of all, learn these very basic skill sets. And what's more important that you need to understand how actors, how code, how everything in the CD world interacts with each other. So you can engineer your way to what you are trying to actually create. Don't start with overly complex ideas. Even the simplest things in games are usually a complicated process to integrate, and some very complicated things may actually be simple. It's counterintuitive in most cases. The hardest thing in this prototype we made was actually the light interactions, the fact that we had to do them so many times in so many variations is just a testament how difficult the light systems in all game are in general. Usually, you wouldn't even want to have this many lights as it is performance savvy. And in this level, the simplest thing to make was actually the gameplay element itself, which was just shoving the balls into the gateway and making them explode. The moment you add any amount of complexity to your level, as having multiple lights interact with some other actor, et cetera, the game suddenly becomes an engineering task where you are trying to make sure you don't use a lot of resources, but at the same time, you are trying to make something that will look good, will be fun, and for all intents and purposes, your dream game. There's a lot more to cover. As such, we will be releasing intermediate and expert level courses in the future. And we will also have individual courses for some subjects that require their individual courses to go through them, such as material, lightning by itself, animation, which we did not even talk about in this course, how to create animations, how to apply animations, how to do AI inside unreal. And by AI, I mean not only AI for movement of the characters in the game, but also AI itself, like AI generative note based programming. You can do a lot of things in unreal, other than games, you can do film production. You can do simulations for scientific reasons if you want. And Unreal keeps adding more and more functions to the engine. So there's always new topics to explore. And there's a myriad opportunities for yourself to improve. Do keep in mind, you don't have to know everything in unreal. You need to understand unreal to a degree where you can work with it. But unless you're an indie game developer or you are trying to be in the game developer, you don't have to know every aspect of the engine. What I would recommend for you to start learning the basics. And after you are confident in your basics, start experimenting around. Try to create something interesting, search for information. If you don't understand something or if you need a proper guideline for it, we always are happy to answer your questions and feel free to check out our other new courses. There will be always more to learn. And at one point, you may need to decide whether you are going to specialize in a certain field in the engine and work as a team with other people to develop your game, or you are going to scope down your game and work on it alone. We did not touch upon using marketplace assets in this course, as I want to use as little outside interference as possible. Because when you are learning, it is important to learn the basics before you can jump on and download complicated master material that you will not even understand even if you see it. Again, feel free to experiment. There's nothing wrong with that, but make sure your basics are solid. My name is Al Jun Ab lazade and I am happy that you have finished my course, and I am happy to help new game developers and perhaps just casual unreal engine users improve their skill set. And if you have any questions, feel free to ask them in the comment section, and I would be more than happy to see your own creations and no reason to be shy about it. Anything you share is better than nothing. Thank you for your time, and I hope I will see you all in my new lectures. Few additional topics for anyone who are interested in game development. When you are starting the game development process, it may seem very complicated and it may seem very scary and it is complicated, but you don't have to be scared of it. The game development process is a very complex interaction of different fields such as mass, creativity, artistic representation of your own taste. Coding skills combined with animation, modeling, production qualities like planning, story writing, there's a lot of things in a single game, and quite honestly, the game may be as complex and as difficult as you want it to be or as simple as you want it to be. You don't have to make a difficult game to learn how to make a game. It's better to start with something small. And the biggest reason why a lot of game developers are having a lot of issues is poor planning, scoping too wide, and trying to do too much at once. And in the process of this project, as they are developing this game, they lose motivation, they waste time, they lose money. And all of this is part of the journey. They are trying to complete to get into the final goal of being a game developer, perhaps releasing a very successful game and getting rich, or you may be just trying to make a game yourself or you would like to play or some other people you would like to show your game to. Regardless of your reasoning on what you are trying to make, when you begin learning any game engine, not limited to unreal engine specifically, but still applies, start small. Pick a simple idea, pick a simple game, that you can finish in ideally few months, at most half a year, finish it. It doesn't have to be good. It doesn't have to be perfect. You can have as many bugs and mistakes as you want. Just make sure the game has a start, a middle, and a finish, and everything is more or less working as it should. And that alone is a big achievement where most of the game developers fail. Releasing a game even a bad one is an achievement when you are doing it alone. It's a different topic if you're part of the company and you are as a big company with hundreds of workers, you are trying to make a game. That's a different topic. But when you are learning and where you are in the game developer, starting just don't straightaway jump to MMORPGs or multiplayer games or overly complicated mechanics for your game. Just start simple. Make a horror game, make a Mio make a platformer, which can be complicated, but just keep it simple. The game development process may be one of the hardest fields in general, because it requires a lot of disciplines that don't usually interact with each other. You may need very jazzy music for the game you have in mind. But you may not have the skills to produce that music. So you will have to either learn how to make that music in addition on how to make the game yourself, or you may need to buy assets which are not always exactly what you want to be, which is the most reasonable option. In most cases, find someone who can make that music and is willing to help you in your project. You don't have to do it alone. You can always get some people to help you. It may cost you money unless they're your friends or family. And you need to remember that while the games themselves are fun to play and easy to look at and be like, Oh, you know, next big game, I will make better copy of already existing game and make it much better than that one. I will take the same ideas, same principles, make them a bit more different, be more complex, and make it bigger. Someone already before me, how hard can it be? That's a nice pitfall to jump into. You assume it's easy to do, but in reality, there's a lot of work put in the background of a lot of games that just seems simple. You may take a look at simplest games are usually shooter games from the implementation and horror games. You have a guy who shoots other people, and you may be thinking, Okay, all I need is a guy who moves around, a gun, a bullet. And other people to hit for the And you may be assuming this is all you need. In a sense, it is. But when you start to implement this into your game as you are trying to polish your game, you