Unreal Engine 5: Blueprint Scripting 101

1. Course Promo Video (About the Course): Welcome. In this beginner game development course, you'll learn how to script your very own functional gameplay using blueprints in Unreal Engine five. No coating or Unreal Engine experienced, needed. Hi, my name is Greg wanderer, a 12-year industry veteran who has been teaching game development using Unreal Engine since 2016. By the end of this course, you'll have an in-depth understanding of all the core concepts driving this node-based approach to programming will cover Blueprint Classes and components, events, functions, macros, variables, and so much more. This course is for everyone from the youngest Byron game designer to the season industry professional. We start from the very beginning assuming you know nothing. But by the end of this course will serve as a valuable resource. You can reference time and time again. So come on, join the thousands of satisfied students who started their game development journey with me. I can't wait to see what you create. 2. Course Primer: Welcome, just a quick primer here before we get to the good stuff, just so you know how to navigate this course and extract maximal value from it. First of all, thank you for choosing this course. I know you've got a lot of options. I take making these courses quite seriously. I've spent more than a year making it. This is my dream course to put together because I think this is the most foundational important concept to get when working with Unreal Engine, you're gonna be learning some blueprint scripting. What is Blueprint scripting world is essentially a visual, node-based way of coding gameplay without staring at a wall of text and syntax and all that jazz. So if you've never seen what Blueprints scripting even looks like, I've got a quick example to show you off here. This is Unreal Engine five, by the way. In order to create functional gameplay in Unreal with blueprint scripts, you can just wire together some nodes like that. And what I've gotten out here is just a quick pickup. I've also got this procedural wall where we can extend how many pieces we have. All this is done with Unreal Engine is Blueprint scripting. So who is this course for? I get that question a lot. Is it for me? Well, I have designed this course for everyone. I've had students as young as six grade, as old as 65 take this course. Some know nothing about coding or scripting somewhere, complete newbies and others are triple a developer's. I've had students from Naughty Dog and insomniac. I do at Teach though, as if it is your first time. So no threat in a Hey, I don't understand anything about programming, anything like that. I start from the very ground level. So how is this course structured? Well, we're not going to be building any one particular thing in this course. Rather, this course is a concepts based course, showing off lots of very useful, practical examples. Now, I tried to make this course as open-ended as possible, meaning it's meant to serve as a resource for you, a repository of scripting knowledge that you can come back to time and time again like a one-stop shop of all these central scripting concepts you could ever want and need. I mean, these were all the questions that I asked myself on my learning journey throughout the last ten years. Now, because of how this course is structured, you can jump around from lesson to lesson. You don't have to go in a linear fashion. Although I do recommend going in order. Now there may be a few lessons here and there that reference previous lessons, but I'll try to call those out when they occur and keep that to a minimum. Now, I do want to note, it is extremely difficult to teach a concept based course like this, quote unquote, in order because to fully understand the concepts presented here, we will undoubtedly encounter some dependencies on what that means is that in order to understand this, you're going to need to know about that. And in order to know about that, you need to know about this. There's a concept or skill that is presented and it seems entirely foreign at first. Know that a, I'm going to call it out and be I will cover that topic properly later on down the road. There is a lot, a lot to cover here. And just to give you a quick primer as to how prepared I am in teaching this course. I have my outline right over here. This is the outline that I use to build this course. Every one of these blue links, links to a lesson. So i've, I've spent literally, I'm actually closer to two years putting this course together. Again, I recommend going in order, although you can jump around. Lastly, if you do find this course to be valuable, please leave a review and recommend it to other, there's no other better thing you can do than to recommend it to others. I love teaching students seeing or they can build. Nothing is more exciting to me than seeing students take what I've taught and they take it to the next level. Pretty exciting stuff indeed. Alright guys, enough of this. Let's get onto the good stuff. See you all in the next video. 3. Download & Install: Alright, first things first, before we get on with any of the good stuff, we need to make sure that you have Unreal Engine downloaded and installed. If you already do, feel free to skip over this video. This one is for the complete newbies that I have no idea where to go, how to get started, et cetera. So using an Internet browser of your choosing, simply just type in Unreal Engine.com. Now they do have a page with some download instructions on it. It'll show you some system requirements if you're wondering about those, this is good for Windows or Mac, doesn't matter what you got. And the first thing you need to do in order to get Unreal Engine is to actually download the Epic Games launcher. Yes, it's a little bit of a fuzzy process. We have to download the Epic Games launcher, through which we then gain access to the Unreal Engine. Weird, I know. But go ahead and click on this download and launch your option. It's going to ask you to save this installer package to a file destination of your choosing. I've already done this before, but once this is done, you can double-click on this to begin the Epic Games launcher installation process, it's pretty straightforward. All you need to do is click through the boxes that are presented. Again, I've already done that, so I can't really replicate that here. Pretty straightforward process. Now once you've done that, you should be able to find the Epic Games launcher either appearing after that is done or you can search it out here. If I click on my little magnifying glass here and just type in epic, you can see there's my Epic Games launch your app. Again, I've already pre-installed this from here. I can right-click on this and pin to my task bar, which I've already done. So once the Epic Games launcher has finished installing, you have access to the Epic Games launcher, which you've got store, library, and Unreal Engine tabs along the left-hand side. Because we're obviously working with Unreal Engine. You're going to want to make sure that this tab is selected and across the top, you're going to want to select your library tab. Now this is where you go to install different versions of unreal. Now, every couple of months or so, Epic Games is coming up with an updated version of the engine. But to add any new engine version, you can simply click on this yellow plus button right here. It's going to add this little card and then this drop-down, you can click to specifically choose a version of the engine you would like to install. Now, as of today's date that I'm recording this Unreal Engine five is still very new and this is the latest version of the engine. Which engine version should you install? I would recommend the latest version, whatever that is. Now, if I click on this again, when you're picking a different version of the engine, it's going to ask you to install it. I've already done this off-camera ahead of time, so I'm ready to launch it, but by clicking Install here, you will install that version of the engine. And this can be a rather lengthy process. So once you click Install, you'll see this epic or this Unreal Engine icon kinda fill up like a meter bar. And also if you click on this Download option over here, you can see the progress of the installation of Unreal as well. So go ahead and do that now. Go ahead and then grab yourself a drink, go have dinner, etc. Because it's going to take awhile. 4. Create Project: Alright, with Unreal Engine install, it was time for us to create a project. And in order to do that, we need to launch the engine. Now there's actually multiple ways to launch the engine. So I'm going to show you those methods now here in the Epic Games launcher with Unreal Engine selected along the left, the library tab selected across the top. We could launch the version of the engine we've just finished installing by clicking right here. In the upper right, there's a Launch button that will allow me to launch that same version of the engine. Now if I had multiple versions of the engine installed here, I can click on this drop-down. They would all be presented here. I could choose one. Whichever engine version I had selected. That number would appear to the right here. And again, clicking this yellow Launch button would launch that specific version of the engine. Now if all of this is to inconvenient, you can create a shortcut by clicking this little drop-down. And you can create a desktop shortcut here, which I have already done prior to this video. There is my desktop shortcut. I'm going to click Launch right here. Okay, eventually you're going to get to a pop-up that looks like this. We are creating a gaming projects, so make sure you've got that box selected along the left. We're also going to be using the third person template to help us along here. So make sure you've got that selected. Over on the right-hand side, we've got some options. This is going to be a blueprint project which that's selected by default. That's all well and good. Our target platform here is gonna be Desktop quality preset, maximum, sorry, content, sure, ray tracing your choice whether or not you want to have that selected, I'm going to say Sure. Project location, you go ahead and choose a file location on your computer. However, the project name for the love of God, please don't leave that as default as I see far too many students doing. Change this to Blueprint scripting. Then go ahead and click Create. Alright, and after what scenes in eternity after creating that project, we are getting our first look at Unreal Engine five, the level editor here. Now if you saw a little something in the lower right-hand window that said project files out-of-date. Just go ahead and click fix. Now to fix that up. In the upper right hand side, we can see the name of our project. And I want to point out that after you close out this project, you can get right back into this by going through the Epic Games launcher, the Unreal Engine Library tab has is my projects section. In any project that you've created will be listed right down here. So double-clicking on this will open up this specific project for us, which is pretty handy. Mission accomplished here, guys, we've gone ahead and created our first project. Let's learn about Blueprint scripting in the next section. See you there. 5. Blueprint Example: Welcome back everybody. Well, with our project now created, let's just jump right in. Let's get to the good stuff. In this video, our goal is going to be to define what blueprints are in Unreal and then show off an example of one in a game. And doing so will demonstrate conceptually what a blueprint is and how we can utilize these in creating gaming projects. So prior to shooting this video, I went ahead and created a blueprint. I created a pickup blueprint just to get you excited about what we're gonna be doing here in the first part of this course. This is something that you see all the time in game. So I thought this would be a very relevant example. I'm going to click this green play button at the very top here. And in doing so, in the upper left, it's going to say click for mouse control. If I was suppressed WAS and ASD right from the get-go and nothing happens. I have to click in this window first to gain control of my character. Now everything you see here was prebuilt. The only thing that I built prior to this video was that spinning cross. If I run my character into it, I collected, I play a little sound. You see that kind of thing in games all the time. I'm going to hit Escape to jump out of here. Now if I go into my content drawer and if I look at the tool tip, their control and Spacebar, That's also where I can bring on the content drawer. This is where I can access the folders and folders upon folders within my Unreal Engine, I created this blueprint class is BP example Blueprint class. Prior to this video, we're going to create one of our own by videos anterior. But I wanted to point out here with the content drawer, this is a new feature and Unreal Engine five, you can click on this to raise it or lower it, or do that control plus spacebar. However, for those of you that are a little bit more experience or veterans of Unreal, you can add something nor does the content browser that is a persistent view of that drawer down at the bottom of the screen. So I'm going to come under Window content browser and choose content browser wants to just have one copy of the content browser persistently available down here in the editor. You don't have to do that. That is my own personal preference. This is the exact same as the content drawer has the exact same folders, content, et cetera. Alright, The reason I'm doing this is because I want to create a new folder here inside of my content folder. So I'm going to right-click on my content folder right here. I'm going to create a new folder and I'm going to call this one scripting. Then I'm going to right-click on this new scripting folder. And I'm gonna give it a color right away. And I'm just going to left-click, move this around. I'm going to set it to blue because hey, this is a blueprint scripting course. Alright, The reason I'm creating this folder is because a lot of the assets that we're gonna be creating throughout this course. I want them to be how specifically in this folder for easy access for me so I know exactly where they live. Now along the right-hand side here, I can create different types of assets. And I can do that by right-clicking and some empty space. In MI right-click menu, I can create a new blueprint class. Now this would be a good time for me to talk about what our blueprints in Unreal. So this term, blueprints, it kinda means two things here. Blueprints is the visual scripting system inside of unreal, sometimes referred to as blueprints scripting. But blueprints are also assets like Blueprint Class assets that may contain specific components, data or script that helped your game in some way, shape, or form. There are a lot of different blueprint types in unreal. Now this whole blue printing system, it is a way for non coders such as myself to create functional gameplay inside of Unreal, which is pretty sweet. So in a way you are going to be coating, but in a very artistic manner. So what does that mean? We're gonna be wiring together some nodes and it's gonna be way more visually appealing than ones and zeros and curly brackets and all that kinda stuff. So here I'm going to choose a blueprint class. When I click on this, we're going to have to pick a parent class. Again, lots of different types of blueprints, but by and large the most common is the actor class blueprint. This is an object then that can be placed to respond in world. So let's go ahead and select this. Going to create that asset down here in our content scripting folder. Let's give it a name. I'm going to call mine BP underscore scripting example. I believe that's the name I want it to give it. Example, pick up no example pickup. That's the name I wanted to give it. Example pickup. That's why I keep notes. Hit Enter. By the way, if you want to change the name of this, you can right-click and rename it F2 while having it selected will also prompt you to rename it. If I was to place this into my level right now, you can just drag and drop it from your content browser. You can see that there's an icon here. But if I was to jump into my game, I wouldn't actually see that thing. That icon is only available in viewable here in the editor. I don't see it when I'm playing the game itself. Now currently I have rotational mode on this hits to some basic navigational stuff. Rotation mode is on. You can go back to movement mode to move this around. Alternatively, your spacebar will toggle between movements, rotating, or scaling your objects. All of those have hotkeys associated with them as well. Alright, so that's all well and good. The asterisk down here show that it's not been saved yet. So Control plus S will say that, or you can right-click on it and click Save as well. One more thing I wanna do before we close out this video is I want to create a brand new tests level. We're actually not going to be working inside of this level. This is all for demonstration purposes. So I'm going to come under file in the far upper left. I'm going to create a brand new level. When you do that, it's going to prompt you to select one of these different templates. I'm gonna go with the basic level here. Click Create. That's going to take me out of this level and into a new untitled level. Now few things we have to do here. One is I need to save this level. So if I click this little save disk icon up here, it's going to prompt me, hey, where do you want to save this level? I'm going to put this in my scripting level. I'm going to give us a new name and I'm going to call this LV underscore tests map. This whole map is just gonna be a giant testing. Now for all of these different blueprints concepts we're going to be exploring throughout the course. We're going to click Save here. The name of this tab will now be changed to test map. You can see that asset now lives inside of my content folder. It'll automatically create this test Mab build data. You don't have to do anything inside of this one, but it'll automatically create this as well in your folder. There's one more thing I wanna do here inside of our project settings. You can find that in the far upper right settings, project settings. It's going to bring on a new tab. Over on the left-hand side, we've got maps and modes. Go ahead and choose this. We want to change our editor default, start map from third-person map to the map that we just created, a level test map. We can simply exit out of here. And what this will do is make it so that once we close out of the editor here and open it back up, will automatically come inside of this level. We don't have to find this level here in our content browser. So that's all well and good. I'm going to finish off this level very quickly by jumping into that blueprint example that I had created in my content folder, I can just simply place one of these in my level and jump into my blueprint example. Right here, I've got this viewport tab that shows the different components that make up my blueprint. And then I've got this event graph that shows the scripting, the nodes and wires that created the functionality for this particular blueprints. I overlap and it plays a sound and it destroys the actor. So that's essentially what we're gonna be building throughout these next few videos here. But guys, that's gonna get us as far as I wanted to get in this video. So we'll see you in the next one. 6. Components Panel: Welcome back everybody. In this video, our goal is to add some components to our newly created blueprint to give you an understanding of what the Components panel is inside of a blueprint and how to make the most of working with it, because there is a lot of nuance, a lot of good things to know that will save you a boatload of time. Alright, Before we get to that, I want to kill out this BP example that I'm read prior to the start of last video. So we're going to say bye-bye to that by clicking Delete right there in the Content Browser. Alternatively, your content drawer. I'm going to come into my scripting folder and I'm going to place my BP example pickup into my level. Again, there is nothing inside of this blueprint yet, so I see this icon, but if I was to play, I wouldn't see anything. Now there's a couple of ways we can go about modifying this blueprint. One is we can double-click on his asset itself down in the Content Browser slash drawer. Or with this object placed in the level, you can click over in your outliner where you've got BP example pickup selected and right there is edit BP example pickups. So I'm gonna click on that. And if you see that this is a data only Blueprints sometimes happens when you open up a blueprint, you can simply click right here to open up the full blueprint editor. Alright. This is our blueprint editor. I'm going to click on the viewport tab right up here. We're gonna be breaking down every aspect of this in detail here. But I'm going to the viewport tab firstly, because we're gonna be adding some components in the Components tab that we will then be able to view in the viewport tab. I should point out here, we did make an actor class blueprints in the last video. And lo and behold, the upper right-hand corner, it says parent class is the actor class. Alright, so let's go ahead and talk about what are components. Components are essentially the building blocks of a blueprint. If you think of a car, the construction of a car, a car blueprint would have a mesh body. You would have some wheels, it would have some headlights, horn, maybe some exhaust smoke. All those components could be added here in the Components panel. Now by default, the Components panel is located in the upper left of the blueprint editor. Now, you can resize this window by left clicking and dragging here. You could tear off this tab right here and place it someplace completely different. Say down there. I choose to have it back where it was. You can hide and show the components tab. If I was to simply right-click on this, I could hide that tab. If I click on that blue little flag there, I can show the tab. I can right-click on this and dock to the sidebar and move it over here if I wanted to. And I'm just simply clicking on it like so I can right-click on it again in undocked from the sidebar. Lots of options here. I can also get rid of this components panel all together by clicking on that X. Students do this from time to time, then they freak out and wonder, how do I get that window back? Well, if you come under your Windows option up here, lo and behold, you have a components option. There you go. Alright, let's add some components to our blueprints. So we got some pretty look at here. We've got this Add button right here. But true to the nature of unreal, if there are multiple ways to do things. So I'm going to try to demonstrate multiple ways to add components. Let's click this Add button here first and add a brand new. What we want is a sphere collision and components. As you can see, lots of different components here in Unreal, don't get intimidated. There are some of these that are used way more commonly than others. One of those that is very commonly used is the sphere collision component. This essentially provides you with an invisible sphere that we can check to see if your character overlap to do things. So I'm going to call this sphere underscored collision. You can give it a name up there. And with that components selected over in the Details panel, I'm going to change something about it. I'm going to change the details, the sphere radius to be 50. We'll deal more with the Details panel in a future video. I'm also going to add a cube. And I'm going to call this cube underscore horizontal. I can use my mouse wheel to zoom in and out. I'm just gonna give us a rough scale. I may adjust this at some point, but with this unlocked, I'm going to change this to be 0.25 in the x, 0.25 and the y kinda thin it up. And I'm going to change the Z scale to be 0.8, something like that. Now I can right-click on this. I can duplicate this one because I'm going to create that cross shape that I had in the last video. And it's prompting me to give us a name. I'm gonna call this one cube vertical. And this one I will keep truly vertical because the last one, even though I call it a horizontal, it is standing vertically with the cube