will notice a lot of things don't feel right. You should have gone, but it doesn't feel as impressive. You look at the environment, it's something is missing from it. This is because a lot of details in a lot of games are not really apparent at the first glance. For example, in the previous shorter example I just mentioned, the gun may have an impact frame when you shoot it. It may be the sound. It may be the VFX. It may be the camera shake you get when you fire the gun. The environment may need more wind, maybe some additional fanges or variation in it. AI may seem like stupid as they are just baking at you and shooting while standing in place, while a professional made game may have an AI that is trying to actively take cover and shoot at you from a better position or run away from you when they are low on HP or high. Sadly, there's a lot of games that ignore a lot of aspects of the game just by trying to copy on already existing games. But you don't have to copy the already existing game genres or even game elements. Feel free to experiment and do whatever you want. There is nothing stopping you from making a game of thrones kind of game and they're all actors being candy, or stones or rocks or doughnuts for all like, we care. And you can just take this weird concept and make into a game. You can make it into a shooter, you can make a tactical RPG, et cetera. You're while it this idea I just mentioned may be complex to implement, there is no real reason why you can't, other than the amount of effort and time you're going to put into it. You have full creative freedom to create whatever you want. Don't get stuck on just copying a template or someone else's work. Just get creative. Get passionate about what you are trying to make. Don't try to copy someone else's work. This is not a school. This is not an exam. You don't need to pass a certain grade, and you have no way of doing it just by copying someone else's work directly. You may try to improve someone else's work by getting an inspiration from their work and improving it to the point where now it's no longer their work, it's your work. And the next person who is going to play a game will look at your work and be like, This is impressive. I will copy it and they will copy your game elements. And they will most likely fail because nothing bits original in most cases. To keep it simple and short, get creative. Don't be afraid to experiment. No real reason to copy paste other people's work. And don't over scope in your projects and just start something and finish it. And the very first game you finish making will feel very different, and it will most likely not be good. It may not sell. It may get bad reviews. Don't take it to heart. Take it with a professional attitude, improve. The critics ems and use it as a fuel to further improve your game. Don't give up in the middle of the way. This is a very long journey you're stepping into. But I believe it's worth journeying this path and we can journey it together. Thank you for your time. I hope I see you in the next lecture, and I hope even if it's not in the lecture, I will see your work down the line. As such, feel free to share your projects if you are working on any or just a samples in the social platforms. And if you have any questions, feel free to reach out. I'm more than happy to help. As a fellow developer, it would be my honor to help you all out in making something cool. See here and have fun. 26. Widget BP: Hello, and welcome back to the lecture. In this lecture, we're going to add UI elements to our games. So in this game, currently, we have our balls, we have our goalposts, but we don't really have any points or HP or any other UI elements in the screen, and we are going to add them with Unreal's widget system. So to do this first, let's go and create a folder. Let's go to blueprint call folder and create an info folder and call it widgets. Or just a widget should be fine. Here, we right click and here we go to interface. User interface and click on Widget Blueprint. I will just call it UI Widget underscore, UI. That's all. You will get this Widget menu, which is your designer menu for the widget. You also have a graph, which is very similar to blueprint with slight differences. So to understand how widget works, first, we need to create our UI elements in the widget. And after that widget is created, we will attach it to our viewpoint. So our screen in a certain position. Now, let's decide first what we are going to have a widget. For example, let's add a score of how many Let's see points we score. We get one point for each sphere, we get into the gate. We can make a widget to calculate our speed to show us at what speed we are running around. And quite honestly, we could do a lot more stuff. Maybe we can put in the time allay elapsed as well, and we may actually add end game to this mini game. Now, first of all, let's add this stuff here. Now, now that we have this widget interface, let's take a look at elements on the left side. You may notice we have elements that may be useful for our UI. So we have sliders, we have images, buttons, et cetera. Like imagine this being a button that you would use. So let's say it can have a text on it called Start. And when you click this, something happens, et cetera. For now, I'm going to delete this You could just put in the element you want and place it where you want in the screen and code in the logic for it. But the better use of the UI elements is when they are in a certain panel or canvas, if they're going to have something like a list of an inventory or you want the widget to be movable from one part of the screen to another one. For example, imagine some chat boxes in multiplayer games. And click on the chat box and move it around for that to be possible, it needs to have a widget panel that you can just move around. And obviously, you would need to code in how it should be moved around, but we are not going to go that deep in the widget. The most general use widget we have is called Canvas panel. And Canvas panel here is quite performance heavy. It's just probably not the best way to do it if you're trying to optimize your UIs. If you have a lot of UI elements in your game and all of them are using Canvas panels, and you're constantly updating them all, it will add a surprising amount of cost your CPU usage. And may even start lagging your PC, et cetera, and you may wonder why your game is lagging when you have optimized everything else. It's most likely because you messed up here by putting too many UIs with canvas panels. Again, the performance cost is not very high, but still it may get very high depending on how complex you make it. So for now, we're just going to use Canvas panel. And as you can see, we have this Canvas panel, but we don't have anything inside. For now, I'm going to resize it. Let's go back to our level. So let's imagine what we are going to need. We have our character here, and we have our character, and by the way, if you press F eight, you will get your mouse back while this character is still in the middle of s game. And if you click, you can move stuff around. So it's simulate it's kind of a mix between simulate and just play. You just press F eight after you start the simulation. So you can test stuff. And this way, the references to the player character will not break because it still exists. It's just we're not controlling it at the moment. So now we have our character, and we had a very we have this camera view, right? And I'm just going to press Fight. Just so you can see my mouse. Let's say we want a text on top right that says how many scores we got, and let's say on the bottom right here, we want to have a value that shows how fast we are moving around. On the center of the top of the screen, you could also at a time elapsed, just for the sake of it. So I can show you how to make second time based widgets. Now, this should we now have an idea for what we need. So let's create our widget. First, let's add a text block here as a placeholder for now. And let's see. All we will need is really text boxes, but I'm just going to add an image as well just so I can showcase how to use it. We could make a progress bar as well. Yes, let's do a mix of them all, even though it's unnecessary for this mini game we have, just so I can showcase. And let's call this text block. On the top right, we are going to have our score, right? So let's have score. This is just a placeholder for now. And let's say we have a progress bar and instead of let's put it here. Let's say if we reach as we get in score, we will get a progress bar. And let's say when reach the score of ten, this progress bar will fill up and we will essentially win the game or do the mission or whatever. And this image can just be a UI element we can use, and let's put it here. We are just going to have it in a certain color or with a certain image with some numbers on it. So we will need a text. And if I drag and drop it on here, you will notice it did not get attached to the image because while Canvases can have children, this image itself cannot have children. So I would need to perfectly place it on top, ideally. Or I would need to but you may not, depending on the size of the screen, this may get up to position. So if I put a text just here as a placeholder, just going to change. 1 second. Oh, yeah, let's change the color of the text so you can see it. If I move my screen, the text may get out of position quite easily, especially if I don't put proper panel in a proper panel. So what I can do, I can create a box or an overlay. So I can add overlay here. And inside this overlay, I can add this image, and I can add this text box. Now, this overlay is acting as a border for our textbook and our image, and let's make our image bigger. We're going to get it into center. And let's see. You may notice something interesting here. I'm not able to directly resize it easily because it is so small. So let's instead what we can do, we can click here at this button, fill. If you just center it, this image, empty image we've added has no real image inside it, so there is no reference for it to get. So what you can do, you can just backdrop this and enlarge it. This text block can be in the middle. We could enlarge it, but it doesn't really do much for the text, and we put it directly center to center by aligning it. We could edit the padding, et cetera, to make it. For example, if we have this like this and we add a padding of 50, it will move 500 would be something like this, but there is no reason to do this. If you just want to center it, you can just center it by doing this. And now, this will always remain in the center of this overlay widget, and you can just put this overlay widget where we want. And this overlay widget we are going to use can be selected and put exactly where we want it to be. Now, I like my positions being solid values, let's just put it like this. Now, our text block will always be here regardless of the size, et cetera, the screen or the device you're playing with, and which is fine. Canvas panel itself, as you may see, is we put this widgets in outside it, and I made a mistake of clicking on I should click on the overlay instead of just image, and let's move them in. You can check your screen size specifically if you want here if you are trying to match a specific screen size, or you can just click the fit custom and put in, for example, let's say, 180, 54 as 180, right? So this is a screen size I'm aiming for. Obviously, I can just click Fit screen, which would be my screen. And here on the bottom, we're shown our DPI scale, which you can configure if you want. But it's not necessary, so we're going to skip that part and focus on what we are doing here. So, let's go back to what we are doing. We have our score. We have our progress bar. We can add time after this as well, let's do my apologies. Why am I dragging it from here? I need it from here. Okay, so let's at time elapsed here or maybe to keep it clean, let's add it. No, no, no, let's just make it in the middle of the screen. Now, we have This is going to be our time, so I'm just going to change the name for now, so I remember why I put it there. This is not going to be You could put in the content for your containers here from here and you can modify them, their position. Their color, their shadow, if they need any image, there's a lot of stuff here you can check out. You can change the phons. You would need to download phones if you want your custom phones. You could use typeface, et cetera, like Italic letter sizes, everything you want to change, you can do it here. And always, you can just call it click on sized content. In this case, the size of the widget will match the content, which is important if you have a widget that has a mechanic like click on the element in the widget element of the widget. Let's say you have an icon. And if you want to click on the icon and you want to, let's say, drag it around in the inventory or just activate it or whatever, you may want to just size to content, the widget. That way, the widget is exact same size as what you see. Obviously you could fake it by making a transparent image in the background gave it bigger, but that's just why would you do that nonsense, right? So just keep in mind, this is a good way of making sure the size of your UI matches what the content is. So this time, if I add extra letters and per center, now my widget is bigger. Meaning I can just press on the X part of this widget, and it will still trigger the event that we will create for it to be function or whatever. Now, let's go back. Now, we have our widget, which is not really functional at the moment. So let's do this. First of all, let's make sure we do something with this image tag here. We have this widget, which is just a brush of white color. We don't have an image set up for it. So let's just select a random image or texture we have. I do not have any widgets uploaded, but quite honestly, I could do it with any texture. So let's see. Let's just use unreal widget for now. Just using re logo may not be the best choice. Let's do this, yes. And we can move this with here. Now that I think about it, it may be a bad idea to use this logo because it is making hard to see the texture. Let's find you could also use materials, but this will not be functional. You would need to create a UI material, which we will talk about later. So let's just for now, just pick this color. Just pick a random texture. And yeah, let's do this. Weird texture. I'm not even sure what it's for. We are going to use this. And we have this progress bar here. The way progress bar functions is similar to how you expect, but you need to put in the values that it needs to, you know, fill in the progress. First of all, we have its default color, and we have fill color. And what you need to do to make it. Okay, let's for now remove this. Keep an eye on this progress bar. We have the progress of 0%. If I increase this, you will see it's increasing in the screen here. But you may notice while it says percent, it is the value of zero, one, zero being zero, one being 100%. So you cannot just input a value of 50%. You would need to convert your value to a percentage and convert that percentage to a value 010-1, and put the value here that way. I will show you how to bind values later. We have our options, how we want our progress to feel. So let's say fill from the center will be something like this. Full from horizontal. This may be a good system for not only persons for progress, but also how much noise you're making if you want to This is from vertical from bottom stop. Obviously, you can change the shape of this progress bar, so you could just make something like this or bottom stop, obviously. We're going to keep it from left to right, and let's make it the way it was before. There's additional stuff you can do, but we are not going to bother too with them. We could add border. So how much of the progress bar can be filled, et cetera. We are going to not worry about them. I don't like the blue color for this. Let's make it red. For now, perhaps I should make it green, but let's keep it like this. And here we have