horizontal selected. I'm going to choose rotation mode up here. You can press the space-bar as well. And I'm going to simply rotate this down to be 90 degrees, like so. Okay, let's add another component. Shall we? How about we add some fire to this? Sure, Let's add a particle effect. I'm going to detach this tab right here. And I'm going to undock it, place it somewhere over here. And the reason I'm doing that is down in my content browser, I'm gonna go into my starter content. I'm gonna go into my particles folder. Here I see a P fire particle. Now this is an older particle system. In some future years are probably going to get rid of these. The newer particle system is known as Niagara up. So you don't have to use these older particle effects. You can use a newer Niagara particle effect when they, I'm sure we'll have those available in a starter content folder. But what I wanted to demonstrate here is I can left-click right here in the Content Browser, drag this right up in to my components panel like so. And you see that box surrounding my cue horizontal, I'm just going to drag it right on top of it. And I can see I've added that to my blueprint. Now something else I wanted to note there is that as we added this to our blueprint inside of our components panel, it added this to the instance of this blueprint that is in our level. So as you can see as we modify things here inside of our blueprint, it's going to modify and update any instance, any copy of this blueprint that we have placed in our level, which is what makes blueprints so awesome. Something else I wanted to point out here is, is sort of relationship going on. You can see that things are indented by dragging my P fire on top of my cube horizontal. It actually made it so that it is attached to this horizontal cube. So if I was to select my horizontal cube right here, let me just go back to full sizing this. I've got my horizontal cube components selected here. If I move this, the fire comes along for the ride. I'm just gonna do Control Z to back that up. However, if I was to select the fire itself and move it, nothing else is attached to the fire. The fire was attached to the cube horizontal. So I'm gonna do Control Z to undo that. If I didn't like that it was attached to it, I can simply drag and drop this bag on top. And now it is showing as not being attached essentially when anything is indented like this, it shows that one thing is attached to another. So right now my two cube mesh components, they are attached to my sphere collision component. Now just because I want to show off more of this sort of things being attached. I'm going to drag this right back on top of my cube horizontal. No reason for me to do that other than just because I'm going to undock this again, places just like so. What else do I want to add here? I want to add some, let's add some smoke, showy. So I'm going to grab a smoke right up here. Actually let me do this. I'm going to put this backup top, gonna go back to my test level. Here's another way that you can add this component, grabbing my smoke, left clicking, dragging it up to my tab. Now that tab automatically opens, and now I'm going to drag and drop this on top of the fire. So there, I just added another particle effect. Now again, the smoke is attached to the fire, which is in turn attached to the cube horizontal. So if I was to move the cube horizontal component, the fire and the smoke comes with it. Control Z to back this up. And as you can see back in my level editor here, it's smoking with this instance of the blueprint. Pretty cool. Alright, I want to add, let's add something else here. I want to add going back inside of my blueprint example pickup, Let's add some rotational movement to show him. So I click under the add components in a search components area, I can search for one called rotating movements. So yes, you can search for components. I knew that this one existed, so I knew by searching for it, I would whittle it down. Now by selecting this, it's going to dock it kinda down here. This is sort of a special component in that is not attached to anything. You cannot attach a rotating movement component to any other component. This essentially affects every other components here in our blueprint. Now with this selected over in the Details panel, you can adjust its rotation rate. Now currently it's going to rotate along the z-axis. You've got x, y, and z axis is that you can rotate it on at a given rate. Now we don't see anything rotating right now. However, if I was suppressed as Simulation button at the top of the editor, you would see it spin. Now it's simulating on, I'm going to click it again to stop it. I could change this to, let's say 2 thousand. And then click Simulate to see it spinning much faster. Going to set that back to its default value by clicking this little back button. Okay, great. So if I was to go into my level here and I was to play, well, if I was to play, I wouldn't be running around. I wouldn't see this actually spinning because I don't have a place actor or an actor placed in my level in which to spawn. So coming under my Add button right up here at the top of the editor, I'm going to come under basic actors. And I want to add a player start actor to my level. I can simply left-click and drag and drop. And with this actor does, is it defines a spot in my world where I will spawn in this blue arrow pointing to the direction that my character will be facing. So now if I was to click play, I would be playing. And I can see that all spinning. Yes, everything spins, including the fire and the smoke because it is all attached. I know it doesn't look great, just showing off different concepts. Alright, let's add one more component to our blueprint. And this one is also going to be done in a unique manner. I want to find a given piece of audio too attached to this blueprint. So what I'm gonna do here is select our blueprint here in the level editor itself. And look over in the Details panel. I'm going to peel this down right here. I can see all the different components that have been added to this blueprint. And from here, I can add a component. So let's try adding it from here as opposed to in our blueprint editor itself. So I'm going to click Add, and I want to add an audio component. And in doing so, it adds it here. However, if I was to jump into my BP example pickup that I had created here in my scripting folder. Let's jump in there right now. I don't see that component anywhere in here yet. So how do I make sure that that change here to this instance of the blueprint propagates to my base blueprint. Well, if I click this button right here, edit blueprint for this actor, let me click right there. What I can do is I can choose this option right here, apply instance changes to the Blueprint. So in doing this, I get a little notification right there. And then if I go back to my blueprint example pickup, I can now see that that audio component has been added as well. Now once again, there are many types of components that can be added to a blueprints. There are many of these I've never even used, but there are some that are very commonly used. And one thing I want to get across early here is on working with unreal. There's so much to know, but you do not have to know it all by knowing some of the key core concepts you can get very, very far. So don't get intimidated early on here. Common types of components include static meshes. You've got some lights that can be added. Where my lights, There's my lights. You've got your collision shapes. And then you've got some of those movement. Once you solve the rotating movement, There's one called interpretive movements. That's pretty commonly used as well. All right, a couple more things I wanted to point out in this video before we wrap this up, one has to do with this attaching relationship that we have going inside of the Components panel. One thing to note is that with a given components selected that is attached to something else, the location listed in the Details panel is relative to the thing that it is attached to. So right now I've got my cube horizontal components selected. And that is attached to my sphere collision component. If I was to set the z location to be 100, that's going to move it up 100 unreal units. Each unreal unit represents one centimeter, 100 unreal units above the center point of my collision component. So just know that all these locational settings are relative to whatever it is attached to. I'm going to set this back. Also wanted to point out that you can change the root. Notice that when we created this blueprint by default, it had this default seen route in this editor here. That was that icon that existed there before. Everything else is attached and their location is relative to that route. You can change the root component by simply selecting, in this case, I'm going to select severe sphere collision, not severe collision. I'm going to drag it and drop it on top here. And it's letting me know if I drop this here, I'm going to make this the new roots and that the default route will be deleted. Sweets, that is now the new root. Everything else is positioned relative to my sphere collision. Last thing I wanted to point out here, and what makes blueprints so awesome is that by having one blueprint actor created here, if I make a change inside of this blueprint, it'll change every copy that is every instance of this placed in the world and just demonstrate that very quickly here. Can you go back to my test level here inside of my scripting folder. I'm just going to place a few of these throughout the level. By the way, you don't have to keep dragging and dropping. You can hold the Alt key and left-click to keep dragging out copies of these. Alright, so I've got five of them. Now let's just say, I think, you know what, that's spinning, fire and smoke looks kind of dumb. I can go back into my example pickup here. I can select my smoke. I can say delete. I'm just gonna do Control Z there and say, You know what, I want to get rid of the fire and the smoke. So I'm going to select my fire and hit Delete. It's going to delete that out. I'm going to then delete out the smoke. And now if I jump back into my level, that's gone for every copy of these, I do want to get rid of those, yes, indeed. So I'm gonna go back into my blueprint example pickup. Let's save this. And that's going to be all we wanted to accomplish in this one. The Components panel guy is a very important part to know about blueprints. It's gonna do it all for this video, we will see you in the next one. 7. Viewport Tab: Welcome back everyone. In this video, our goal is to understand what the viewport tab is inside of a blueprint. Now this is our window into what our actor class blueprint is going to look like. Through this tab, we can fine tune the placement of said components in relation to one another. Now the viewport tab can be found right up here. We've got three different tabs, a viewport tab, it Construction Script tab, and then Event Graph tab. Each of these is going to warrant its own video. So don't worry, we're gonna get to those other ones. Let's start off by talking about the different viewport options. That is, what is found underneath this little hamburger icon in the very upper left. So if I click on this, I'm presented with four different options of which I have two of them on. By default, this real-time option and this Show Grid option. We'll get to all of those in a little bit. So let's reset camera one. If I was to click on this right now, doesn't really seem to do all that much. It just kinda jump my camera back to show everything in my blueprint. Right here, front and center in my viewport. Now, where this really comes in handy is sometimes you've got a lot of different components here inside of your view ports. Or sometimes for whatever reason you have flown far, far away, such as I am doing right now. And you're like, Where is all my stuff? Where are my components? If you simply come under this hamburger icon, click on Reset camera. It'll jump you right back to where you want to be and you will sigh. Sigh of relief. Next up we're going to talk about the real-time option. It is checked on by default, but we don't have anything animating here, so it's hard to really see what this does. I'm going to jump to another blueprint to show off what it does here. So I'm going to jump back to my level test map inside of my content browser or content drawer. I'm going to come onto my third-person Blueprints folder. There's my B P ThirdPersonCharacter that is a character that we are currently playing as when we hit this Play button, I'm going to double-click on here to open up this blueprint. And again, if I click on the viewport tab, I can see all of the different components that make up our ThirdPersonCharacter, including a camera, and that's the camera that we're looking through when we are playing our game. Now if you zoom up on this character slightly and I'm just mouse wheeling in here you can see our character animating a little bit. They're playing an idle animation. Well, if for whatever reason I want the character to just hold still, I can click this option. Turn off real time. It's got a hot key associated with it as well. So if I do Control and our that'll toggle that on and off. Pretty cool. All right, jumping back to my BP example, pickup, coming under my hamburger icon wants more. I've got the show floor option. Now this is off by default, but it's not showing floor here, which is rather odd. I'm going to turn this off. Let me go back to my ThirdPersonCharacter and show floor. There we go. There is our show for option. I don't use this too often, but every once in a while, you do have a bunch of components and say we're building out a car or something like that. This can give you a better sense of scale and just how things are laid out in relation to one another, as opposed to just a character or an actor class blueprint that is floating off in space. Jumping back to my BP example pickup once again, underneath the different options, we've got the show grid. Now it is on by default and you can see it's down here. I can toggle that off. And why that's useful to show or not show. I'm going to demonstrate here in just a bit. I'm going to show my grid and now I'm going to lead into the discussion of our different views here, jumping one over. Currently this is the perspective viewport. This is kind of your beautiful view. However, if I was to click on this, I've got different orthographic views that I can jump our viewport into, such as a top view. This is kinda a bird's eye view of things. I've got a left view looking at it from a left angle and you can mouse wheel in and out. A front view. We're seeing the cross, not in the cross side, but more the side, side. And each of these has a hot key associated with it. Now where the grid really comes into play here is you can see these different grid marks. So you may be wondering, well, what size does each of these grid squares represent? Well, that is where we lead into discussion of our different grid sizes right up here. So if I was to click right here where this number five is, I can show different snaps sizes, 1510, etcetera. It's currently set to five, meaning each of these tiny squares represents a five-by-five unreal unit area. Now this is super handy and I'm just going to jump to go to top view. If you're wanting to move components around and you want them to jump certain increments. So I've got this snapping movement Snapping currently set on. That's what this blue represents it over here I'm going to set my snap settings to 100. Now notice that once I do this, the grid size is changed to match. So this is now 100 by 100 as a grid size as opposed to what it was before, which was five by five. So I'm going to change this back to 100. Now let's just say I want it to move my cube horizontal mesh over here, over 100 units by left clicking and dragging it, I simply jump it over 100 units. Now you can see if I move this around in the top view, it is jumping it by increments of 100. And you can see that reflected here in the locational settings. Again, these locational settings are relative to the root. Now, if I wanted to move it in a more smooth fashion, I could turn off the snap settings when it's not blue like that. That means I can move it quite smoothly. But sometimes you do want to move it in very discrete increments. And that's where that really comes in handy. I'm going to set my location here back to 0. And I'll turn my snap settings back on and set it back to five while we're here and talking about all of this. This is probably a good time to talk about our different settings here in our viewport. Currently, I am in the translating objects mode. I can click right here to change this into rotation mode. Like so. You can see right now, let me just jump out here back into perspective view. You can see as I'm rotating this, it is moving it in increments of ten. And it's moving in increments of ten because I have my rotational snap settings on, meaning it is going to move it in increments of ten. And if I was to click right here, I could change what increments. It is going to rotate it by. I like ten degrees, but there are cases for these other ones. I also have scale mode that I can turn this into. So I can go to my scale option. And now if I was to simply grab one of these handles, I'll grab that blue handle right there, which represents the z-axis, the relative z-axis. In this case, you can see how I am adjusting the scale of this. I'm going to set this back to what I had it before, which was 0 points. I think I had it at points 8.8 indeed is what I had it at. So W, E, and R, as you can see in those tooltips, those can jump you into the different modes there, which is the movement mode, rotation mode, and scale mode. Clicking on these buttons will do it as well, but w ENR can jump you into those different movement, rotate and scale modes. However, the spacebar will toggle between all three of them as well. Next, let's talk about our different lighting modes. Currently by default, this is in Lit mode, but if I click on this, I can change this into unlit mode. Again, all of these have hotkeys associated with them. Or wireframe mode. Not too many times I use wireframe or unlit mode, but they are there in case you do need them. What happens if you accidentally close out this tab? It does happen quite often, more often than you think actually. And then students are wondering, Where did it go, how do I get it back? So I'm going to do that right now by closing it out. Well, the way to get it back is simply to come under this window option. And then down below you can click in turn your viewport back on. There are other view-port options here that you can access by right-clicking on it. You can dock it to a sidebar. What that does is it's gonna jump it over here. And so if I was to click on it, I would expand this open. If I pin it, that means I can't get off of it. So if I unpin it, I can right-click it and it will move it back to the sidebar. If I right-click it again, I can undock it. So I can also close it from here, which I did before closing it is the same as clicking on this x. I can close the tab to the right of this meaning of that construction script or the event graph. If I get rid of those guys, oh, they're gone. Those are not found under the window option here. So to get those guys back in the My Blueprint panel, you can double-click on the Event Graph to bring that guy back. You can double-click on the construction script as well to bring on that particular tab. Next up, let's talk about moving around the viewport. If I was to hold down the left mouse button and simply move my mouse around. This. Driving in the viewport. By the way, these are the same control back in your level editor. If you were in your level editor window, left mouse button and moving your mouse around drives. Right mouse button simply looks around here at your level editor, as well as inside of your viewport for your blueprint middle mouse button. And moving your mouse around will simply keep it on the same 2D plane and move it around. Middle mouse button plus, or I should say a middle mouse button or left and right mouse, right mouse buttons together. We'll do the same thing again back in the level editor, middle mouse button, moving it around, left and right mouse buttons together. Moving it around, does the same thing. And then last but not least, is my favorite way to navigate around the viewport, holding down the right mouse button, and then using W, a, S, and D to fly around. Now the speed at which you fly around, let me jump back into my viewport tab of my blueprint that is determined by this guy right up here. Your cameras speed sliders. If you click on this, you can set this up or down. So now I'm gonna fly around super fast. Or if I send it lower, I am flying around super slow. Now one thing to note here, the default is for if you're to fly around and you're using your mouse wheel in and out, scrolling up or down, you can actually modify how fast you are flying around. So that is a good handy trick to know as well. You want things to note before we close out this video, the root components. In this case, I've got the sphere could have collisions set as my root two components. I can not move the root components. You can see I can't really go about selecting it here in my editor outside of simply selecting it in the Components panel, you can select it, but as you can see, I can't change it into translation mode or rotation mode or scale mode. It keeps me in just the select object mode, which is the Q hot key. And you can see over in the Details panel to, I can only scale this. I don't have the option to move or rotate it. Also, I wanted to remind you all of the relational aspect of the Components panel and how that affects moving things around your viewport. If you remember the last video, I added this audio component which is buried inside of my cross here. Let me just move this guy up a little bit because it doesn't really matter where I place it, just that icon right here. I'm going to add this to my cube vertical component. So again, if I was to move my audio component around by itself, it will move independently. But right now it is attached to my Q vertical. Supposed to move that guy around. The audio component is going to come along for the ride. So this relationship is quite powerful. Use that and remember these locational settings, these are relative to the thing that it is attached to. If you don't like this attached relationship, you can just go like this, drag at the top again and it will not indent showing it is not attached to it anymore. The last but not least, do not forget about your snap settings up here in the viewport when you are moving something around, rotating something around or scaling something. And please, please, please don't forget that you can modify your scale snap settings, your rotational snap settings, and your movements snap settings that can save you a lot of time as well. All right guys, that is viewport tab. In a nutshell, hopefully, a lot of those tips and tricks will save you a lot of time. That'll do to offer this one. We will see you in the next video. 