our score and our time, and we have our textblock for speed. So we will need to create some additional functionality for all of them to update in game. The widgets can be used as menu elements, can be as UI elements. Their purpose is to let you trigger something some code you have precoded or just to keep I updated and available to you as an information source, right? Imagine a simple game like how much HP you have, how many lives you have left, like your inventory items, start, pause menu, settings menu, everything that is interactable or just giving you information as a UI element. Is a widget in unreal. So we have this, but we don't have any logic associated with them. The reason why is because we did not create them. We will need to create our UI elements. Sorry, UI logic. First of all, let's remove this eventi. And we have here event pre construct and event construct. It's similar to event begin play, but the difference is UIs needs to be constructed to function. So you may ask when I is constructed, does it not automatically happen when I begin the game? No. Then answer to that is no. Is needs to be spawned and attached to the screen, essentially, to our viewport via blueprint. And the most common way of doing it is to do it in the player character. So if we go to our content and go to our third person blueprint, this is our character. Just to make sure I am looking at the correct bleprint, I'm just going to scale it up, press play. Yes, I'm gigantic. Maybe this is the proper size. So we are looking at the correct blueprint. Here, we would need to add an event to create our UI widget and attach it to our viewpoard which we will do in the next video. 27. Widget Editor: Now, let's create our widget. Let's create it here. First, we find a node called create widget and add to. We attach it together. And here we select the Widgit we created. So we called it we underscore UI, not the best name for it, but we will want to add this to event begin play. So let's cut it. I got event begin play, and we have some stuff happening here, which is completely fine. We can just add it as just to make sure we don't mess it up. We can add a sequencer node. We can put it here, this, and here we can add our create UI widget logic. So the game begins the game adds default inputs to our player character, which is just keep in mind, this is created by Unreal, and the mapping context and enhanced input system are going to be part of the intermediate course in the future. As there's a lot of details, I don't want to overcomplicate this course too much. Just know that this here is responsible for making sure your inputs are registered when you are playing the game. So jumping, moving around, et cetera, everything. They take their enhanced inputs local subsystem and add the mapping context to it so you can work with it. So what we do here, the game begins player is created apologies. And first sequence does input and the second sequence does the viewport. And this happens instantly, pretty much, so you will notice difference. So for now, let's compile, save and press play. Our UI is actually on the screen. But you may notice it's kind of in a weird position. And this is because we need to adjust our UI designer so first of all, let's make sure we anchor our elements. So what anchoring does, anchoring makes sure your elements stay in a certain part of the screen, and you can do this by clicking here and clicking top right. Or you can just click here and click here. So this score now is always anchored to this point. I could move it around, but there's no point. So this score is now always anchored to this point. Let's just do it with our and I want it to be uniform size. I will just size it content, make it easier to manage. So sizes here no longer matter as it's sized content, and let's just make it around 100 on Z, sorry, X, and let's say 100 I don't want it all the way up in the screen. This has the same issue. We need to anchor it to a certain point. So click Anchor, click on the top right, and now it's anchored to the top right. You may wonder what's the difference between anchoring something and not anchoring it. The difference is if the screen size is different, emergency is a mobile screen. Where should this widget be placed in relation to your screen size? So if your screen corner is this right line here, a mobile screen would have a different let's just go. Let's say, mobile iPhone size, in many of not the moment I changed it to mobile screen size, this UI widget I have dropped out of the viewport. So if I were playing this on a mobile to be specific I pull iPhone five S, this widget would not be seen because I did not anchor it anyway. But this widget here moved together with the screen because it's anchored the top right of the screen. That's the point of anchoring. You anchor your widgets to a specific part of your screen. So when your screen is in different sizes, of cours different devices, it always remains in a relative position to that part of the screen. So if you want something to always be on the top right, anchor it to the top right. If you want something always to be in the center of the screen, anchor it to the center. You have options here. So just do it. Now, let's take this, for example, and what we are going to do, first of all, let's I don't like the screen size, obviously, so let's just restore. And what we are going to do is you may notice I cannot really anchor this text or this image because they're inside overlay panel. So this overlay panel is the one needs to be anchored, not the widgets inside. So I will do it bottom right. And obviously, when I move my overlay, it also moves my widget. Let's do it -100 and minus 150. Actually, I guess 200 will be better. Now, also let's move this to the same place, so we could just do it 100. Maybe not. By the size content, it will be very small because it doesn't have its real size. Let's do it for 100 and zero. No 100. And as for Y, let's make it 200. Actually, let's do 400. And time, we want it to be anchored to the center, top, or you could do it like this. But I want it the middle of the top, not the whole top. So I'm going to do it like this. So also, this gives a good indication of where the center of the level is, so I can just put it here. I could position at zero, zero, but that will be on the top anchor, which not ideal. So we're going to move it like this, make it 100. We are going to size the content, and we're going to put it -50 -25 better. Okay, now they're properly placed. Now we compile, save, press play, and our widgets are in place. But you may notice the widgets are not doing anything right now because we did not add any logic to them yet. We did everything we need here in the widget UI segment, so we are going to save it for now and exit. First, we need to understand how this is going to work. These two are essentially trying to get a similar value and similar information. This is a progress bar out of total. So what do you like, let's say you need ten points. So this will be a percentage value of your current score and a value of ten. So let's say you have four score, four points. This should be at 40%. So these two require same value to do their calculations. This one requires speed. So our current velocity, which we will get in a second. And this one is just time elapsed since game began. So this is a Delta timing. This is velocity, and these two are just looking for a value they can use to show your scores. Now, the way we did our scoring was by kicking a ball into this gate. What we can do is something quite simple, really. We could cast to this UI. This UI is always available in the level because it is part of your main UI, right? There are other ways of doing it to be very clear. You could do it within the widget itself, you could add the logic here. But the most common way of scoring points and calculating is by doing casting to the UI or doing it from the player, as we already have a reference to this inside the player character, which is what we are going to when we are going to add our interface to our player character. So let's