8. Details Panel: Welcome back everyone in this video or goals to learn all about the details panel inside of a blueprint. Now, blueprints are composed of all types of things. We've got components. We've got variables which we haven't even talked about yet, but will, and even information about the blueprint itself. Now all of this data, all of this information is set by you inside of the details panel. Now, by default, the Details panel is located over to the right here within your Blueprint editor. Just like any other viewport, you can simply rip it off, left-click, drag it to some other part of your editor window here. Some people like to put it right below their components panel because there's selecting various components and then they like to change the details right down below. I however leg get right where it is. So I'm going to dock it back there. Walla. Why don't we change a few different details about some of our components. And right now I'm eyeballing are two different static mesh components or cube a horizontal and cube vertical. Right now we've got this sort of white cross for a health pickup. I think it'd be nicer if we change it to green. So I'm going to choose my cube, horizontal here, and over in the Details panel, I can change the material that is applied to it. Right now I've got this basic shape material. I can left-click on this and I can choose one of these different types of materials. I liked this basic asset, O3, that's pretty cool. Now, if you're not seeing this, or maybe you want access to more materials. If you click on this little gear icon right here, you can turn on and show engine content. And that's how I'm seeing more materials than you are at first glance here. So if you also have some plug-in content, this is how you can turn that on as well. So showing engine content will review more materials for you. I'm going to use this basic asset O3 to change his green. And I'm gonna do the same for my cube vertical with that selected, changing the material here by clicking on this drop-down and we change it to green. That is all well and good. Now also, maybe I want my sphere collision here surrounding my green cross here to be a little bit bigger, a little bit more of a generous pick-up area, if you will, right over here with a sphere because collision components selected in the Details panel, I can change my sphere radius by clicking on it and punching in a new number like 100 and clicking Enter. Or in these numerical fields, you can simply left-click and drag. Let's see, clicking off with and clicking back on it. And then you can move it left and right to adjust it that way as well. I'm gonna go with the number 100 for now. That seems pretty generous. Now once again, if you mistakenly close out this Details panel by clicking on that there x, you can come under the window option and turn it back on. Now there are different viewing options you should be made aware of. Over in the Details panel, you've got this gear icon. If I click on this, there's a bunch of different options available to you. I'm only going to be talking about a few of the more commonly used ones. One of them being collapsed and expanding all categories. So right now I am going to collapse all the categories. So yeah, now if you want to get into them, you have to click on them one by one. That can be useful if there's only a few different categories you want to fiddle with. I'm going to go on into this again, and I'm going to expand all categories. Another one I like a lot is show modified properties only or show only modified properties. So clicking on this, it's a really easy way to see at a glance what are the things that you've actually changed about this particular component? I'm going to turn that one backoff. Then show all advanced properties. Now what are Advanced Properties under each of these given categories? I shouldn't say each but many of them there are advanced properties that by default aren't expanded upon. So for example, I've got my shape and I can change my shape color if you will. Let me just click off of this. By default, it's red. But if I was to click back on my sphere collision under the advanced category, I could change this to hot pink if I really wanted to. Sure, why. Nuts. Now there's also this little, I don't know what you call that. A little bit of a notepad type of icon. This will open a selection in property matrix. What is this now this is an option I do not use too frequently. However, if I was to click on this, it's going to bring open a new tab here. This is another way to go about changing different properties. Again, everything is collapsed here, but if there's something that you wanted to change about it, you could simply pin it. I'm going to pin this option right now. Does generate overlap events. You can see that this is checked if I was to uncheck it here and then go back into my b p example pickup under sphere collision. Under the collision properties does generate overlap events is no longer checked. I'm gonna change that back to where I had it and I'm going to close out of here. I just wanted to show what that is. I don't use that too often. You may find some good use for it. And then you can see here with vacuum I sphere collision, I can see that generate overlap event has been checked back on. Now along the top on our toolbar, we've got this class default option that I wanted to make you aware of. I'm going to click on this and when I do, I'm going to bring on a whole set of different details about this actor class blueprint that are specific to this actor class blueprint. Now there's not a lot that you need to change in here, although I will make you aware of one that's kind of fun to play around with. And that is with class default selected initial life span is currently set to 0, which means infinite. But if I was to set this to something like three, that means this guy is going to go away after three seconds. And I can prove this by simply clicking the play button here. And that's going to jump into my level editor here by playing in after three seconds. They all go by, by kind of fun if I do say so myself. So I'm going to change this class defaults my initial lifespan back to 0. So again, these impacts certain things about this particular class of blueprint, the class defaults. Next, I just wanted to make you aware of the button over here, this class settings option. Later on in the course, we're gonna be dealing with something called a Blueprint Interface. And that's going to get all set up in this area. Nothing else I want to change in here. In fact, you don't deal with class settings too much outside of implementing things called a Blueprint Interface. But I just wanted to bring that up now. So later on down the course, you'll be like, I know exactly where to go and what that is. Alright guys, that is the Details panel. Know it, love it, make good use of it. That'll do it all for this video. See you in the next one. 9. My Blueprint Panel: Welcome back everyone. In this video, our goal is to learn what the purpose of the My Blueprint panel is within an Unreal Engine blueprint. Now this is an area of a blueprint where you can create things like variables, like functions or macros to help shape what a given blueprint can do. Now if you're unfamiliar with terms like variables, functions, or macros, don't worry. We're gonna be breaking those down much further later on in the course. For now, it's just good to file away knowledge that the my blueprints panel here is where such things can be created. So as you see here in my BP example, pick up the blueprints panel, by default is located in the lower left-hand corner of the interface, just like any other tab here, you can left-click on this and you can drag it around to wherever you like. I like it where it is by default. So I'm going to leave it right there. Just like other tabs here, you can right-click on it. You can close it out. You can bring it back on via the window option here, checkmark shows that it is in our blueprint here. No check mark means that it is not present. So I'm going to bring that back on. Right-click options here. I could hide the tab. That'll just kinda barrier that tab gives you a little bit more screen real estate that oddly comes in handy from time-to-time. Left clicking on it will bring that tab back. Right-click. I can dock to the sidebar like I could before. Right-click on dark as well. You've seen me do that several times. Alright, another option I want to point out here in the My Blueprint panels, this gear icon. Now if I click on this, it shows me various options showing empty sections I have on here. What this does is it'll show any empty section, any empty category. Right now, I have no macros in my blueprint here. If you don't know what that is, again, don't worry about it, but just know that if I was to turn this off, I wouldn't even see that category. So by showing this and I like to have it shown by default, I will see all the different empty sections that we may have under the blueprints category. Another important one to point out here under this gear icon is this show inherited variables. Now this is gonna show inherited variables from parent classes. Now, in our case, our parent class here is an actor class blueprint. So I'm going to show this quickly. And when I do, you're going to see some categories appear right down here. So here we go. We're going to show inherited variables. And I'm going to drill down into my actor category here. And what do you know? I see a variable called initial lifespan. Well, that looks rather familiar. So what are all of these variables in these various categories? Well, if you remember from last video, when we clicked on our class defaults button, we have a lot of different parameters, a lot of different properties that are specific to this actor class blueprint. And one of these located under the actor class blueprint category was initial lifespan. Lo and behold, that can be accessed in here, the my blueprints panel as well. We show inherited variables. So this is another way of having all of these class default variables show up, not just when you click in class defaults, but over here in the My Blueprint panel. And I just want to point out here that if I was to click on the initial lifespan variable and go over to the Details panel. I can change my initial lifespan to S3. Now if I was to go into the class defaults and find the actor category initial lifespan. It's set it to three here as well. So you're changing the same property, just two different ways to go about doing it. I'm going to reset this back to where I had it. And note now that while I changed it here in the class default section, if I was to click on my initial lifespan property, it changes it back here as well. Alright, let's hide those out back again so we can clean up our My Blueprint panel here a little bit. So show inherited variables. Nope. Let's talk about how to create new variables, functions, or macros. We can also create new graphs and event dispatchers, but those will have their own sections later on in the course. If we click this Add button, it says you want to create a variable, a function, a macro, a graph and Event Dispatcher. You can do it that way or with each of these different categories here you've got this little plus button to create a new graph, a new function, a new macro, or a new variable, or an Event Dispatcher. Let's go ahead and create a variable here. Even though that's not what this video is all about, variables will have its own a couple of sections here. We're going to create one just to give you a sense of what this whole my blueprint area does, I'm going to create a new variable by clicking on this plus button. I'm gonna give this a name and call it hiccup. Sound like so. Now next I need to decide what type of blue or what type of variable I want this to be. By default, it usually shows Boolean when you are creating a variable for the very first time. Or it'll set the default variable type to be whatever you last created. Now before I created this video, I did a dry run and so it's currently set to the variable type that I'm looking for. So how do you change this? We can click right here to change it. Or with his variable selected over in the Details panel, you can change it over here as well. So under variable type, click this drop-down and do a search for sound base. In the little fly-out menu here you want to choose the object reference. Now in doing this, it will prompt you to compile your blueprint. Again, it's showing my default value here because I already did a dry run prior to the video. But if you compile here, it will then allow you to slot in a sound of your choosing, clicking on this drop-down. I like the interplay sound. So if you do a search for enter, play, and mouse over that particular sound wave file, it shows in that little pop up that appears that this comes from the engine path. And once again, if you don't see this sound, if you click over on this gear icon, you can show engine content and you should have access to that sound. Now you could really slot in any sound here. This is just the one that I chose. So feel free to slot in the sound that you want. Now we're not going to make use of this variable just yet. That's going to come in the next video when we talk about our Event Graph. But just to summarize here, the My Blueprint panel, this is where you house, where you create things like functions, things like macros, things like variables, and where to access those things. Last thing before we wrap up this video, you may have already notice that all of our different components up here in the Components panel, they are also displaying down here in the variable section. And this is a quick and easy way that we can add a reference to each of these different components into our event graph. But again, we're gonna be making use of that in future videos. For now, I just wanted to point out the relationship between components added to your blueprint, also showing up under the variables section of the My Blueprint panel. That will do it all for this video, guys, we will see you in the next one. 10. Event Graph: Welcome back everyone. In this video, our goal is to learn about and demonstrate what the Event Graph is inside of an unreal blueprint. Now this is an area of a blueprint where all of our scripting magic happens anytime we want to add some kind of behavior, functionality or gameplay. The place to make those interactions come alive is inside the event graph. So here inside of my BP example pickup, we've already explored the viewport tab, Construction Script tab we will talk about soon. The Event Graph tab is the one we're going to make the star of the show in this one. So let me left-click on this. And what you see is a graph that has a few nodes here. By default, these are event nodes of which we can build some script off of. We'll talk about event nodes in their own section. But for now what I wanna do is I just want to left-click drag and I'm going to drag out this box known as a marquee selection. And I'm going to hit the delete key once all of those are highlighted and Newcomb out. Bye-bye. We're going to create our own script here. Alright, so the first thing we wanna do is add some nodes to our graph. So how do we do this? Well, there's actually several different methods and how to go about doing this. The first is by right-clicking in a graph. If you right-click, you've got a whole bunch of different categories. And in each of these different categories, there are different functions that you can add. There are different events that you can add, et cetera. I'm just going to choose Event Begin Play here. That's one that you saw here before. And voila, you've got yourself a node. I'm going to nuke that out. I'm going to actually add one now that we want in our graph, I'm going to choose our sphere collision component up here in the Components panel. Now I'm just going to jump over to the viewport tab quickly. The sphere collision is this invisible sphere surrounding our cross here. So I want to do something with our sphere collision. I want to have some node associated with that. So going back over to my Event Graph with this sphere collision selected, I'm going to right-click in my graph and note this checkbox right up here. It's context sensitive. So it's going to show me some nodes that are specific to my sphere collision and they're listed at the top here. One of them that I'm going to be adding now is under this Add event for sphere collision category. So I'm going to click this drop-down box and under the collision section, I want to add on components begin overlap. Now this node is going to fire out a signal when something begins overlapping it. And it can output some data here depending on what overlapped this particular component. Now one piece of information I want to find when something overlaps are sphere collision was who was the other actor? So I'm going to drag a wire out of here, and I'm going to type in cast to third person character. Now, we haven't learned about casting yet, but long story short, we will, this node is going to allow us to check, hey, was the other actor that overlap this sphere collision, was that the ThirdPersonCharacter? If it is, we're going to continue our flow of execution here. Out of this events through this node, continue on through here. This is a bunch of wires and nodes that we're linking together to make stuff happen. If it was not the ThirdPersonCharacter that overlap this fear collision, this cast would fail and the flow of execution would continue out of here. So that's another way that you can add a node is to simply pull a wire out of one of these colored pins here. And we'll talk about these different colored pins in future videos and then search for a given node. The third way that we can add a node to our graph here is to drag and drop. We can drag and drop a components. And I could do it here from either the Components panel or from the variables section of the, My Blueprint panel. Now, I'm going to do both just because it's fun to demonstrate both ways. But the first thing I'm gonna do is I'm going to drag and drop, left-click and drag this pick-up sound into our graph. It's going to ask me, do I want to get this or do I want to set this? Well, I want to get the contents of this variable. The contents of this variable or this begin play there, sorry, this interplay sound that's associated with it. I'm gonna get it. And then I'm going to drag off of this node and I'm going to type in play sound. You see, I knew that this variable contained a sound inside. It contains this interplay sound. So all I'm doing here is I'm saying, Hey variable, I want to play what sound that you have inside of you. That's what this function node does right here. Now this won't happen unless I link up this execution wire to this play sound function node. Alright, so that's one way to drag and drop is directly from the, My Blueprint panel. Now another thing I wanna do, and this is gonna be just for demonstration purposes, is I'm going to drag a component out of here. Let me drag in something visual like the cube horizontal, left-click and drag. And then I'm going to drag out of my cube horizontal and simply typing destroy. I'm going to destroy this components when our ThirdPersonCharacter overlaps are sphere. So that's how to read this particular script right now, upon overlapping our sphere, we're going to find out who the other actor was. We're going to cast to our ThirdPersonCharacter, basically find out, hey, was it the ThirdPersonCharacter that overlapped us? If it was, we're going to continue with our flow of execution here by playing the sound. And then we're going to just destroy just the cube horizontal component. Let's go ahead and play test this. I'm going to click on this Play button right up here. And I'm going to move this off to the side here because I want you to be able to not only see me play the game, but also view the execution of this script as well. Now currently I've got access to my window here, but I want to do is hit Shift in F1 to bring my mouse cursor back up to my editor. Now right up here I've got my BP example pickup. I can click on this and you can see I've got what amounts to 12345 different instances of this pickup in my graph. So this is only going to show this for whatever particular instance I have selected here. So I'm gonna go with BP example pickup, the first one. And now if I bring this window back on, you'll see this flow of execution pulse out of this event node through the rest of these nodes whenever I overlap this specific instance of this pickup. So let's see this first one here. So that was a one to show the flow of execution right up above. And as you can see, it just destroyed that one component didn't destroy everything. Alright. I overlap that one. Again, it destroyed the component, but you're not seeing the flow of execution of above. Sweet, so it is currently working. Now, I want to take this a little bit further here, and we can ignore this error here because what we just built here was just temporary. So I'm going to click this X button. So wanted to take this a bit further here by destroying this destroy component and the heat and the cube horizontal. Because that's not truly what I wanted to do here. Instead, what I wanna do is I wanted to destroy the whole actor when we collect this. So I'm going to drag off of my play sound 2D, and I'm going to simply type in Destroy Actor. Now the target of this particular node is itself, meaning this entire blueprint. So upon overlapping this sphere collision, we're going to find out if it was a third-person character that was the other actor that overlap this sphere collision. We're gonna play this sound and then we're going to destroy our actor. Fun factor this place down to D. You can click on this to modify some properties about this, such as the volume multiplier can set that to two. For example, let's go ahead and play this once again. Now this should destroy the whole actor when we overlap it. And let's make this a little bit bigger here, like so. And here we go. Sweet. Alright, with a little bit of script built here, let's talk about navigating the event graph. Here, the scroll wheel in the Event Graph will zoom in and out. Left mouse button plus right mouse button will also zoom in and out. So I've got both of those down and I'm just moving my mouse up and down. You can see the zoom level in the upper right. By the way. If I right mouse button and drag that'll pan around. It kinda gives me this hand icon to move it around like so, left mouse button and drag, left-click and drag like. So. That'll bring on this marquee selection, which is great for highlighting a whole selection of nodes like that. Fun fact here, something you can do with the whole script like this added is tap the C key to add a comment box around this. And I'll just call this my pickup script. That helps keep things nice and organized. So if you're zooming way out like this, you can see all of your different scripts that you've written here. Left mouse button on a No, that'll allows you to select it so you can then move it around like so. Right mouse button on a node will bring up a content sensitive menu. Some options here that I really liked to explore. These alignment options, these are great and they work like anything you might find in PowerPoint or Google Slides for aligning nodes, getting them light, left justified, right justified. I love these, especially this straightened connections. One is one of my favorites. What else we have here? We've got alt plus left mouse button is how you can cut wires. So as you can see, we've got this unbroken flow of execution. When this event happens, a pulse flows through these execution pins right up here, holding down the Alt key and left clicking on a wire will break it. So right now if I was to play the game, I would actually play the sound but not destroy the actor because the flow of execution through these execution pans has not gotten here. Alright, Control plus left mouse button will move wires. So let's just say I had, I'm just going to right-click and duplicate my Destroy Actor node. Let's just say that this was some other function down here. And I wanted to move this wire. You don't have to break it like this and then rewire it like this. If you hold down Control, you can left-click and pick up that wire and move it to another node. That's a very handy trick as well. Use that one a lot. It's something to point out here when breaking wires, you don't have to just, you know, Alt and left-click on the middle. You can also Alt and left-click on either one of these execution pins as well. So there you have it. That's some quick navigational stuff for your event graph. One more thing I want to point out here with the event graphs because it's always happens to students. Eventually, if you close out your Event Graph Tab, boom, it's gone. You cannot find it in the window option right up here. How do you get this back then? Well, that is contained in the My Blueprint panel here we've got this event graph. And if I was to double-click on this event graph under our graph section, that'll bring it right back on. Also, this is good to note as well. It'll list out any events that are inside of your event graph. So let me just right-click and add and events Begin Play. You can see as I add this to my graph, it shows it down here under my Event Graph as well. So if I was summer out yonder and I double-clicked on event begin playing, it would jump me to it. I also have the ability to create a new graph. Now let me just do this quickly by clicking on new graph, and I'll call this new graph. Now I've got two different graphs. Both of these are event graphs. One is called event graph, the other is called new graph. Why would you ever do this? Well, I do this sometimes simply to better organize my scripts. Depending on how much script you want to add to a blueprint, it may make sense to have a graph that is very specific to say, input events versus just very passive things that can happen to that blueprint. So some organizational things to keep in mind as you're building out your various blueprints. Alright guys, that's a quick rundown on the Event Graph. Any blueprints. 11. Construction Script: Welcome everyone. In this video, our goal is to get a high level understanding of what the Construction Script is inside of a blueprint. That is, this tab right up here sandwiched between our viewport and Event Graph tabs. Now at first glance, it's going to seem almost identical to the Event Graph. So right now I'm on the Event Graph tab of our bp example pickup. You can see that there are nodes wired together. Over in our Construction Script. Currently we have one node, but just like an event graph, we can wire other nodes up to it. Now, whereas the Event Graph is the place meant to create script that will execute while your game is running. The construction script is a place to create script that you want to run before the game starts up while you're constructing your blueprint. Now look, construction script is great for building construction variety into your scripts, as well as creating procedural actors for you to work with. What you see before you is a sneak peek of what's to come throughout the rest of this video. This wall right here is an actor class blueprints that is only utilizing, taking advantage of the construction script. Now, what makes a construction scripts so cool is that you can expose a few parameters in your details panel. And just by changing a few of those parameters that you've exposed, you can modify the look of this particular instance of the blueprint. Now, as you can see, as I alter some properties here, the script down below is firing off. Once again, what makes it Construction Script different from the Event Graph is the construction script fires whenever I make any change at all to this blueprint, it could even be simply moving it watches I move this. You're going to see a pulse throughout the construction script down below here. Now it also makes this cool, is if I create a copy of this blueprint, I'm going to Alt, left-click and drag. I can change the parameters for this particular instance. So let me change the number of sections here to something like ten. And I can change out the material to be, let's just type in the word brick. And so this can have a unique material all its own. So the construction script is where he can make something like this happen. Now think of the possibilities with just how I have this construction script set up. This is just a simple wall. This could be a row of chairs, it could be a fence. It could be a bunch of electric poles with wires strung between them, that sort of thing. Alright, we're gonna get started here inside of our content browser, specifically within the scripting folder of our content browser. I'm going to right-click in some empty space over here. Am I right-click menu? I want to create a new blueprint. We want this to be of the actor class variety because this is going to be a blueprint that we place within the world. It's going to prompt me to give it a name. I will call this BP underscore example. How about just eggs? Construct script, that's a very abbreviated name, but I kinda wanted it to fit all on one line here, not wrap around x construct script. Awesome. Going to double-click on this to open it up right away. Then docket across the top, like I like to do. Now, we're going to be adding one component to this blueprints. I'm going to come under the add button and I'm going to type in static mesh. Just static will whittle it down. Now, unlike before where we added a static mesh component, in this case we want to add an instance Static Mesh component. And the reason for that is because we're going to be building out any number of wall sections. And in order to do that efficiently for the type of script that we're about to be building, we want an instance static mesh as a tool tip tells you this is how to render it efficiently. So let's add an instance Static Mesh. I'm going to hit Enter here with that component is selected over in the Details panel we can slot in a static mesh. I'm going to click this drop-down here. Type in the number 400 because this section of wall that I want to associate with this component is wall 400 by 400. Go ahead and choose that. Now as you can see, we don't see anything in our viewport yet. We're gonna make use of this in a different way here inside of our construction scripts. So let's hop on over there. Now. The main takeaway I want you to understand, at least for this, is what the construction script can do. For building out a very dynamic blueprints. You can customize your blueprints in an awesome way while you're building out your level. Now the script that we're going to be putting together right now, it's okay if you don't understand at all what's happening, we're going to be breaking down these scripting concepts as we go throughout the course. My goal in this video is to simply build the thing so you can get an idea of what the construction script can do. So bear with me on this. We're going to start off by creating a variable here. Click on this plus button. We're going to call this variable num of. Sections, we're going to use this variable of which we will change this to an integer type to hold how many sections of wall we would like for this blueprint degenerate. We can give this a default value over in the Details panel, but it's asking us to compile the Blueprint first. I'm gonna go ahead and do that. Let's start off with a default value of one section of wall. That's nice. Now I want to point out something else here. We can expose these variables to our editor if we check this instance editable checkbox here. But before we do that, I need to actually place this blueprint inside of our level. So let me jump back to my level test map tab that brings me back to the main editor. Let me drag and drop this example construction script to our level. All we see is that root component icon. Now over in the Details panel, if I do a search for just numb, remember our given variable here was called number of sections. I don't see anything. I'm gonna leave this search right up here for the moment. I'm going to jump back into my example construction script here. Let's go ahead and check this instance editable box right here. Note that when I do that, this is the same thing as clicking right here. Closing this eyeball means not instance editable. Clicking to open it up, checks that box. So you can check this box either by clicking here or clicking right there. Now if I compile, save this blueprint, and I go back to my level editor with my example Construction Script selected here in the level over in the Details panel. I've now expose this variable to the level editor. This is going to be awesome because we're going to be able to punch in a number here. And then it Construction Script is going to determine how many sections of wall we want to appear. Pretty sweet. Alright, let's go ahead and build out that script. Back here. In the construction script. I'm going to drag out a wire. I'm gonna do a search for a for loop. And again, I'm gonna be going through this a little bit quickly. So if you don't understand what's all happening, That's quite alright and just wanting to show off the power of the construction script here. Now with this, I'm going to feed this are a number of sections dragging and drop that into the graph. I want to get it. Then I'm going to drag off of this and I'm going to type the minus key. I want to subtract node, and I'm going to subtract the number one. And I'll explain why once we're finished with all of this. And I'm going to plug this into our last index of the for-loop. So yes, please allow me to build this out first and then go back through and describe exactly what is happening. Now off of this, the loop body I'm going to drag off of this. Well actually first I need to bring into our instance Static Mesh reference. Let's go ahead and drag and drop this from our components panel right into our graph. Alternatively, I could get it down here as well. I'm going to drag off of this and I'm going to type in AD instance. So this is going to be the know that's going to actually add a section of wall here. It's contained within this instance static mesh to our world. We're going to take our loop body and plug it into here. Next, I'm going to pull off of our index from our for-loop. I'm going to bring in a multiply button or multiply node rather, I want to multiply this by 400. There's a very specific reason that I'm choosing the number 400 here. That's so happens to be the exact length of our static mesh here. In fact, if I click on this mouse over it, there you can see in the tool tip the size of this, about the middle of that box there, the approximate size is 400 by 20 by 400. So it's 400 unreal units wide, 20 units thick, 400 units tall. So that's a very specific reason why I'm choosing this number here, because I'm going to be adding a given number of sections every 400 unreal units. Next I'm going to pull backwards off of this instance transform pin. And once I release and going to type in the word make transform, gives us a little bit more space here. Move this over into position like so. And then off of the location pin right here, I'm going to left-click and drag and type in, make Vector right down here, make vector. And I'm going to plug this into our x. And it's going to bring in a conversion node, converting one datatype integer to a float. So that's going to be fine. So now let's talk through what we've got going on here. What's going to happen is we're going to feed in a given number of sections. And remember this variable is exposed in the editor, so we'll be able to determine how many sections we want. So let's just assume we want ten sections. We're going to loop through however many of sections that we have here, starting with our first index. It starts off with the number of 0. If I have ten and I minus one, That's going to equal nine. So our first index is going to be 0. Our last one is nine. So essentially that's going to give us ten iterations of this loop. Again, starting with 0, ending with nine. That's why we're doing this subtraction right here by putting in ten, subtracting one that equals nine. But we are starting counting at 0. So it's going to run this ten times. It's going to execute out of this loop body ten times. It's going to add ten instances of this Static Mesh. Now all of this down here is determining where to place the static meshes. Essentially what we're doing is for every index, we're going to move it on over 400 unreal units in the x-direction. That's essentially what this bit of script is doing right here. Now anytime you build out some script, whether it's in the construction script or the Event Graph, you want to compile. Doing this, we'll check your script to make sure that you haven't made any errors. It's not going to catch all errors, but it's going to catch a lot of errors. And then you want to save this out. Now let's jump back into our level here. And what we see right now is we have one section of wall. That's all well and good. Let me just raise this up. Hit the End key, and that'll smack it on down to the floor. And that's pretty cool. What happens now if I change the number of sections to two? What do you know what adds another section? 3410. Now we've got ten sections of wall now that's a rather bland looking while, but you can see what the Construction Script has allowed us to do. It's a lot us to make a blueprint that is very customizable by just changing one value here, we're changing what happens with this blueprint, one place inside of your level. Now let's take this one step forward because this is a rather bland looking wall, if I do say so myself. So let's extend our script down a little bit more. So come inside of our construction script. And I'm just going to zoom out a little bit. And I'm going to drag out another copy of our instance static mesh here. Drag out a copy. I'm going to place it right here. And then I'm going to drag out a here and type in a set material. Set material. Our instance static mesh will be the target. And let's keep our execution going here. And off of our material here, I can right-click and I can promote this to a variable. When I do that variable is going to appear in our variables section. This is going to be a material and I'm going to feed this the name new material. And I'm going to click this box to make this instance editable. I'm also going to need to make this editable so we can change this over in the editor. Let's give us a new material right here. We can feed it a new material I will choose. Let's try. I'm just going to type in brick. You can change this to whatever you want. I'll choose brick clay. Sure. Compile, save that is our current script. And now if I jump back into our level editor here, you can see that clay material is placed on every section of wall. However, however, I don't see it in the editor because I am currently filtering by the word numb. So let me undo that filter right there at the very top, I can see the two variables I've now exposed to the editor. Let me change my new material to something else. Let's go to Chrome and wallah. We've got ourselves a Chrome wall. This is how you make blueprints that are very extendable, if you will, during design time. So once again, the construction script is there to give your designers, your level designers, if you will, great power and flexibility about the blueprints that they placed in your levels and how they can customize them. Imagine if you will, if you had a blueprint that was simply a light, a lamp, if you will, in a room. And maybe you expose the color of the light like we did here in our example, right here in the editor. We can make it so that for every lamp blueprint that we placed in the level, we could change the color of that via the construction script. So there you have it, guys, that is the power of the construction script. Inside of a blueprint. They'll do to offer this one. We'll see you in the next one. 12. Class Blueprints: Welcome back everyone. In this video, our goal is to learn about some of the different blueprint types in Unreal, starting with something known as a Class Blueprint. Now the reason we want to learn about different blueprint types is because different types serve different purposes. Additionally, the interface and the way you go about working with that blueprint can differ slightly depending on what it is you're working on. Now, let's use our bp example pickup here. Take a look at this really quickly. In the upper right. Once again, it shows that this is an actor class blueprint that is known as the parent class. It is under the Class Blueprint umbrella. Again, there are many types of class blueprints. So what makes a Class Blueprint a Class Blueprint? Well, you can think of a Class Blueprint or blueprint for short, as a type of asset template. As a template that you can easily add functionality or components to make it your own. Now, right next to this tab here I've got my BPA ThirdPersonCharacter. And inside of this character class Blueprint, I've got a few different components that came automatically from the creation of this character class blueprint, namely the Capsule Component, the arrow, the mesh, and the Character Movement Component. However, if I wanted to, I could customize this and make it my own. I can add more components. I could swap out, say, the look of this mesh in the Event Graph. I could change out all of this script at the fine folks at Epic Games provided. And I could create something completely different to have my character move in the manner that I wanted it to move. That's what makes class blueprints so powerful. They provide you the template and from there, you can make it what you want to make it. Now how do we go about creating these class blueprints? Well, there's a couple of methods. One you've already seen me do. In the Content Browser, you can right-click and some empty space come under Blueprint Class. And there it allows you to pick a parent class. These are all different types of class blueprints. The most common ones listed up top, the less common ones down below. There are many. We're going to explore several of the most common types throughout this course. But know that there's many, many, many types. So this is one way you can get at this class blueprint picker. The other way is right along the top here with this little Node Icon, the blueprint icon, if you will, you can choose this, come under new empty Blueprint Class. And clicking on this will bring up that same choosing your parent class option. Now once again, the parent provides us with the starting templates. So I'm gonna go ahead and create a character here. And I'm going to call this my temp character, like so. And I'm going to double-click on this to open it up. We're going to compare and contrast this with our existing BP ThirdPersonCharacter. As you can see across the top in the far upper right, it says the parent class is character. And some of the commonalities that you'll see between this and the third-person character is I've got a capsule component in error component, a mesh, any character movement component. These four can also be found in our ThirdPersonCharacter component, capsule, arrow, mesh, and character movement. Now one of the key differences between the ThirdPersonCharacter and our temp character is the mesh here is populated with a Skeletal Mesh. However, in my temp character, I could define this and make it whatever I want to. I could choose whichever Skeletal Mesh I wanted to. It's blank by default. You'll also notice that here with our blank character template here, I've gotten nothing in the Event Graph that defines my temp character's movement. However, in the ThirdPersonCharacter, the fine folks at Epic Games have already given this to work with. So once again, our character class pooper, they provide the blueprint for how to create a character by providing us these components, however, the rest of it is up to us. We can customize it by adding new components, customizing the script to make it move a certain way, you get the point. Next, I wanted to give a few ways for you to easily identify. Are you working inside of a class blueprint or a Level Blueprint level blueprints are gonna be talked about in the next video. Number one, in the upper right of a Class Blueprint, it will list a parent class Level. Blueprints will not. Number two. Class blueprints have a Components panel Level Blueprints do not. Number three in the Event Graph Tab class blueprints in lower-right was simply say blueprint as opposed to Level Blueprints, saying Level Blueprint. So some quick tips there. I've got a lot of beginning students that sometimes are confused where they're working in. Why don't they see the Components panel, that kind of thing. So those things hopefully will help some of you out there. Lastly, want to talk about some of the common class blueprints here. So right-clicking and some empty space Blueprint Class. After class blueprint. This is the one you want to choose when it is something that you are going to place or spawn in your level. By that, I should say, something that isn't a character or a pawn. A character blueprint is a pawn. It extends from the Pawn Class, actually, you can move it around. And one of the great things about a character class blueprint is it comes pre-built with a Character Movement Component that gives you control over things like how fast your character moves, how high they jump, that kind of thing you can possess and control a character class, blueprint, Game Mode, blueprints Game Mode base, if you will. This is a primary place to store scripted rules of your game. It can determine things like scoring, time limits of that sort of thing will work on one of those later on in the course. Alright guys, that's gonna do it. That is the class blueprint upcoming next, the Level Blueprint. See you there. 13. Level Blueprints: Welcome back everyone. In this video, our goal is to learn what a Level Blueprint is, how to access it, things it's used for, and how it differs from a Class Blueprint. So what is a Level Blueprint? Well, it's the blueprint associated specifically with a given level. In our case, it would be the blueprint associated with our test map level. Now how do we access it? Well, right along the top here with this little blueprint E-type icon, click on this drop-down and right smack dab in the middle here we've got this open Level Blueprint option. Simply clicking on this will open up our Level Blueprint tab. However, before I do this, I want to show you a quick tip here because if I were to click on this right now, it would open it up in this separate window. I like to have my windows open right along the top here along the main window. So I'm going to show you quickly how to do that. Right now. I'm going to come under Edit editor preferences in our editor preferences window. Right here we've got the option under general appearances category right here. Asset Editor, open location is currently set to default. I'm going to set this to be main window, and then I'm going to close this out. So now when I tried to access my level blueprint right here, open Level Blueprint, bam, it puts it right across the top here, instead of me having to drag and drop this tab right along the top, like, I like it. Now I'm going to also drag and move this right next to my level map tab itself. So notice something here quickly, the orange icon of the mountain that represents the level itself, the level of yourself you're working on. This has the exact same name to it, but it's got this blue mountain icon that is the blueprint associated with it. It is the Level Blueprint. So quickly before we talk about what this Level Blueprint is used for, how can we tell that this is different from a Class Blueprint? Well, for starters here, down at the very bottom, it obviously says, Hey, Level Blueprint. Another way we can tell that this is different from a Class Blueprint is there's no Components panel are BP example pickup here had a Components panel. Our Level Blueprint does not. Also notice that our Level Blueprint does not have a Construction Script or viewport tab are other blueprints up here to the ThirdPersonCharacter and our BP example pickup. Both of those have it as well. Also in our Level Blueprint, if we look along the upper right, there is no parent class listed. And thus because it does not inherit from a parent class, there's no inherited components or variables. So in this level blueprint, what is it used for? Well, the Level Blueprint is where you would put script for level specific things such as level music. Maybe this level you only want that one selection of music play in just in this level, nowhere else. This is where you could script for that level music to play. Maybe you've got a specific one-off events specific to this level, such as player passing down a corridor. In this level, they overlap a trigger volume and it causes zombie to break through a window and scare the player. That's very level specific things that script should go inside of a level blueprint. Contrast this with say our bp example pickup. Now, jumping back to our level editor here are BP example pickup. This is an actor class blueprint. You can drag and drop this throughout this level. And if I were to play my game, I can go ahead and run over these faux health pickups and collect them. Now, it doesn't matter if I drag and drop these inside of my test map level, or I can create a second level, a third level of fourth level, et cetera. This pickup is going to behave the same way. Thus, I created this script inside of our bp example pickup that checks to see if our ThirdPersonCharacter overlap the sphere, plays a sound and destroy as an actor, this script is specific to this actor, and this actor can be placed in any level. So the Level Blueprint is where you put various levels specific script. Now, one of the benefits of working in the Level Blueprint is it's really easy to get a reference or add an event for an actor that already exist in your level. This is something that is not as easy to do inside of another class blueprint like an actor class blueprint. And just to demonstrate this quickly, I'm going to jump back to my level editor here. And I'm going to come