add an interface. And I believe we called it Tutorial BP interface. Oh, no, no, no. My apologies. I forgot the name of the interface we're using, so let's make sure I select the correct one. There's a lot of unreal interfaces. Let's check. If you forgot like me, what was the name of the blueprint? Like just got the blueprint and checks the name of the interface. Okay, so BPI goal score. Okay. Let's go here and add our interface. BPI goal score, compile, save, and we have our goal score here. So what we are going to do is when goal score happens, event called score. We're going to get this reference from widget here. So for that to do, let's just make sure we have this value always at hand. We call it widget. Underscore UI. And we'll put it here. And obviously, we set it as well. So this is probably done in reverse. Let's set it and after we set it, get this value and put it this way. Obviously, if you're not sure about your code, it's best idea to test it. Let's go back. So we now have a widget reference we can use, right? So event call score. When this happens, we want the score to change in the UI widget. So what we are going to do, we are going to go back to our UI and go to our graph editing mode. Let's delete these two. For now, we don't have any events planned for GameStar. And here, we are going to create a variable, and we're going to call it score. And we're going to make it into float value or integer value depending on what we need, but we are going to make float in this case. Just keep it simple. And what's going to happen when this event happens event called score happens, we will get our value, the score value and plus one it. So we are going to get this score and set it into plus one. We also need to obviously get it score. So you could just do this. I do not believe there, there is a plus directly. Oh, no, we? Since we are going to just do plus one, you can do this. So what this does instead, this is by the way, it took me a lot of time to come across it. I don't know why that made my life so much easier. So if you just plus one and put set this here, right? This on top, taking this value, adding a plus one to the existing value and setting it can also be done by this node. If all you are doing is adding a plus one to a float value, just keep track of something or whatever, you can just use this. This adds one to the score value we already have in the widget and sets it to whatever it is. So if it is one, it becomes two, if it's two, it becomes three, et cetera. So we are going to skip this part and instead, we are going to set this value directly plus one. And obviously, we will need to test it after we have our functionality. Now, going back to our designer, I'm going to show how to bind values to the not values, my apologies, variables to the logic you created. 28. Score System: Welcome back. Continuing on where we left over. Let's just for now, take the score text here. And bind this text to our float value. So the way binding works is you bind this text here, meaning instead of manually inputting this text here as such, what we do instead, we are just going to replace it with a variable or some other result. So the moment I click Bind, we get a function here called get text. And you may notice there is no thing in the event graph here, but we have this function. This function is meant to only work for this specific with specific score text here. And it's called Get text by default. It is going to get confusing if we have multiple get texts, so we are going to replace the name with something like Underscore score. Well, I don't need underscore here. But we are going to get score, and we need a return value in the form of the text. We have our score here, and what we're going to do is we are going to get our score. And this score value is automatically converted to a text and put into UI. So our default score value is zero, and let's begin. We now have a zero on top of our screen. So let's make sure I can somehow get a ball into the gate. And it changed to one. Our gait moved around, and it now is two. And now we can do it again and this time, it's going to be three. So this top UI now actually shows our score, but it is just a number. You may want, I'm just going to add another widget that adds a text that says, Oh, score. So it's like score two dots and number that comes after it. That's a common mistake. Like people who don't know certain nodes in the widgets make. What you need to do instead is append. My apologies. That's this one. Yeah. So we need to append, but we need to make sure this is the correct function. So here is the text. What we need to append is a string. So append string. And we put this A to B. Sorry, we put this value into B, and we put this into our return value here. And here to A, we write down score and that's it. What this does, this change the text value into string value, puts it into B, and from here, we put this value and combine it with a text score the string here, we typed in, and it gives output back as a text after it convert it from the string. I will explain the reason why we are doing this after we test it. So now we have scare underscore zero. And if we just then we get score one. We can do it as many times as we want, and it will always work as it should. Now, you may notice we got a text. We took that text, converted it to string, converted it back to text. The reason why we did this is unless you change this to text first, this will happen. If you change it to string, to string, and we directly input it here like this. Compile, press play. You will notice we have now zero dot zero. The float value by default, has a additional zero dot zero after it, which gets removed when we do it via conversion to text. As I did not need dot zero value, I just used Lexis. We could also, of course, try to do this with integer values. For example, if you want to make, let's say, an integer value variable, let's we have a score variable, right? So if we take this and let's instead duplicate this remove newer and make an integer value and put in the integer value. And for testing purposes, I'm going to make the default value on this. Once again, get pre default. That's fine. We change this value to let's say one, compile. And if I were to get a string out of it, like Cp, press play, I will get one. Which maybe what we should use here in all honesty, but I want you to remember the difference. The float values have their like there are additional numbers you can have after zero, like zero dot something. Integer values are whole numbers. You cannot just have them like zero dot five. Or one dot five or two dot two or whatever. So in this case, since we are using a score based system, we can just use an integer value instead of float, and we can skip this spot. But if your game requires a value that needs to have be able to divide it, multiply it, et cetera. So if you are going to do some kind of mass operations on it, for example, you need a value of zero dot two or five dot seven or something like that, you cannot use integer as a whole. You would need to use float. And if you use float, you need to make sure you do it this way, or you can always check these values, right? So I will again, show a way to use float if you want to if you need to use float, but you don't want to harshly show the integer values. What you can do is you can do this by which we reduce the fractal digits. We press play, and now we don't see our fractal digits, but it is still a float value. So we are still using a float, but we no longer have one dot zero or 20 or whatever. And you can use this same value to do other operations and apply the same value somewhere else without messing up your UI's visual aesthetics where you don't want zero dot zero, et cetera, fractals to be seen. So we are going to remove this integer because we no longer need it. I will keep it as float. There's no real reason not and we obviously converted it to float, et cetera, but still we could directly put it in as well, and it would still be okay. So there is no dot one, not dot anything. And we can just use it as it is, and