under my Ad Content tab here. And I'm going to add a shape. We're just going to add a cube. So I'm going to left-click and drag out a cube into my level, just going to raise it up into the air a little bit. Notice that I have it selected. This yellow outline shows that I haven't selected. And if I look at my outliner, this is currently known as the cube actor, that is the name. Now I'm going to jump back into my Level Blueprint with this selected. And with that selected, all I need to do is hold down the R key and left-click. Or alternatively, I can right-click and right here I can create a reference to that cube. So this is the right-click method. If I hold down Alt and left-click. That's the same thing, getting a reference to that cube. Now note if I was to try something like that inside of my BP example pickup here, let's jump inside of this event graph. If I hold down the Alt key and I left-click, it has no idea what you're trying to reference here. In fact, if I right-click, it's like I have no idea what you're trying to reference now, this is not to say we can't get a reference to that specific cube inside of our bp example pickup, but there's other methods to do that and we can explore that stuff later on in the course. But this is just a quick example of one of the benefits of working in the Level Blueprint is it's really easy inside of a Level Blueprint to get a reference to anything that already exists inside of your level. Alright, let's create a quick script here inside of our level blueprint. We've got our cube already selected in the level. So I'm going to right-click and some empty space here. And instead of creating a reference to our queue because we've already got one, we're going to add an event. Now, it says you're at event for static mesh actor to instead of cubed currently y Static Mesh actor to well, to make this clear back in our level, in our outliner, the floor, the default floor, that is a static mesh actor type. This was a second Static Mesh actor that we added to our level. Thus, it is considering it Static Mesh actor too. So just wanted to make that clear. Alright, with that cube selected, right-click at event for static mesh actor two, we're going to add an event for when we hit this actor. So go ahead and add this. This will be a real simple script. We're not going to check who hit it. We're going to have this thing floating in the air. So I'm going to drag off of this and just type in plays sound to D. You can slot in any sound that you like. However like to hear things explode. So I'm going to check to see if there is an explosion in here. There it is explosion. Feel free to put it in whenever you like. And then after this, I'm going to drag out of my cube because I want to talk specifically to this cube. And I want to say Destroy Actor. So this is a script specific inside of this level blueprint. If I were to place just this cube into another level, it wouldn't destroy it like we're about to see, because that script exists only inside of this Level Blueprint. So let's go ahead and play here. And bam, little delayed explosion there. But a way, a way it goes that indeed does work. Let's run through another example here showing what the Level Blueprint might be used for. It can be used for something like kicking off playing of music. So jumping back into this Level Blueprint, Let's go ahead and build off of this event began play here. I'm simply going to drag off type in play sound 2D. A 2D sound is one that is not localized to any spot in a 3D space. It's simply like great for menu music, background music, that sort of thing in our sound drop-down here I'm going to type in the word music, and I'm gonna do our starter music here that is in the Starter Content Pack. Feel free to slot it in wherever you want. And if I go ahead and play wallah, you've got some music. So once again, these scripts work in this level and this level only if I create a second level, I've gotta decide which in this case, menu music I want to play, and what other one-off interactions I may want to script as well. So up until this point in this video, I have shown you a one-level blueprint associated with a single level. So the question may come, can I have multiple low blueprints? The answer to that is yeah, essentially you can see how well, if I come under my Windows option in the main level editor here, I can find this option four levels. And when I open this, I'm going to open a levels tab. Now, I like to dock this right next to my outliner. And what I can do here is I could add a brand new level, essentially a sub-level, a layer, if you will, to this existing level. Currently, it shows that I have one level here known as my persistent level. And this blue coloring shows that this is the level that I'm working with him. Come under this levels tab and its levels dropped down right here, I can create a new level. So I'm gonna go ahead and do that now. It's going to prompt me to choose a new level and give it a name. I'm going to choose an empty level here. We're going to create this. And it's going to say, where do you want to save it. So I'm gonna give this the name of sub underscore level, underscore 01. I'm going to how's it into this folder right now, but I'm going to start housing these things into separate sub-folders in just a little bit here, let me get rid of that capital U there. Sublevel one, we're going to save this out. Now you see that this has added a level to my levels tab here. Think of a sub-level like a layer in Photoshop. It's just an additional layer of stuff, actors, objects, what have you that you can add to your level? Dev teams will often dedicate an entire sub-level to lighting, for example. So that a lighting specialists can focus on just the lighting aspect of the level. And it's really easy for that person to have sole access to that one is sublevel and make edits to it without interrupting the rest of the dev team working on that level. So if we're making a Massive Open world, we can have multiple sublevels here. Maybe someone's responsible for sculpting that massive open world. Maybe there's a sub-level for all the foliage and other sublevel for lighting and other sublevel for effects, that kind of thing. As you can see here, when we created this as sub-level, it made our sub-level blue emitted the current level that we're working within. What does that mean to make it current? Well, that means any actor we were to add to this level now what actually add it to our sub-level, our sub-level right down here and created a brand new asset for this level down and our content browser, as opposed to our main persistent level or LV test map. Let's go ahead and give this a try in just a moment. But however, I wanted to point out that each sublevel has its own level blueprint. And that can be accessed by clicking right here where there's that little blueprint icon. So if I open this up, we can see it's got the name of my sublevel and again that level blueprint icon. Now let's go back to our main level editor here, and I'm going to add a point light. So I'm gonna come under my Add tab here. We're going to find our lights. Let's add a point light. Alright, now, we did add it to our sublevel. And if I click this little toggle visibility here, you can see that it shows and hides it. And it's in our sublevel. If I was to hide our persistent level stuff, we would still see our light because that belongs to our sub-level. Also to help drive this point home, I'm going to select our light here. If I was to go into my sub level Level Blueprint and I was to right-click and some empty space, I can create a reference to my point light. I've got that point lights selected in my level here, my sublevel specifically. However, if I was to try to add a reference to that inside of my main level blueprint here, right-click. There is no reference that I can create to that point light. So whatever you have, whatever objects, effects, et cetera, that you have existing in your given sublevel. You can reference them directly inside of your Level Blueprint. But it's gotta be whatever level or sublevel you've actually placed that thing within. If you are new to Unreal, the whole idea behind sublevels is probably well beyond what you actually need to know about right now. But since we're on the topic of Level Blueprints, I thought it was inappropriate time to at least bring it up. Couple of more things I wanna do before we close out this video. Let's go ahead and save our level and sublevel. Both of these have the asterisks on them. They can be saved by right-clicking on these assets and our content browser or in our levels tab right over here, I can click on each disk to save it. Additionally, I want to create separate folders here for some of our assets. Otherwise, we're going to have too many one place inside of our scripting folder. I'm going to right-click. I'm going to add a new folder. I'm going to add 14 levels. And I'm also going to right-click on our scripting folder. Once again, I'm going to add another new folder, and I'm going to add one for we'll call it overview for some of our very first blueprints that we created. And then I'm gonna go back to my scripting folder. And I'm going to drag and drop some of these assets inside of the appropriate folder. So I'm going to left-click and drag and highlight as sorry not left-click and drag. Control. Click my example pickup in my construction script. And I'm going to drag and drop these into inside of our overview folder. And the other 3123, I'm just control clicking. I'm going to drag and drop inside of our levels folder, move them here. Falling acids are referenced by one or more, will say yes. And last but not least, we will file and save all good spot to save all as. Alright guys, that's gonna do it all for this one. We will see you in the next one. 14. Node Types: Alright, welcome back everyone. Over the course of the next few videos here we're going to be breaking down blueprints, scripting nodes in much finer detail. In particular, we're going to be talking about different node types. We're gonna be talking about different pin types. That is these colored circular shape pins versus these triangular shaped pins. We're going to be talking about the difference between input pins on the left side of a node versus output pins on the right side of a node. We're going to be talking about wiring up nodes and also how to better organize nodes. Now, in this video, our goal is to discuss some of the blueprint scripting node types found in unreal. Now, we're going to talk about each of these different node types in greater detail later on in the course. But for now, I just wanted to get you familiar with these different node types so that you can better identify them and understand their use. Alright, we're gonna get our discussion of different node types started here with the red color nodes. Red colored nodes in Unreal are known as event nodes. And they are critical because they are needed to start any bit of script there. The spark that sends a pulse down this wire here to make any other nodes hooked up to it, fire off as well. Now some example, events or event begin play, which is super common. This fires off whenever we start up our game. You've also got input events such as when you press one on your keyboard or the bottom face button on a gamepad. Moving along, we have these blue color nodes and these are known as functions. In particular, they're known as impure functions. In pure functions make something happen but are free to have things modified. Some examples of different function nodes include spawning an actor, spawning, and emitter. That is the older VFX system in unreal, we've also got spawned the system which is the newer VFX system in unreal, we've got this create widget function. This is used to show types of menus or HUD that you've created. We've also got functions for playing a sound or setting and actors location or setting, the material, that kind of thing. I wanted to add this one down here as well. You have some functions that may have this development only stripe on it. And that's because this function note is really only meant for developmental purposes. So if you ever see something like that, That's why moving along, we've got these more green color nodes. And they're known as functions as well. But they are known as pure functions that are simply used to get some data. And one key differentiator between these green functions and these blue function nodes. Both of them have this fancy F on it is these blue impure function nodes have something known as exact pins on them. Execution pins, exact pins for short. Whereas the green knows the pure functions do not. These exact or execution pins are simply used to keep the flow of execution going. In. Execution wire can go in and out. However, these don't have that. So what exactly is their purpose? Their purpose is used to just get some data. In this case, this node is going to get what our player character is. In this node, we're getting what level that actor is in. And this pure function simply gets the display name of the object plugged into it. In this case, our level. These two nodes right here are not pure functions. Next up we've got a category of nodes known as flow control nodes. You can identify them by this grayish color banner along the top. The lone exception to that is the switch family of nodes of which there are many. And they had this sort of a golden color banner along the top. They are considered flow control nodes as well. So what a flow control nodes do with their use to determine where to go next in a script. So imagine if you will, we had an event, begin play it right before this branch node. And it was plugged in right here. So depending on the condition, true or false, we could either a fire off this way or this way. And I can have all kinds of different scripts attached to my true branch or my false branch hello control nodes are super common in Unreal and blueprints scripting. And you'll know you're really kinda leveling up your blueprint scripting game when you start to master these, how do you find these nodes? If you simply right-click in some empty space, you can type in flow control. And there's a whole category actually listed as flow control. And you can see where there's tons of switch nodes, flow control, let me collapse the switch category and there's a bunch of your flow control nodes. And next up we've got variables. Now I've created a bunch of different variables along the left in preparation for this video. Variables hold data of a specific type. These are containers, if you will. They can have their values altered or set as we like to say, something other than what it originally was, so long as it's the same type. Now these containers are used to hold things such as health values. Or is the status of owning something or spawn location. If it was a health value, might be an int or a float type. That is some sort of a number. If it was status of owning a key, it could be a Boolean type that is true or false. And if it was the location of an enemies spawn, that would be a vector type, that would be an X, Y, and Z location. Finally, I wanted to make mention of a very special and unique node found within blueprint scripting, that is a timeline node. Timeline nodes are used to alter the value of a variable or variables over time. And they're used for things like changing a float value to change a game timer to decrease over time, like founded a sports game, you know, a clock counting down. Or maybe to change a vector variable over time to move an object. In the case of a moving platform, this is such a cool and unique node that I have an entire video dedicated to this later on in the course. So in summary, we've got red nodes. These are known as event nodes that are needed to start any bit of scripts. Are blue. Nodes are known as impure functions. They simply make something happen. They can spawn an actor, they can spawn a particle effect, play a sound. They can show a menu screen or HUD. What makes impure functions different from our pure functions is that they do have execution pins coming in and out of them. Speaking of pure functions, here are some examples of our pure functions. These are colored green. They do not have execution pins on them, and they're simply used to get some data. Flow control nodes are colored gray, with the exception of the switch nodes. And these are super useful for controlling the flow of execution within your graph. Next up we've got variables. There are many different variable types. Variables hold a piece of information. The contents of a variable can be set, changed if you will, somewhere along your script. And last but not least, we've got a timeline node. This is a very special node within unreal that can change the value of a variable over time. Alright guys, that's gonna do it all for this one. We'll see you in the next one. 15. Execution & Data Pins: Welcome back everyone. In this video, our goal is to learn more about and understand the differences between execution and data pans are various no tides within Unreal Engine blueprints. Now up until this point in the course, you've seen me work with some of these different pin types on the various nodes, but we have not had an official discussion about pin types. So that's what this video is all about, using some of our impure functions. Here is a quick example. Check this out. I've got some of these triangular shaped pins on a node, and I've also got these color-coded circular shaped pins on a nose. These things are referred to as pins. What's the differences between them? Well, these triangular shaped pins are known as execution pins. These pins are where signals are sent into and out of a given know. They instruct the node to execute to do something. In this case, this node would spawn a visual effect. Now, all event nodes have at least one execution pin. And it's pretty critical that event nodes do because they're the ones that start the entire script to happen. So we began play. It's going to start a flow of execution out of this pin and down this wire. Now it's important to note here that not all nodes have execution pins. If you remember from the last video, these pure function nodes do not have execution pins. These are just simply meant to output some data. That leads nicely into the discussion of what is a data pin. Well, coming back to our impure functions here, because this node has a lot of them. Data pins are pins were data can flow into or out of a given node. Examples of data that can be plugged into a node could be numbers, coordinates, objects, that sort of thing. Now notice that these data pins, these circular shape data pins come in different colors. And that's to help identify the different data types. If I mouse over any of these different color-coded pins in the tool tip that appears. It lists out the different datatypes that can be input into it. So the location is looking for a vector datatype, as is the scale. However, this auto destroy is looking for a Boolean data type. Now you may have remembered from the last video we talked briefly about variables right up here, and that variables can come in different datatypes. Variables can be plugged into these various data pins to instruct the node on what to do. For example, if we wanted to spawn an emitter at a given location, I could plug in a vector variable into this data pin to instruct this emitter where to be spawn. As you can see as I'm dragging and dropping this over the pin, it's saying, Yep, That is a vector variable. It is okay to plug that into our location here. Now, if I delete this out and I tried to plug that same thing into this auto destroy pin. It'll say, Nope, can't do it because that is not a compatible datatype, can't do it. However, this Boolean variable could be plugged into this auto destroyed because that is a matching datatype. Now it's important to understand that nodes can take in data as well as output it. So this spawn emitter at location as our spawn system at location, they can take in all kinds of data and it does return data as well. But let's check out another example of a node that outputs a lot of data. I'm going to jump over to my BP example, pickup quickly here. And we can see on our own component begin overlap event note here that it can output a lot of data, including the other actor that is the other thing that overlapped this sphere collider. Now I want to help solidify all of these concepts here we've got execution pins versus data pins. We've got input pins on the left side of a node versus output pins. So I added a temporary script up here inside of my BP example pickup. That is this grip right here. I'm going to delete this at the end of this video just to help demonstrate this concept. I also in my level have one instance, one copy of my BP example pickup. Currently in my level it is known as BP example pickup to. The reason I'm bringing this up is because inside of that blueprint right up here, I have selected this, my loan BP example, pickup instance as the debug option. The thing that I want to see the script for it actually firing off in working. Now this temporary script that I added up here, this is going to fire off every single frame. That's what event tick does. It is going to instruct our print string function node here to print something to our screen in pink texts. And it's going to print off the name of our player character. That's what these, these nodes do here as well. So this print string, if I unhooked this wire right here, it would simply print out the text Hello. However, with this plugged into it, I am telling this print string function what to print out to the screen. We are providing IT data of what to print out. So here we go. I'm going to click play here quickly. And if I move this down a little bit, there we go. You can see this event tick firing off continuously, a continuous stream telling our print string to continuously print off this display name to our screen here it is spammed along the left-hand side in pink texts. And there you have it. We have an execution node firing out into this execution input node, telling this to print out to the screen. We've got some data flowing into this node telling it what to print. That is gonna do it all for this video guys, we've got execution pins, these triangular shaped pins. We've got data pins, these color-coded circular shape pins. We've got input pins on the left side of a node. We've got output pins on the right side of the node. That will do all for this video, guys, we will see you in the next one. 16. Node Wiring: Welcome back everyone. In this video, our goal is to learn the methods of wiring notes together in unreal. Now, on the surface, it may seem there's not much to this, but there are some subtle tips and tricks here that are very much worth your time learning about because they can save you a boatload of time over many days of development. So firstly, let's talk about different types of wires. White wires. These are execution wires and they flow between execution pins. They keep the flow of execution going from one node to another. And fun tip here, if you mouse over any of these wires, you can kinda highlight it like this to help make it stand out. You can see as I do this, kinda doles out all the other wires down below. Pretty cool, makes it help stand out. Next, we've got data wires. These are color-coded according to their datatype, which again, we're gonna be learning a lot more about datatypes later on in the course. They pass along data from one node to another. So this pink wire represents a string datatype. And again, it says that in the tool tip as I mouse over it, if I jump over to our bp ThirdPersonCharacter, we can find a few other color-coded wires. These green wires represent a float datatype that is a number with a decimal point. There's also a yellow wire down here. This is a vector datatype. So once again, data wires are color-coded according to their data type. Next, let's talk about different ways to connect nodes together. Probably the most common way is to simply left-click and drag from one pin type to another similar pin type, like so. However, you don't have to work in this forward, this left to right fashion, you could work backwards. If I was to disconnect this pin, I could do something like this. That is a completely valid way of doing it as well. You can also drag and drop some nodes onto other nodes. Look down below here in my place sound 2D node, I've temporarily disconnected my pick-up sound from my sound input here. I could do something