put in one. And obviously, we want this to be like this. And let's just keep organized a bit. It's a simple line. Let's play, test it out. Everything is okay. Our function works. Oh, I messed up. Just for testing purposes, I probably should have made gates bigger. Okay, yeah, it works. Now, this is our widget logic for this widget, we no longer see here, this one, the score. You may notice it is very small right now because I made sure it is sized content, which I like doing unless I don't have to, but still it doesn't really matter in our case, so I'm just going to keep it lexis. Easier for me. Next, we want to manage this one. Progress, progress bar. I'm not sure why I moved it around. And this progress bar, we will use the same value. By value, I mean the scare value, the float created. But here we need to bind not the value directly because as I explained in the previous video, we are doing it by progress, and our progress is 0-1. So if we go and bind this value to score, as I did right now and compile and press play. It is currently at zero, and the moment I score any points, it will be filled up to the complete full because our value of one means 100%. So we need to make sure we create a new binding for this. And this new binding will get our score. And let's say let's create another floss value and call it let's say score goal. So this is the score we are trying to reach to end the game. Usually, you would not do it directly in the widget. You would get this value from game mode or somewhere else where your logic is dictating how many points you need, but we are not going to apply multiple levels with multiple logics, so I'm just going to keep it very simple. We need ten points for this game to be considered complete, like level finished. And as such, what we are going to do, we are going to compile it and put the default value of score goal to ten. Now, we need to get a percent of this value. You could try to search as percent, but this is just a text. It is converted to text. So what we are going to do instead is we're going to take our value and we are going to divide it by score. Sorry, multiply it by score and divide by 100. So we multiply it by score, 100. Sorry, we multiply by score, and we divide it by 100. This should give us the value. Unless I misremembered how percentage works, this should give us a value we need. Let's test it out. Now, every time I put in another sphere, I will get one more bar of progress. Because each time I get a score, now, it gives me 10% of the bar, which is exactly what we wanted. And if I were good at this game, I would perhaps do it easier. Anyway, so now we have our second widget working. And the only thing we really did, we just added this float percentage calculation, and we add a variable that is our end goal. We could get this from game mode or game instance or whatever actor you are making that needs something to happen or widget to react to be more specific. But that's not necessary for our minigame so we're going to leave a set. Next, let's take a look at here. We have time. If your game has time related elements, let's say you have a racing game, you have a you need some kind of time ticking UI mechanism, this is how we are going to make it in the next video. 29. Timer: Welcome back. In this video, we are going to convert this widget placeholder we have here into an actual timer that just ticks up. Now, the issue with this doing this is the timer is something that happens in every tick. So ideally, you wouldn't want to have a lot of timer actions, because if you go to event graph and we get our tick, This needs to trigger essentially every second and update our value for the timer, which is ideally is not something you would want. And if you are doing this, regardless, it's better to probably have some way to stop it, the tick process when you don't need it or alternative ticking options if it's related to some kind of event or something so that you can enable disable this tick you could even add a timeline if it's just 10 seconds or 20 seconds, so you don't have to worry about Evan taking every single time. Evan Ts adds a lot has a lot of cost when there are too many of them. Now, for the purpose of this, let's go. We have this time here, and we need to bind this. And before I forget, let's make sure we rename the previous one. G score, get percent. We already did. So let's create a new binding. For this time. And this is going to our new binding, and let's name it time elapsed. Time elapsed. Now this function is supposed to give us a text value of a time that already has passed. So we are going to create a variable, call make sure it's float after. Let's call it time let's convert it to float and add this value. We need to update our time value by the game time in milliseconds. So let's get Delta time. And what Delta Time does, Delta Ts is amount of time passed after essential game has begun. So if you plus this by Delta Delta Time and set, easier to do it like this and set it and we input this as a text value. Let's see what happens. 1 second. Context. Oh, this is not the correct Delta time. We need a Delta time for this get world Delta seconds. Which is quite confusing with their naming being so similar. But anyway, so our widget is way too up. Let's make sure you can actually see it. And let's see position wide let's put it somewhere lex. Compile, press play. So now we have a time that's ticking, and it will keep ticking. But this is not what we want exactly. So what we are going to do, we are going to convert this time to time seconds to string. This will automatically convert it to the format of minutes, et cetera. So now, seconds, minutes now we have a time on top. You could also make a countdown timer, for example, if you want to have, let's say, 20 seconds to score a point, and if you don't score a point in seconds, you lose the game, et cetera, or if you want to just have a max amount of time they can spend in a certain level, you can do it anyway you want. If you want to turn it countdown, all you would need to do would be to subtract this value, get rolled out of seconds and apply this value instead. And you would need to set a default value for time to the amount you want it to be the max second. So let's say if I want to have 30 seconds at max. So I make it 30 seconds, and now my time is going out, I have only 22 seconds. Obviously, we don't have any logic applied to it to actually game over or whatever, and we don't really want it in this case, so I'm going to remove it. And now, what we could do is also if you don't want it to be so jarring in a way, if you don't want this float value at the very end, all we need to do is do the same thing I previously mentioned. We convert instead of using float values, we use integers, and I'm just going to demonstrate a simple one. We're going to give time. We're going to convert it to integer. We're going to put this a time. And actually, what we can do instead is convert this to integer. Conversion. Oh, not this fun. Let's just do this. It will be faster. And we set this value and we put this value as 2 seconds seconds to string. That was a weird error, but now we get this by second. You may notice it is still not what we want. We still have dot zeros. So what we can do instead, we can remove this and remove this as well, turn gates. If you remember our previous function, the way I showcase you, we have this apparent and we had to text float here. So what we can do instead, we have to text string here anyway, but we want it to be from float to string. What you could do is you could create an append by, let's just copy our append nodes so I don't have to type it. So what we could do is we just append and make a combination of appends to be like, Oh, okay, this first time value is minutes, the second time value is seconds. By that, we would need to clamp, divide it. Every time it's reached 60 seconds, you set it to zero, you put it in a value. You can multiple ways. If you don't want that zero there just to be clear. And obviously, if you know C plus plus, you can also edit the Ciplus plus functionality