like this, where I left-click and drag this into the graft, I get it, and then I wire it up like so. However, that's a two-step process. Let's make our lives easier. So because this is of the same datatype that this is looking for, I can simply drag and drop it right on top of there, and it will wire it up automatically. That is a really handy trick. Now this works not only for inputting data, but for outputting data as well. So prior to this video, I have created a variable here called Delta seconds of the float datatype because this event tick can output some float data. If I left-click and drag this on top of here, it can automatically. Why are these two nodes together as well? Now we haven't talked about getting some data versus setting the data. We'll talk more about that in our variables section. Another way to where nodes together is to get something context-sensitive. What do I mean by that? Well, let me show you. I'm going to select our horizontal cube mesh up here in our components panel. And with that selected, I'm going to right-click in our graph here. And I'm gonna do a search for node called Sets material. So I can set material for my horizontal cube here. If I selected this function node, it is going to automatically hook up our horizontal cube component here to this function node. This works not only in an actor class blueprint or other blueprints for that matter. But here in our Level Blueprint I can demonstrate this as well. So let me jump back to my test map here. I've got my cube selected, jump back into my Level Blueprint. That's a reminder on how to do that. With that node selected or with that actress selected. I should say that cube selected. I can right-click and some empty space. I can call some function on that Static Mesh actor. Let me go into the rendering section and I can set actor hidden in games. So I'm automatically hooking up a reference to my cube, to this set actor hidden in game function. Now as I briefly demonstrated in the last video, if you try to hook up one pin to another and they're not compatible, unreal is going to let you know about it. So if I was to break my cue boy right here, and I tried to plug it into here. It's going to say, OK, can't do it. Event began play in execution pin trying to plug it into an int string, string datatype, Can't do it. Long story, short, Unreal will let you know if you can connect those pins or not. Now, let's talk about some ways that wires can be cut. The easiest method is to hold down the Alt key and left-click on the wire itself. However, if you don't have to do that on the wire itself, you could find either pin that the wire is connecting and simply hold down Alt and left-click on the pin itself. It doesn't matter if it's this side or the other side of the connecting wire. Another way that you can do this is simply by right-clicking on the node. So let's right-click on our print string node here. And am I right-click menu? I've got the option to break node links. That'll do it. Another way that you could do this is by right-clicking on the pin itself. So let's use this example over here. I've got this cube reference inside of my Level Blueprint. And I've got this hooked up to two functions. So I can right-click on this pin itself and I could break all Pin links. So notice that I've got it hooked up to two different function nodes here. If I wanted to bring both wires at the same time, simply right-click on that pin, break all Pin links and boom, all disconnected. Lastly, moving wires from one pin to another is one of my favorite tricks. Instead of doing something like this, where we've got our cube reference and we want to hook it up to this. Oh, now we want to hook it up to this. So we got to break the pin and go like this. Yeah, that's perfectly fine. You can do that. However, if you hold down the Control key and you left-click on the pin itself, you've got that little hand icon. You can drag and drop that from one data pin to another, just like that, love that trick. That is a huge time-saver, right guys, that is some different methods for wiring nodes together. That'll do it all for this one. See you in the next one. 17. Node Organization: Welcome back everyone. In this video, our goal is to learn some note organization tips and tricks that will help us be more efficient, as well as to write cleaner scripts that can be more easily read. Now up until this point in the course, we have written some fairly basic scripts. They don't contain a whole lot of nodes or wires. And thus organization of our nodes is not that big of a deal, but as you get more advanced, your scripts will tend to include more nodes, include more wires, and thus these organizational options become o, so important for readability sake. So in a blueprint of your choosing, I'm going to be within my BP example pickup. Let's explore some of these and now I've intentionally messed up some of the node organization that I had going on here ahead of time. If you left-click and drag, you can highlight a selection of nodes. Alternatively, you can hold down control and left-click to select multiple nodes. Once you've right-click on any of your selections, you can bring on a right-click menu in one of the categories is organization. We're gonna be talking specifically about these alignment options. And in the little fly-out menu here you can see we can align our nodes along the top of the node. The bottom's, the middle is less the centers, the rights, et cetera. All of these have hotkeys associated with them. As you can see here. If you look carefully, it's Shift plus W, a, S, and D. That's the movement of your character on the keyboard that easily corresponds to the top, bottom, left, and right. Pretty handy. So I'm going to align along the top here, but there's a little bit of nuance with aligning that you should know about. So let me just go ahead and do this. You can see how it does align all of these nodes along the top. But then the question becomes, well, which one of these nodes that it decide to align two? Let's do this again. Moving this a little bit off kilter. You're going to do the control selection of these nodes. So I've got 1234. So notice that Destroy Actor here was the last node that I have selected. Now if I right-click, I'm going to align across the top again. And note that it aligns it all according to the last node that you have selected. Now we just did aligning across the top there, but you can imagine what aligning right, left, or bottom does. Next, I want to talk about straightening connections. Many times, as your scripts get more and more complex, you can have nodes kinda curling up in one area, maybe curling back like this. No, it's kinda like that. Wiring all sorts of weird ways. Straightening out connections is one way to make them look very clean. If I highlight these two nodes right? Like this and right-click, you can see that the hotkey for straightening connections is the Q key. And if I do that, you can see how it straightens out that wired connection. Now here too, there is a little bit of nuance. The first selection that we made, and let me just kind of get these off kilter. Once again. The first selection that we made is the node you want to straighten. The second selection that we make. In this case, it's going to be our print string node. That is going to be the pin of the node we want to straighten two. So notice this by right-click. Do align Q. We have straightened to that pin, this node, we straightened to that pin. Next, I've jumped on over to my Level Blueprint where I have intentionally messed up the organization of some of my variable nodes so I could demonstrate distributing vertically. The first thing I'm gonna do is left-click and highlight all of these variable nodes. And I want to get them aligned along the left first. So holding down Shift, I'm going to press the a key because Shift plus a is the hotkey for aligning along the left. As you can see vertically, they don't look very evenly spaced out. So there's an option for that as well. I'm going to right-click on any of my remaining highlighted notes here. They're all highlighted alignments and we can distribute vertically. And what that's gonna do is it's going to evenly space them out between the topmost node that I have selected and the bottom most node that I have selected. So check it out. It evenly spaced them between my top-most selected node and my bottom most selected node. Organizing notes horizontally is not what's different. So here we've got some flow control nodes that are a little off kilter. I'm going to left-click and drag to highlight these four. The first thing I'm going to do is hold down Shift and press the W key to align them along the top here. And then with all of these highlighted, I can right-click on any one of those four that are highlighted. We can go to alignment. We can distribute horizontally to evenly, space them out. Now, with these nodes selected, there's a couple of different ways we can go about moving them. You can see I've got all four of them selected. I can select any one of them and move all four round like this. However, I can also use the arrow keys. So right now I'm pressing down on the arrow keys, left, right, and up, that'll move nodes as well. Something else you may note that I have on a couple of the nodes. Here is a comment, a comment about some of the hotkeys associated with bringing a few of these nodes into your graph. How do you get a node comment? Well, it's just a matter of right-clicking on the note itself. And there you can leave a node comment. I'd like to do this sometimes with hotkeys, particularly when I'm creating videos like this. Anytime you want to leave a reminder for yourself about what a node does, or maybe some special case that node is dealing with. Right-clicking on it and adding a node comet is quite handy. Speaking of comments, you might see, notice if you will, that I've got this comment box around this entire selection of nodes. Well, how did I get that? Well, that is simply a matter of, let me just move these nodes all on out of here. I'm going to delete that out. You can left-click and drag to create this marquee selection around all your nodes. With them all selected, you can tap the C key to create a common box. The moment you do this, you can see over in the Details panel, you can give a name to your comment box. You can also name it up here as well. Let me just move these nodes down because it's overlapping a little bit. You can also double-click on that name right there to rename it and also gain access to your comment. Details here, I'm going to call this flow control. You also give it a color to the box right here. Something green. Perhaps. You can also change the font size. This is really handy for when you are zoomed way out like that. Maybe you want something like that. Now another really useful option with this comment node bubble is you've got this movement in mode. Currently, if I was to select my comment box, I can move all nodes because my movement mode is set to group movement. However, I can also change this to just the comment box itself. And I can move just the comment box personally, I like group movement. So another way to create a comment box would be to highlight some nodes like so. And as you may imagine, the right-click menu will give you an option for creating a common box as well. I'm going to go ahead and do that and I'll call these my loop nodes. And this also demonstrates that you can have a comment box in side of another comment box. So I could move around these nodes like that, as well as moving all of these nodes around. Let me change this back to GRU movements, including the comments selection inside of it. And lastly, no node organization video can be complete without talking about reroute nodes and their importance within blueprints. To demonstrate the reroute node, I'm in my blueprint wall, Scott's, which you can find as of today's date anyway, in the starter content Blueprints folder, again, you can demonstrate this in any blueprint, but inside here, you see this oftentimes in scripts where he got some wires crossing over other wires, wires going through nodes, this sort of thing. Is there any way that you can redirect that the wire? Yes, you can. And that's through something called a reroute node. What does the reroute node? It's essentially a defined point, a band, if you will, that you create in a wire. To bring these on, you can simply double-click on any wire like so. Double-click this right here is a reroute node. It's simply continues the flow of data. In this case, you can also add reroute nodes for the execution wires, like so. It's great for doing this kind of thing where you're sort of bending this around to make it more clear where this is going as opposed to crossing over things. You can also bring in a reroute node by dragging out of something and typing in re routes, you can add a reroute node like that. And you can see that this point lights right here, this component, if you will, is plugged into multiples of these. So long as it's feeding into a reroute note, I could do something like this as well. This is a completely valid way of doing that. It doesn't matter in this case if I'm dragging the point light from here or from the point where it is rerouting. Both of those are valid ways to do it. So the reroute node super handy loved so much. And the simplest way to get them is to simply double-click on a wire. Guys that is gonna do it for this video on node organization, please master these tips and tricks. You'll thank yourself later. 18. Level BP - Design Time Object References: Welcome back everyone. Over the course of the next few videos here, we're going to be talking about one of the most key and essential concepts in all a blueprint scripting. And that is how to create an object reference. Now, this is such an important concept and we're getting to it before we even talk about events, functions, or variables. Because so much of blueprints scripting is centered around manipulating objects in some way. For example, if you were to walk over a new weapon pickup, Well, you can't collect that weapon without having a reference to that object. Maybe you shoot a tank with a rocket launcher. Well, you can't destroy that tank without a reference to that object to that tank. Or maybe you want to collect some harvestable item to craft some Master Sword, so to speak. Well, you can't collect that item without having a reference to that object. Now we're gonna be talking about how to create these objects references not only in Level Blueprints, but in class blueprints, and not only during design time, that is before the game is running, also during runtime, that is, while the game is running. Alright, so creating references in side of our Level Blueprint. First of all, just want to point out that over in my levels tab here, I am working in my Persistent Level. And I have three objects that have been added to this persistent level, a cube, my BP pickup, and my Construction Script blueprint as well. And just to hammer home the point that these were added to my persisted level, my level tests map, if you will. I'm just going to click on this eyeball to toggle that on and off so you can see that yes, indeed, they do exist inside of this level test map, which is otherwise known as my Persistent Level. I'm gonna go back into my outliner here and I'm going to select all three objects. Now, you can select all three of them here in your view port by holding down the control key and left clicking 123. Alternatively, if I click off of it for a moment, I can select all three of them here in my outliner as well, 123. And you can see all three of those objects are outlined here in the Viewport. Alright, now let's jump on into our Level Blueprint by coming under our blueprint button here. We're going to open our Level Blueprint, even though I've already got it opened up across the top. And something I want to note here that currently my low Blueprint, I've got two event graphs. One called Event Graph, that one was there by default, and another one called node types. I created this one when I was talking about the different node types. Now the reason I'm mentioning that is because within my node types event graph, I've got this event begin play. You can only have one event begin play per Level Blueprint. So if I was to work in this Event Graph Tab and right-click and do a search for Begin Play. And click on this. It's going to hop me from this Event Graph tab back to my nodes type tab. There it is. Now I've also got to function nodes out here. I've got a delay node that's going to delay for three seconds and then a Destroy Actor node. So essentially what I'm looking at, looking to do here is upon beginning play, we're gonna delay three seconds and then we're going to destroy a target actor. Well, which actors do we want to destroy? Well, I've got these three selected back here in my view ports. So let's create a reference to that inside of our Level Blueprint. Now, if I right-click and some empty space here, I don't seem to see them at all right here, however, there's a shortcut for this. I can hold down the R key or as in Robert, left-click and boom, all three of those references are added even though they are overlapping one another. So you can separate them out. Like so. Now, that is my preferred way of adding a reference to something that exists within your level, inside of the Level Blueprint. However, if I go back in here and select just one object, this I'm going to select my example pickup. I'm gonna go back to my Level Blueprint. I can right-click in here. And when you have just one of them selected in your right-click menu, your third option down, you can create a reference to that as well. Either method will do personally, I liked the shortcut of holding down the R, R as in Robert key and left clicking. Now I've got two references here to my BP example pickup. Is it okay to have more than one reference to the same actor, the same object? Yes, that is perfectly fine. There simply duplicates you are talking to. Same thing. I'm just going to delete one of them out here for the time being. So as you can see, all of these actors are from the persistent level, my LV test map. And I can hook up all three of these to my Destroy Actor. And you can see I can wire them forward and back. So again, getting an object reference is super important because so much a blueprint scripting involves manipulating actors in some way. In this case, we're just going the brute force method of destroying the actor. So if I play my game now, let me just firstly compile my blueprint here to see if there's any errors with my script. Save that right away. Go ahead and click Play right here. And you can see after three seconds, all three of those actors are destroyed. Now, creating object references is cool, not only because you can affect the object itself, but you can affect things about that object on a more granular level. Let me show you what I mean. I'm gonna get rid of this Destroy Actor function right here. And with my BP example pickup, if I go back to where this is in my folders here, I've got some components here that I can talk to directly. These exists inside of my BP example pickup. And I want to affect this sphere collision. This is currently my root component. So I'm going to change the scale of this root component. All these other components are attached to the root. So if I scale this, these are going to be scaled as well. So as this audio one, but that one is currently empty and frankly I don't need it anymore. So let me go ahead and delete that out of there, compile and save that. Alright, let me jump back to my Level Blueprint. And I'm gonna drag off of my example pick up here. And I'm gonna do a search for sphere collision. And I want to go to the very bottom. Oftentimes, when you're searching for something that exists within that blueprint, It's at the very bottom. And I want to get my sphere collision because I want to do something to it. And then off of this, I'm going to drag off of here and type in set world scale 3D. So this function does what you think it does is going to scale up this scene component, that's the target. I'm going to set the scale to be three times bigger in the x, y, and z coordinates. So we'll do this after three seconds. And again, all the other components of the green cross, if you will, what's attached to this sphere root collision component. So upon scaling this, everything should scale three times bigger as well, including that green cross. So let me compile this to make sure my script is okay. Let's go ahead and click Play. So after three seconds, we should see this change. Whoops, and I accidentally clicked off the window. Let me try that once again. Focusing on that green cross, boom, three times bigger. Let's try something else here. Again using our bp example pickup, let me just delete out some of these unnecessary nodes here. Going to delete out these guys. Inside of our bp example pickup. We have this pick-up sound variable, and currently it's set to this interplay type of sound. Now I'm gonna change this to an explosion type sound. And I can do that within my Level Blueprint so long as I have a reference to this actor that exists in the level. So once I've got a reference to this, I'm going to drag a wire off of this and type in pick-up sound. I can get that sound or I can set that sound. Let me go ahead and set it. And now I can change the contents of that variable to something else. Let's go ahead and change that to explosion. And I will make it so that off of Event Begin Play. I'm simply changing the value of this variable, this pick-up sound variable, from this interplay sound to an explosion sound. Alright, so once I play, you're going to hear an explosion. Now, when I collect that health pickup, a couple of other interesting tidbits of information I thought I would mention while I was here with this example pickup reference in our Level Blueprint, if I was to right-click on this, I can find this actor in a level. So if you're ever wondering, Hey, where does this thing exists in my level, you can go ahead and right-click, click on this and jump back to your level Tab, and it'll jump you right to it. Something else inside of your Level Blueprint that you could do is let me just kinda pan off of where this reference is. Say I'm off in no man's land. I can come under Window. I can come under, find results in, in this fine results window, I can just type in, let's just type in pickup. And I can find my BP example pickup right there. I didn't realize I was going to find my pick-up sound as well, but indeed that has the word pickup in it. Simply double-clicking on this will jump me right to where that object reference is to. Pretty sweet. Alright guys, so there is how you can add some object references inside of your Level Blueprint, make sure you've got the objects selected here and your level. And then you can either right-click and some empty space and create a reference to it, or hold down the Alt key and left-click, that'll get you there as well. That'll do it all for this video, guys. See you in the next one. 19. Level BP - Run Time Object References: Welcome back everyone. In this video, our goal is to learn how to create references to objects inside of your Level Blueprint at runtime. This differs from design time object references in that will be capturing and containing references to various objects while we play the game. Remember design time is before the game is running. Runtime is while the game is running. Now a common use case for this is items or enemies getting spawn into the game while we play. Perhaps after an item or enemies spawn into your level, you want to affect it in some way. In order to do that, you must create a reference for that object. You must contain that reference inside of a variable. Alright, we're gonna get started here inside of our level test map. And just to make things super clear, over n My Open levels tab, I have my persistent level as the blue level, the currently active level. I'm going to be adding objects from here on out to my Persistent Level, not going to be doing any more work inside of my sublevel. So just wanted to make that clear. If you want to make this the active level, you can double-click on it or alternatively right-click on it and make current that blue font shows that that is your current level. We're gonna be adding one actor to this level. And to do this, I'm going to come under my quickly adding to the Project button in the flyout menu all classes. And I am looking