and make a one where it does exact same thing as this, but urnicate less two values. And we could also always just remove part of the string to make it so that they don't have any fractured values. But I personally don't care. I don't mind time having milliseconds, especially if you're a speed runner or something. Let's make sure we put our time value back to zero. We start at time zero, and we delete our integer, compile and save. Now we have a widget that tells us the time passed. We have our progress var, our total score, all of them are misaligned, sadly. So I will have to align them if I want any visual clarity. So let's put 20 just a bit. I want endpoint of it to be the same as score. Yeah, actually, good enough. Not ideal, but it doesn't have to be. We're just prototyping stuff. And now we have our timeline. We have our score. We have our progress bar. Now let's change our speed value. Now, this one is going to be a bit different because the speed we are getting is from the third person character. So the movement we are trying to get the velocity of the third person character. So what we need to do, let's say, check sorry. Velocity. So what we are going to do, we are going to calculate velocity. And as you can see, this is not what we need. This is not an output we can use. So instead, what we are going to do For all intended purposes, we could get easily our current velocity from Sirt person character inside star blueprint. But this is not what we want, really. In a game, usually you would have in a game where you would want to see your speed, usually you would have some kind of value for it. For example, if you are driving a car or it is a game where you are calculating speed or whatever, when you are flying, would have some kind of floss value already attached to it that would dictate how fast your character goes or does not go. In this case, we don't have it. We are just using unreal basic movement system, and what we can do is we can get our speed. If I 1 second, get my question. This is going as parameters, so it's also not correct. So we are going to do we are going to event graph here. And in event graph, by the way, if you have noticed we did not use this tick we had before we will, make sure you delete it if you don't need it. This adds cost just by existing. We are going to go to speed, and we are going to create a new binding. And we are going to call this binding where we are going to get speed. Now, the speed we're trying to get belongs to the player character, and I will show you how it's done in the next video. 30. Additional Functions: Welcome back. Now, continuing on, we are trying to get a value for our speed we are going to have here on the bottom right on the top of the widget. We need to get the movement speed of our third player character. And as I have shown in the previous video, there is no direct way of getting like, Oh, get me the movement speed. We need to go through some poops, and I'm going to move it from third person player character into the widget itself. So if I want to modify widget properties, I can just do it from widget. What we are going to do, we are going to get player character. And the reason why we are getting this player character is because we are trying to find a speed for the player character. If you were trying to get for some kind of enemy or object in the level, what would be ideal is to get the value directly from that object and somehow transfer it to the widget via interface or game mode. Instance, if it's necessary, usually it's not a good idea to have all these calculations constantly happen unless it is integral part of your game, you should probably not do it. Again, it's a lot of cost for a very little return. But again, in some games it's required, so you do it. So we need our player speed, so we are getting our player character, and what we need is its velocity. If we get velocity and we have here at the very bottom, get velocity. And if we just put it into return, and compile press play, you will see we are getting XYZ values because velocity is usually well, not usually is calculated in XYZ. We're moving at a certain velocity, X at XY or Z in the three D world. But this is not what we need. Like we don't want to put our XYZ into the viewport. So what we need to do we need to get vector link. And now this value is our speed. Let's see, press play. And now, this is our speed. You may be wondering why is it getting stuck at 3,000 and why it's moving slower, going up. First of all, we do have a fractal value at the very end, which is normal, but you may notice also we have a max speed of 3,000, and that happens because of the blueprint, character movement and the max speed we have sent previously. So our max vax speed is 3,000. It is 3,000 centimeters. It is essentially 30 meters/second. Now, we don't want it to be directly put in that kind of value. So what we are going to do instead, we are going to convert it to text to text. We are going to make sure we don't have fractals. I don't want them in my UI for speed. And for their own, before we even do that, I will divide this value by 100 because I don't want my speed to be shown in centimeters. I want it matters. Now, what this is going to give us is a value of one to 30 being our speed. Sometimes it goes a bit far up because I'm flying and stuff, but that's understandable. This is just calculating my total velocity. So now we are going to do something we already did in the previous one. We are going to append We're going to append the value and after the value, we are going to add let's make less. And I will add extra space the spacing. I'm going to put it back in. I will compile it, save it, press play. And now I have a widget that tells me my speed. There's a lot more you can do with widgets. So Widgets also act like menu elements. So if you want to click a button or, you know, manage your inventory, check the map, click on the map elements, et cetera in the games, you would need some kind of interactability with widget directly. And usually we would create different widgets and apply them, remove them from the scene like screen as you need them or by removing the widget. So for example, we have our widget here, created this widget. We could also eliminate the widget. So Widget if you go to the widget commands here. You have removed from parent, you can use to just remove it or set visibility to invisible or just move it out of the screen. Ideally, if it's a widget that is CPU consuming, et cetera, you would want to just remove it entirely. So's remove and if you read the description, it is removing it from everything, essentially. It's removing from containerus, et cetera. Unless you need it, you should probably remove it. And in our case, this widget is something that should remain on the screen always. You may want to if you want to hide certain elements of the widget, you can do that within the widget itself by adding some calls, et cetera, by going to the widget and calling direct events. We have our Widget UI reference here. So if I want to, let's say, get a certain function. Let's we had the one for time. So we have co function time elapsed. So you are able to access your widget element, like functionality by the reference we have here when we create the widget. So you can always just manage your widget elements, hight specific parts of it or elements just by casting to it. Sorry, just by using the reference from it. Now, if you want to click create some kind of interactivity here, what we would need to do is, for example, we could just add a bottom I'm going to add a button here. And on this button, I would add an event called On clicked. So when this button is clicked, something is supposed to happen. So I'm just going to make a print string. And here we go. And I want it to say hello when I click this button. Compile, PrescoPlay press play, and as you can see, I can click on it. But when I begin my game, I would lose my mouse input. The reason I was able to click it because when I play, I still had my mouse, but you wouldn't have this mouse when you actually begin the game if