for a note actor. So I'm going to left-click and drag this into my level and place it right about here. Now, in known actor, if you're playing the game, you don't actually see this icon out here. I'm simply using this actor as a way to define a point in space where I want to spawn something in. Now note, I currently have my note actor selected, and I can see that I have it selected here in my outliner. Please make sure that you do have this selected because we're going to be creating a design time object reference for this here in just a second. So coming up under my Blueprints button here, I'm going to jump on over to the Level Blueprint, even though I've got it opened up here, that's how you can jump back into your Level Blueprint. And what I'm gonna do is I'm going to jump over to my E Event Graph Tab right over here. In some empty space, I'm going to create a design time reference to that note actor. I'm going to hold down the R key and left-click. So you saw me do this in the last video. That is a design time reference. Now, I'm gonna come back to this in just a moment, but I need an event key. I'm going to right-click and some empty space and type in the one button. I'm going to add a keyboard event for when I press the one key on my keyboard. And often this, once I press this button, I'm going to drag off of this and type in spawn actor from class. This is a super handy function, no, that's going to spawn in something that we tell it from this drop-down. What do we want to spawn in here? I will spawn in something visual. Let's spawn in this blueprint effect fire. This comes from the Starter Content Pack. Again, if you don't have this constant pack when you're putting this course together, anything will do something visual. So it doesn't really matter what you put in. I'm going to choose the fire though. However, I do need to tell this where I want this to spawn and that's where this spawn transform comes in. And I have to plug something into this transform input so it knows what to spawn and then where. So that's what this note actors is going to be used for. I'm going to drag off of this and type in get actor transform. The transform is the locational, the rotational, and actually the scale information for this node actor. But we only really care about the locational information. So it's fine that we use the entire transform here. Plug this into my spawn transform. And this is where we are going to create a runtime object reference. We're going to be storing something inside of a variable while the game is running. So off of this return value here, as I hover over the pin, it says it will return one instance of this blueprint, the fire object. Now I want to store this into a variable so that I can affect it in some way while the game is playing. So I'm going to right-click on this pin and type in Promote to variable. So in doing this, over in my variable section, I've created a new blueprint effect fire. But I need to give this a name. I'm going to call this promoted promoted fire. That's a fine name. So even though this is a variable, I can compile this as well. Currently, when I compile this, I look at the default value in and says, Okay, this is going to be of this blueprint site is Blueprint fire effect, fire type. But right now we've got nothing inside of here. However, once I press the one key, this will spawn that actor at this location and then set it inside of this variable. It'll essentially contained inside of this container while we are playing the game. Now we're simply going to do this at runtime so that we can then destroy it. So down below here, I'm going to Right-click type in the two key, two inputs. They'll whittle down to the keyboard to key event. And off of this, I'm going to drag out type in, Destroy Actor. It's a very visual function. That's why I like it so much when I'm putting these courses together. And then it's going to say, what object would you like to destroy which actor? Well, I can just drag and drop this right onto the target to instruct that to destroy it. Now note that if I was to jump in and play and press the two key, in fact, I will do that now just to demonstrate something. Playing the game. Let me see if I can kind of put this off into a side window here. You can see my scripts. I'm going to press just the two key to, to, to, to, to, to, whoops, I got to select a debug option up here. Let's choose my test maps so we can see the flow of execution here. And so I'm pressing that two key and you can see that pulse off to the left there as I press the two key. But watch this. When I hit Escape, I'm gonna be span with some errors. And the reason I'm getting an error is because it's saying, Hey, we can't find anything inside of this variable. We're trying to destroy this thing, but there ain't nothing in there. So the reason for that is because nothing is currently stored in here. However, when we press the wonky, we will spawn an actor that blueprint fire effect, and then we will store it inside of this variable. We have created an object reference stored inside of this variable. So let's try this again. Clicking play. So my note actor was a round above the spot where my character's head is here. So I'm going to press one key. There is that fire effect That's just spawned in. And I'm going to press the two key gone. And I can press the one key again. Another instance of that firewall, populate that variable, press F2 key, gone. Now something else worth noting here, I'm going to jump back to my level test map. And I'm gonna change my play option here, clicking these three dots. It changes to be playing not in a new editor window, but in this selected viewport. I'm doing this because if you look over in the outliner, over on the right-hand side, when I press the one key, you're going to actually see that actor gets spawned into my list of objects over in the outliner. So check it out. You can oppress the one key. You see the blueprint effect fire appear right above my BP example. Pickup two is going to destroy it one to one. And just to point it out there it is in the Outliner right there. Let's try a second example here. Right up here I'm going to place under volumes, trigger volume, a trigger volume right in front of where my character is going to be spawning. And I'm just going to size it up a little bit to ensure that my character has an easy time overlapping this. I'm going to pick it up off the ground slightly. Then with that selected, I'm going to jump into my Level Blueprint here, and I'm going to right-click add an event for when we overlap this beginning, overlap it. And again it trigger volume event like this is on actor begin overlap can tell us who is the other actor that overlap does what I'm going to do those I'm going to right-click on this pin and I'm going to promote this to a variable. And in doing that, you can give us a name. It's defaulting the name here for me to other actor. Because before this video recorded, I had entered that in as a name. You can press F2 on that to rename it though. So once we overlap this, it can store a reference to this actor that overlapped it during runtime as to who the other actor was. Just to ensure that we know that in fact is overlapping is taken place. I'm just going to play a sound, hear any sound will do. I'm going to jack up the sound here as well. We'll play sure. A camera shutter, this is just two. Notify us, it's something in fact has happened. So that's great. But let's assume that when our character has overlap that trigger volume that, that is, oh, that's negative in some way. Maybe that's some sort of a poisonous gas cloud that's going to shrink us. So once we've got a reference to our actor here, we can affect them in some way. So I'm going to drag off of here and bring in a reference to my other actor. And off of this I'm going to type in the word scale. We'll set actor scale 3D. And I will press 0.5.5.5 values into each of these. So let's jump in, in play here. Once I compile, compiles, going to check to make sure my script is all good. Let's play. I've got my test map set as my default object that I'm debugging here. So we can see these scripts firing off. Here is my player window. So right in front of me, that invisible trigger volume. You heard me overlap that. In now. The other actor has been populated during runtime here. So as soon as I press the key, the other actor, AKA me in this point, they act or scale is going to be set to half size. Here we go. I'm pressing the one key right now. Boom, down. I go. One more example here. Before we close this up, we're going to show how to create multiple references to actors during runtime. I've currently duplicated my example pickup here. You can do that simply by dragging and dropping individual instances or by alt, left clicking and dragging on one of these to create another instance. So back in my level blueprint off of my 16k event, what I'm gonna do is I'm going to drag on a wire and type in, gets all actors of class. And in the actor class, I can slot in my pick up my BP example pickup. And this can output all instances of that actor. So I'm going to right-click on this out actors pin. I'm going to promote this to a variable and call this my pickup actors. It's an array. Again, I know we haven't talked about array types, but an array is essentially a list of a type of variable, in this case, are BP example pickup. It's going to store all of those inside of here so that we can affect them in some way. And what we're gonna do to them is drag off of this pin and type in for each loop. And again, I have a video dedicated to the for-each loop coming up. So if you don't know what that is right now, not a big deal. So for every item in this list that we store here, we're going to do something to it. And what we wanna do is for each item in this list, the array element, we're going to get the display name. And then we're going to print this to our player window, hooking this in like so. Click this drop-down. I'm going to change this to a pink coloured texts because it makes it stand out a little bit more. So essentially what's happening here is as soon as I press the one key, we're going to do a search for all actors of a given class that exists in my level. And we're gonna be storing them while we're playing the game at Runtime inside of this array variable, they're all going to be of this variable type, my BP example pickup type. And then for each item in this list, we're going to print out their display name to the screen. Let's go ahead and give us a play. And once again, I've got my level tests map listed up here. It acres, it increments that number each time I play the game. So that's what that number is. You don't have to worry about what that number means. Right here we go. Click and play. Now note in the upper left here, as I press the one key, you're going to see that flow of execution go through here. And it lists out all five instances of my example pickup. I can do it again and again and again. I'm just spamming your right now. Now if you know back here in my Level Blueprint, if I click my list of pickup actors here in the editor. Well, there's nothing inside here. Once again, we're populating the contents of this variable during runtime, we're capturing it inside of that variable. So let's do something off of the two event here. Let's set the lifespan of the mall Shelley. So once we've got a reference to that list of actors, I can then grab that list of actors, drag and drop it. Let's get it off of this. I'm going to type in for each loop, we're gonna do something for each item in that list. And what we will do is off of the array elements. So this is for each item in that list, I'm going to set their lifespan. Again. Each of these has a lifespan property within them that I could affect. I'm gonna change that lifespan to be two seconds. Alright, and let me just shrink this down a little bit. I've got my test maps set as my debug option. I'm going to click Play. Let me just move this play window and down here a little bit, pressing the one key to populate that list of variables. It's now been populated. So when I press the two key, one to gone. So there you all have it. Some of the many ways you could go about creating runtime object references inside of your Level Blueprint. We talked about how to do that off of a spawn actor from class function node. Also when overlapping a trigger volume, we could also hit another object as well that would do it. Also, we talked about how to do this off of a, get all actors of class function. That's how you can get multiple actors. There are other ways to be sure, but hopefully this gives you a grid, sorry, guys, that'll do it all for this video. See you in the next one. 20. Class BP - Design Time Object References: Welcome back everyone. In this video, our goal is to learn how to create references to level objects inside of a Class Blueprint. Now in doing so, we'll be able to write script inside of a class blueprint that can affect level objects, things place here in our level. This is a really handy trick to know and unreal for creating a simple per level setting system. So we're gonna be doing that, although just a little bit of a disclaimer here, this is going to be a super simplified setting system and I'm using air quotes here. Alright, we're going to start off in our content scripting overview folder. And over in some empty space, I'm going to right-click and I'm going to create a new blueprint class. This is going to be based on an actor class because we're going to be placing this inside of our level. So I'm going to be naming this BP underscore L V, which is going to stand for level underscore settings. Then I'm going to double-click on this to open it up. And I am going to add one component here, and I'm going to add a billboard components. In this billboard components by default gives us this dragon head type of Sprite icon. This is the one I'm going to roll with. You could change this out to be something else, but this is going to designate in my level that hey, this is your BP level settings actor. I'm also going to make this the root of this because I want to get rid of that default scene root icon. So let me just drag and drop this right on top of there. That's going to make it the root and thus the only icon IC. So now if I place this into my level, I can see this little dragon head icon. Yes, the dragon heads going to stand for my level settings in order to the Details panel. If you do a search for bill board and again, you've got to have that level settings blueprints selected. You can whittle it down to editor billboard scale. I'm going to change this to be something like ten times the usual size. Just to make this really stand out. This actor will not be seen when you play the game, but for something like a level settings actor, I like to make this very prominent, very easy to see. And again, you don't see that in game, so no worries there. Alright, the next thing we're going to be doing is creating a variable inside our level settings blueprint here. So under the variables section found within the My Blueprint panel, variables. Plus, we're going to add a variable called Music. And we're going to change the variable type here from a Boolean to ambience. Sound, ambient sound in object reference. Now over in the Details panel, it says hey, compile this to set a default value. So I will do that. However, I am going to leave this blank. We're going to set this within our level editor in order to be able to set this particular variable from the level editor, I've either got to click on this little close eyeball icon or check this box where it says instance editable. You see right now if I was to go back to my level editor with this actor selected, let me just exit out. I don't see This music variable, expose it all inside my editor. However, if I either click this eyeball icon, which does the same thing as checking this instance editable box. And I compile that and I save it. Now here back in my level editor that has been exposed here in the Details panel inside my level editor. So what this is allowing me to do is to set the value of this variable here in the editor to some actor. In the editor, I could click this drop-down box. And I can see that there's nothing in here, however. But there's this pick actor from scene eyedropper that would allow me to pick a sound file that exists in my level. So let's go ahead and search for a sound to play. I'm going to select my content folder here. And I'm going to use the filters option. And I'm going to search under sound. And we'll do a search for sound wave files that will search for any sound wave files anywhere within my content folder or any of its sub folders. I want to find this starter music. So I'm simply going to drag and drop this into my level, like so. Now if I was to jump in and play our game, actually hear them music escaped. And the reason for that is because our starter music, let me just, with that selected, activate my viewport here and press the F key to focus up on it. My star music in the Details panel has a property for auto activate checked on. I'm going to check that off for the time being. And now if I play, I don't hear that level music playing, pressing Escape once again. So what I wanna do now is in the side of my BP level settings here, I want to set the value of my music variable to that piece of music. So here we go. I'm going to pick actor from scene. I'm going to select this ambient sound actor. And now it's going to slot that star music inside of my BP level setting. So that's all well and good. However, inside of my BP level setting, I don't have any scripture to actually tell that to play it. I can change that by going over to the Event Graph and doing something off of event. Begin play here. Let me just delete out these two other actors. So now I can drag in a reference to my music variable here, left-click, drag. We're going to get it. And if I drag out of here and type in the word play, I can play the audio components. So long story, short, if you drag out of music, that variable, the ambient sound variable right there, it'll bring in this audio component automatically. We can set a delay. I'm going to right-click and some empty space and type in delay. So we don't hear this right away if we wire it through here as well. So let's say after two seconds, we will start at the very beginning of this musical track. Let's compile and save to make sure that our script is all good. And if I play after two seconds, you don't play that. Let's try another example here quickly. Over here in our variables section, I'm going to click this Plus button. And I'm going to type in directional light as the name. It's gonna give me ambient sound as the variable type because that was the last thing I created. I want to change that. And I'm going to change this out to a directional lights, directional light object reference, not the component directional light object reference. Now once again, if I compile here, this is an empty variable. There's nothing inside of here. But also once again, if I check this instance editable box, that'll make this eyeball icon come alive to again, these do the same thing. And I compile this and I go back to my level editor. I've now expose this variable to the level editor once I've got my BP level settings here selected. Now the reason I set this to be exposed is because when we created our test map level, I know that by default it had a directional light actor already in this level. That is, this guy right here, this sort of sunlight icon with this white arrow hanging off that guy. So what I can do is with my level settings blueprints selected. I can set my directional light inside of my BP level settings to be talking to this particular actor. So let me click the eyedropper right here and look. It knows that these objects are not valid. However, that is valid. None of these other ones are no, but that is a directional light actor. So we can set that one. Boom, it is now set as well. Let's hop back into our BP level settings. And if I drag and drop this into our event graphlets, get that off of this, I'm going to drag off and type in sets. Intensity will set the intensity of our light component here, because directional light consists of a leg component. And we'll set our intensity here to, let's try a value of say, 500. Just continuing the flow of execution right after our beginning of play and then the delaying of two seconds. So after two seconds, we're going to hear our music kickin. There's pressing that Q key where that comes in handy. Then we're also going to set the intensity of our directional light actor or compiled script is looking good. Let's go ahead and play. You can see we not only hear the music. So these are some rather extreme examples here, but we have created a very basic level setting actor. And notice the power here. I could drag and drop this level setting actor into other levels as well and set a unique piece of music and a unique directional lights. So long as I am pointing to a directional light for this variable and an ambient sound for this music variable. So you got to have these in your levels. Well, whoops, directional lead actor in music actor. But this is how we're setting level actors level objects inside of our BP level settings. A Class Blueprint, guys that is gonna do it all for this video, we will see you in the next one. 21. Class BP - Run Time Object References: Welcome back everyone. In this video, our goal is to learn how to create references to level objects inside of a Class Blueprint at runtime, that is, while we're playing the game. Now this is really useful when, for example, you want your character to interact with something in your world. And then he wanted to do something to that thing that you've interacted with. Alright, to show off this example that I have for you here today, I'm going to be putting some stuff inside of our blueprint ThirdPersonCharacter, this will work inside of a first-person character as well. But once again, this is the character we're using for this project. So go ahead and double-click on this to open it up. Let's go over to the viewport tab because we're going to see a component here in just a little bit. We're going to add a brand new component in our list of components. We're going to add an arrow components. Go ahead and click on that. And I'm going to call this my line trace end point. And with that components selected, the x location for this, I'm going to set to be 300. Unreal units hit Enter. And if I kinda sweep on over, holding down the right mouse button here, my viewport, I've set my arrow component to be out ahead of my character here by 300 unreal units. Now what we're aiming to do here is we're going to be sending out an invisible line into space using this component to help us here, we're going to check to see if this invisible line collides with anything. And if it does, we're going to figure out what was that thing that hit us so that we can affect it in some way. In doing this, we can create an object reference at runtime while the game is running. So let us jump on over to our Event Graph. I'm going to come over into some empty space. And by default, character class blueprints do recognize input events. So I'm gonna hold down, or rather Right-click and type in the 0 key. By the way, not all class blueprints recognize input events by default, but the character class does. Off of pressing the 0 key. We're going to bring in a function node called line trace by channel. There's a lot of different trace function nodes. The one we're looking for is line trace by channel. Now way later on the course, we'll talk about some of these traces. And this is going to be way more advanced than where you are at if you are beginning with blueprints. But the circular nature of learning Unreal Engine blueprints is that to know about this, you need to know about that. And to know about that, you need to know about this. So if you don't understand this part right here, that's completely fine. We'll be getting to some of these concepts. Just bear with me. This is just showing off a technique for getting a runtime object reference. Alright, so this node is going to send out an invisible line trace into our world here. So where do we want to start this trace? Well, how about we started at our actors location? So I'm going to right click and some empty space Typing get actor location. And this will return the location of ourselves or our ThirdPersonCharacter blueprints. That's where we're going to start this. Where are we going to end