you're playing with a keyboard, et cetera, because this is only going to work inside unreal Editor until I click this. And now if I want to click the widget again, I need Fight and click this here. But this is not the way it would work in the game, especially if it's a widget that spawns in the middle of the game. To make sure you can actually click on this, what you would do, the widgets that require your ability to be clicked on would have an event that lets you click on it. So I will add an event called Construct me and my miserable typing event construct. What this does is gets triggered when the widget is created. This is this by no means should be part of the UI widget elements. I'm just showing it here so you know how it is done. Ideally, you would create this in a different widget. So when event is contracted, we get player controller. Let's move it. And and set mouse Wait. This is not it. My apologies. We need to get player controller from this, not from execution bits. This is just a pure function. And here, what we do is we get mouse cursor. And we make it and compile, press and press play. So now, while this widget is on the screen or not while it is when this widget is beginning to create, I still have my inputs available to me on my keyboard, but I can also click on this button and create the Hello button. But obviously, imagine this being an inventory or a map, et cetera, and you don't want it to be constantly on screen, correct? So you would want to disable this mouse input and remove that element of the widget from the screen. So first of all, let's anchor this so it's not in the middle of the screen. Yeah, much better. So when I press play now, this is now bottom right. First, now that it's done, let's take this widget. And we know this widget is our Button 01. Let's go to our Button 01 and here get. Instead of selling hello, we're going to let's see what we can do with this. This is just a widget, so we can, I guess, remove it. Yeah. So let's see what happens when we click it now, when we remove it from the parent, and it's gone. But we still have our mouse in the middle of the screen, obviously that's quite an easy fix. We get this mouse cursor and we set it to fs. And target should be player controller, obviously. And when we press Play now and click on this button, it now disappears. Now, this is useful when you have, let's say, a UI that you want to have a click on that has something like, let's say, when you have a certain item, it show up in your UI. You click on it, you consume it, and it disappears. Obviously, you could write all down logic to it, like, Oh, if you don't have anymore of this item, remove it, or if you like, time passed, it expired. It's up to you. You can create whatever you want with it. But I personally don't need this functionality in this one. And as such, I removed all of it. But just keep in mind. That's how you can create your menu elements. You can put a text, you can click at buttons. You can add a grid, which is if you go to our Canvas here, we have our grid panel, for example. And inside this grid panel, I can add multiple other things. So I can add buttom one, button two, button three. It's hard to see right now, but you will see it in a second. And I will just size them up. I can put them in rows. And now I have four buttons. In a different row. I can move them around if I wanted. As you can see. Now, if you want your size to be bigger, et cetera, you would just do it in the grid panel, we are going to size content itself. So it's only going to be the size of the content, or you can instead go to your buttons and from the buttons, you can change how they are padded, they are past, et cetera. And you are not limiting to just adding buttons. You could add an image here as well. And if your image is, let's say, Wait. This is not image. This is an HDR image. My boologis. Let's just add a texture, regular texture. And this texture is very big, so it's suddenly covering the whole widget. You can reduce the size. If you want, and in my case, I don't want any images, so I'm just going to kip the buttons. If I go to grid panel, you will see we have our size here. I'm going to increase the size to something like this, and we can position it where you want. I'm going to anchor in the bottom left for now and position it 000 and then move it around as I want something like here, which is fine. Now we can click on the buttons. We can change their colors if we want. I understand it's kind of hard to see from here and So we have our columns. We have our rows where we want this to be placed. And keep in mind, this is a grid. So there are like this is a grid based system, and there are buttons on the grid. If you want menu elements that are more in line to what you are used to, what you can do is 1 second. I believe it was this one. And if I add buttons here, yes. If I add buttons here. Now, I want them to be horizontal, not vertical, so Sorry, I want them vertical, not horizontal. Now I have them horizontal. No, I'm just going to paste this bottom. And now I have five UI elements spaces inside this overlay, and I can add texts on top of them if I wanted to do each one. And let's say, this one is start game. Yeah, not star game, you got the point. Options, quit game like extras, et cetera, whatever you want from your game Stack box. Feel free to experiment. There's a lot of things you can do. Imagine any game you have ever played or have seen, there you eyes and try to think about how they made it happen. How did they how would you use the widget system in unreal to get the same results and whether it would make sense for them to be in the same widget or part of a different widget. Also, do keep in mind, you can add other widgets into your widgets. So if you have a different widget, which we are going to create in a second. Again, just for demonstration purposes, I will not actually we are going to click and create a widget, and we're going to call the user widget and go Cty. That's just SS, just so I can find it easily. And here, if I want to add a widget, I could just add it here. And I have my SS widget here. And if I open my SS widget now, and in this here, I add a panel, I just going to add a canvas just because it's faster. And I'm going to add an image or actually a text. I'm going to anchor the text center and just type text, compile, press save, let's play. And you may not on the top left, I have SSSS. I anchored it here. You may ask why is it not here, and on the top left gal I have not anchored it here. I anchor it here in the center as well and position it So you see now, I have a widget inside a widget, which is useful when you have inventory system or some kind of menu that overlays itself, like a menu with multiple layers and stuff. That is very useful. Also, it lets you code them independently of each other and you may remove them when they are not needed, et cetera, or if some widgets are specific to certain levels, you can use them there and remove them afterwards. There are a lot of ways you can use your widgets, and widget system in general is very expensive. Like there's a lot of stuff here you can use, but that you would just need to test it out to see what you want to make. And there is no one solution to all. You can add a circle trober, et cetera, which is just a nice widget. I like using. You can use this like loading screen or whatever. You can add more elements, less elements. Like, imagine you make a game and the amount of dots represents the amount of HPs you have. You can just increase them or decrease the amount with the amount of HB you have. There's a lot you can do. Imagination has no limitations, so feel free to experiment. That is going to be all for widget introduction in this basics course. We will have more in depth explanation about widgets and how to make complicated game elements in the intermediate course which will be released in the future. I hope you learned something and you enjoy your time here. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out. I will do my best to help you. Thank you, and I hope you have a nice day.