this? Well, that's why I included this line trace endpoint component. I'm going to drag and drop a reference to this into our graph. And then I'm going to drag off of this and I want to get the world location of this components. So essentially I'm gonna be starting off this invisible line trace into our world at the location of our ThirdPersonCharacter. And it's going to extend as far as our line at trace endpoints. So from here to here, alright, moving along here, what we're gonna do is this outfit. Essentially it's going to give us a lot of different results about what this did hit. And I can break out the hit results here by typing in a breakout hit result. Clicking this down arrow here. So this invisible trace, this invisible line being shout to the world can give us all kinds of information, including what was the actor that a hit. It can output all this information. The one we're looking to have output is the hit actor. Now, what we can do off of this is right-click on this. We can promote this to a variable. Let's do that. And let's keep the name Hit Actor over here. And you can see the variable type is just a generic actor. Now up above here, I'm going to drag a wire out of this and type in branch. And I'm going to plug our return value here into the condition. Essentially what we're going to be saying here is we only want to continue beyond this branch. If indeed it was true that we hit something, we're going to only execute what's beyond this branch here. If it is true that our line trace did hit something, that's our condition. So let's drag a wire off of this type in play sound to D. Let's have a little sound feedback for if we did in fact hits something. Let's set our sound here to be anything, but I'm going to set this to be clicked on a button. Sure. We'll go with that. That sounds good. Off of this, I'm going to plug this flow of execution into setting our hit actor. So in fact, if we did it something, if and only if we did hit something, are we going to set the contents of this variable if I compile, notice right over here the default value is none only if our line trace hits something. Well, we set the contents of this variable and we're going to be doing it while playing the game. Off of this, let's extend a wire out and type in print, string. And out of our Hit Actor. Let's just drag out of here and type in get display name. So we'll print out the name of the thing that we hid. So let me frame up this script here. So if you want to pause the video here and get a good gander at that, you can see what we have built. Can't keep, can't quite get the right zoom level here. There we go. One more setting that would be useful here to set our Draw Debug Type here to be for duration. In doing this, when we press the 0 key, we're going to see a little bit of a line there, a debug line, if you will, being shot out into the world. So we can see that this trace channel leave it to visibility. For now that is our default trace channel. This is essentially a name channel that we're going to be shooting this line out from beyond. Alright, and with this, we can actually compile this, save it. Let's jump in and play to see if we can see a line being shut out. Again once we press a 0 key. There, you see that red line being shot out. That red line being shot out. Now the reason you're seeing the red line being shot out into the world, but you're not seeing that flow of execution in my script up at the top is once again, because I've not set my debug option. So I need to play first. And once I am playing, that's going to spark my character into the world, then I can set my BP ThirdPersonCharacter. Let me bring on that play window once again. So when I press that 0 key, I can see that flow of execution going right now. I'm not hitting anything. So you see that the flow of execution is stopping at the branch. However, if I go to an object chair, you heard the sound in the upper left and my play window, it prints out the name of S M chair, cube, example pickup. And it's not going through this. It's that hitting this bench at all. And the reason it's not hitting this bench is because this bench Static Mesh does not have any collision on it. So that's why it is skipping that. So something to keep in mind there. My Construction Script wall as well. Okay, So this is all well and good. We are setting this object reference at runtime, but let's affect this object reference in some other way once we have captured a reference to it. So let's just put a little bit of additional script down below here. I'm going to right-click and some empty space. Let's bring in the nine input button. There we go. And off of this, I'm going to bring in our Hit Actor. Let's get that. And then let's drag a wire out of this type in is valid, this question mark version. And if this is a valid object, meaning does it exist? If it is valid, we're going to drag off of this inside been Destroy Actor. The target. We want to be our Hit Actor. That's the thing we want to destroy. Double-click on that to create a reroute node. Little cleanliness there. So let's try to frame up this script right over here, both of these scripts, so you can see them working. Let me go ahead and play. Try to shrink down this play window here a little bit. Alright, if I was to go ahead and press the nine key right now, what you'll notice, you can see it is pulsing out of the nine key over on the left-hand side as I spam on that. But It's not advancing beyond the is valid node because there is no valid hit act actor that is an empty variable. However, let's press the arrow key. I have now checked to see if that is a chair by setting that variable. Now when I press the Nike, the hit actor has been populated. And boom, it goes bye-bye. Walking up to this cube, pressing the 0 key that has now been set as my new Hit Actor. Pressing the Nike, boom, that goes bye-bye. Now it's important to note here that are Hit Actor is just a generic actor. We're not sure which object we hit and so we can't modify variables are called functions specific to this object reference. If we did want to do that, we could cast it this object to ensure that it was of a given type. Now once again, this is going to be a little bit more advanced for where you're at right now, we will be talking about casting more later on in the course. But just to show briefly how you could do something like this, I'm just going to modify this script here a little bit more. Let's try something like this off of my Hit Actor. I'm going to cast too. We'll do example pickup. We're gonna cast and check to see if that was an example pickup. And if it is, Let's scale this this type in world scale. We'll set the world scale of our sphere collision, which all the other components are attached to. And we'll set our world scale here to be, well say, three times as big and the x, y, and z. So once again, our line trace is what's going to be populating, creating a reference to our Hit Actor variable. If that is valid, we're going to check to see if it was an example pickup blueprint. And if it was, we're going to scale it up three times as big. So let me just minimize this way over here. Jumping in and playing, wrestling the 0 key. I don't wanna get too close to this. Pressing the 0 key right now. My hit actor has now been set. Yet. There has been set. Let me just back away so I don't accidentally overlap it when I scale this up. Now I'm going to press F9 key. And wallah, it is set the world scale of that to be much bigger. Alright, there you have it, guys. There is one very practical use case of a runtime object reference. Again, there are other ways to do this, but a line trace is a super useful way, especially inside of a character blueprint. That will do to offer this one guys, see you in the next one. 22. Casted Object References: Welcome back everyone. In this video, our goal is to learn how to cast to an object in order to create a reference to something. So first of all, what is casting? Casting is a way of checking if a given type of object is of a specified class. Now you saw me do this in my BP example pickup here. We were checking to see what is overlapping our collision sphere here, that is this sphere right here. In this case, we were checking to see if that other actor, if the thing overlapping it was a ThirdPersonCharacter we were casting to see if that was the ThirdPersonCharacter. Now, if it is of a specified class type, in this case, the ThirdPersonCharacter. We can then immediately capture that object as a reference. And more importantly, do things specific to that object. There might be functions, variables, or components inside of our specific class that are unique to it. So by that, I mean, if we capture a reference to our ThirdPersonCharacter here, if this is true, we can capture reference to our ThirdPersonCharacter. That means ThirdPersonCharacter. We can talk to the components in here. We have any variables inside of here. We can modify them in some way. We can modify some of the class default variables inside of here. Things such as jumping max count, which is a fun one to play around with. Hint, hint, you can double, triple jump with that parameter, all kinds of things. So note, this topic of casting is a topic we're going to talk way more about in the Blueprint communication section later on in this course. But for this video, we're simply going to talk about how to create object references by casting to a given thing. Alright, let's show off a few examples here back in my level test map. Firstly, I want to check that you have a player start actor here in your level. And if you don't, you can come under your little button here to quickly add to your project. And in the all classes category here, you can find a player start actor, that guy right there, drag and drop one of those. Make sure you've got one of those in your level. And then if you come right up here, you've got these three little dots to change your play mode in place settings. This is where you can change to play it selected view port or a new editor window. By the way, however, I want to draw your attention to this spawn player at currently, we have this ticked, that means checked to spawn a player character at our default player start that is at this actor location right here. I could change this, change this to the current camera location. So wherever I am in the level, if I click Play, I could spawn from this location that I'm looking at right now. However, we want this set for purposes of this video to default player start. Alright, with that, we're going to create some script to capture a character reference inside of our Level Blueprint. So once again, you can access your Level Blueprint coming here and opening your Level Blueprints. Boom. Now I want to do something off of Event Begin Play. Now, earlier in this course, I created a second event graph and I named it node types. And I mentioned we can only have one event begin play per our Level Blueprints. So I'm just going to delete it out of here and do all this work inside of our base event graph here, our default event graph, which is currently empty. So here I'm going to then right-click and typing begin, play. Event B in platelets. Go ahead and add that. And then I'm going to right-click. And in some empty space, I'm going to type in git player character. This is a really handy function right here that's going to simply return the character that you, a single-player are playing, as in this case, player index is 0. We only have a single-player, so that is going to be us. Off of this. We can drag out and type in Cast to ThirdPersonCharacter. If you're playing with a first-person character template here, you can cast to a first-person character. We're going to cast to our bp a ThirdPersonCharacter. So what we're doing here is we're going to get our player character and we're going to then check, hey, is this a ThirdPersonCharacter that you're controlling or is this some other character that you had assigned in your project settings? And again, our project settings can be accessed over here, project settings and over maps and modes. Under our selected game mode, we can see our Default Pawn Class. Currently, we are defaulting to a third-person character class when we're playing this game. But this is kind of a way of just checking, hey, are we indeed playing as a third-person character? Now, here's where the thing really comes in, where we're using a cast to create an object reference right here off of as third-person character. We're going to right-click on this. We're going to promote this to a variable. As soon as we do this, it's going to hook up two wires to this center variable right here. So in our variables section, it has created a new third person character variable that is a type that has been given to it. The name. We can change this out. I'm just going to change this to be Character Rough. And then I will right-click on this node and leaving node a comment and just call this promoted. That is how we created this variable. We promoted it off of our beginning of play here. We are going to capture a reference to our ThirdPersonCharacter. Great sweet. That means we can then do something with it. And it's great to do these types of things. Oftentimes off of an event begin play, because once you've got it reference to a given actor type a given object, then you're good to go. You can affect in any which way you want to. So I'm going to create some script down here to then affect our character reference. Let's right-click in some empty space. And I'm just going to type in a number of key. Let's type in the one events Shelley. And off of this, I'm going to drag in our character reference. It's going to say, do you want to get it or set it? I want to get a reference to our player character and offer this. I'm going to type in my old set world, scale 3D. Now what do we want to set in 3D here? Let's set our mesh. And if we go into our ThirdPersonCharacter Blueprint, were talking to this guy right here with that components selected. Our character mesh or person, our mannequin, if you will. Mannequin woman, if you will. Alright. So when we press the wonky, we're going to set our world scale and don't leave it at 0 because then you're going to disappear. Let's go 0.5.5.5. And let's compile this to make sure that our scripts look good. Let's save it. Let's then set our debug option here to our test maps so that, that is the scripts that we will see firing off. Let's go ahead and play. Actually let me make sure that I've got this set to new editor window. Jump back to my Level Blueprint. Now, we've already created this character reference we began played this did fire off. But if I press the one key right now, you will see that that script has indeed fired off. I've captured that character reference off of Event Begin Play, and I press the one key that's set my scale to be 0.5. Now you can see I'm hammering on the one key. Now it's not going to keep setting it at half the size, half the size, half the size. I just told it, set it to half of its usual size right there. So that's one example of casting to our ThirdPersonCharacter, creating an object reference. Alright, let's try another example here. This time not using a player character, a third or first-person character. I'm going to come under my button here to get some content. I'm going to add a sphere. Let's go ahead and add a sphere to our level. I'm gonna raise it up into the air. And then I'm going to set a couple of parameters, one on my sphere here and then one on this floor mesh. First of all, I'm going to rename my sphere here by simply clicking on it and pressing F2. And I'm going to call this my physics ball. That'll help offset it a little bit. This is a static mesh actor. And then down in the Details panel, I want to check a box called simulate physics. And under this physics section here it is, simulate physics. Now what this is gonna do as soon as I play the game, this ball is going to drop down to the floor. Let's go ahead and click play here. And you can see, whoops, I want to go to, in fact, I don't need to play the game. I'm going to briefly set this to simulate. And the moment I do, you're going to see that bulge is dropped down to the floor. So simulation is running the game, not playing the game, but there you saw the results. What happens when you run the game without play? That was simulation mode. Now it's stuck in simulation mode right now I'm gonna go back to new editor window. Near you saw that ball dropping once again, shift and F1 will give me my mouse cursor back. Let me exit out of there. Okay, so we've got our ball set to simulate physics that's important. Next, go ahead and select your floor mesh here. And what I wanna do here is I want to look for something called simulate generates hit events. And if I come under my collision section right here, here's a checkbox I'm looking for simulation, generates, hit events. This is going to be a simulated ball, meaning it is going to have physics on it. Simulation generate hit events for this floor means that it will generate a hit event for a simulated object, aka this physics ball. So it's important to have this box checked for what we are going to be doing. Next, we are going to be accessing our Level Blueprint. However, I want to make sure that we've got our floor selected here firstly. So make sure you've got your floor selected and in your Level Blueprint. Let's move over to the right here I'm going to right-click and some empty space. We're going to add an event for floor collision and we're going to do in on actor hit events. Then off of this, we're going to check to see what was the other actor. They hit me. So if we drag off of this, we can cast too. Let's cast to a static mesh actor. Why are we casting to a static mesh actor? Well, we're casting to a static mesh actor because our physics ball here, if I select that, the type of actors that this is, is a static mesh actor. Okay, let's jump back into our Level Blueprint here. And once again, let's promote this to a variable by right-clicking on that pin, promotes a variable. And I'll rename this is physics ball like so. The type is a static mesh actor. And let's just print some texts after this as well. I'm going to drag off of this. We can print string or print texts. I'll just go with print texts in the text field. I will change this to hit the floor. I'm going to right-click on this and also leave a node comment and call this promoted. Alright, let's do something here with a key as well. I'm going to right-click. Let's bring in a two key to key. Whoops, that was F2. I mean, we could really do this off of anything. I'll just do the two key because that's obvious. And then off of this, we want to get a reference to our physics ball here. So let's drag and drop this into the graph. We're going to get it. And then off of this less simply type in set material. We want to set a material on the static mesh components, like so. And we will say that once we press the tube and we're going to change our material to, I'm going to type in gold. You can change this to whatever you want. So once again, I'm going to make sure that my debug option here is set to level test map. Going to go ahead and click in the play here. You solve that fire right up above as I've got the window grabbed here, you can see I grabbed it perfectly so you can see that pulse flowing through the actor hit floor. We're casting to our static Mitch actor. We are capturing our physics ball there, any variable we are creating a reference to it and we're printing it out to the screen, hit the floor. And it's printing out multiple times there. Once I press the two key, this should turn solid gold. And there you go. You've got a physics ball that has turned solid gold. You can see it's registering those hit events again, again as I roll it across the floor. Because of course, why wouldn't it? Alright, so there you have it. You've got a couple of instances there of us casting to create an object reference. Plenty of more things we could have cast into figure. You could find some use out of those. That'll do it all for this one guys, we will see you in the next one. 23. Widget BP References: Welcome back everyone. We're starting this lesson off here in the Internet by showing off a couple of examples of, in this case, in inventory screen from a Legend of Zelda, breadth of the wild. And also I want to show off this example of the in-game HUD of Legend of Zelda, breadth of the wild. So in unreal, if you want to create something like health meters or mini-maps or in-game messages, or in inventory screen, any of this kind of stuff, you need to create a widget blueprints. So our goal in this video is to learn how to create a reference to a Widget Blueprint. So we're not going to be really honing in on how to create widget blueprints. Although we will be doing that, that's a whole another course unto itself. But once you've created a Widget Blueprint asset, how do you create a reference to it? We're, we're gonna be doing in this video is creating one of these assets. We're going to just put up a simple health meter. It's not gonna be functional. We're just going to put up with simple helped me to earn her hood. Now we're going to create a reference to it so that we can toggle it on and off bacteria in Unreal, we're going to start off by creating a brand new folder inside of our scripting folder, I'm going to right-click New Folder. I'm going to call this Widgets. Then inside of here, I'm going to right-click over on the right. We're going to come under user interface. And we want to create a Widget Blueprint asset in the pop-up box that appears, it's going to ask us to pick a route widget. All we wanna do is select this most common one, the user widget one. Again, this is not going to be a lesson on how to create every aspect of a Widget Blueprint. I'll simply name this WPP underscore HUD. And then we'll double-click on this to open up this Widget Blueprint asset. So long story short, what you can do here is you can drag and drop different elements, these different widgets from this palette panel right here into this viewport to lay out a screen of sorts, a hood, a menu screen, a text notification, all this kinda stuff. We're going to create a very basic HUD, having a health bar. And we're going to start off by adding a canvas panel widget. So under the palate panel, I'm going to do a search for a canvas panel. Canvas panel is essentially a tack board is going to be the widget that we can stick other widgets onto. So I'm going to drag and drop this right out here. Boom, we see this green outline over in the hierarchy. It shows a listing of all the widgets you have added to your Widget Blueprint here. So currently we've got this canvas panel and giving us a giant tech board, if you will, to stick things on to. Great. Next we're going to add a horizontal box components. Horizontal Box is simply an empty box that can contain other widgets. I'm going to drag and drop this in the upper left here because I want my HUD to have a meter of sorts in the upper left corner of my screen. Now, currently it is this size, this predetermined size. However, I'm going to adjust this in just a second here, but just for sake of extending this out, I'm going to change my size x here with this selected to be something about, I don't know, 400, let's go 500, probably a little bit long, something like that. Again, this is just an empty box that can house other widgets. Next I'm going to find a text widget right up here under the common section. And I could drag and drop this on top of my horizontal box to have this contained inside of it that way. Or I can simply drag and drop it right here inside of my horizontal box like this, you can see this little indentation here showing that relationship. So currently this text widget is contained within our horizontal box. I'm gonna change the text here. So with this selected over in the Details panel, I'm going to change this text that says textblock to simply health. I'm gonna give it a couple of spaces there because I'm going to add a health meter, if you will, right to the right of this. So hitting Enter, Boom is going to change that to Health. Next, I want a meter to go right over to the right here. You can add this by adding a progress bar widget. So I'm going to once again drag and drop this inside of my horizontal box. Now the moment I do this, it's going to appear as this grayish little slab, if you will, which does not look at all like a meter. So the way we can change this is with this selected, this progress bar widget selected over in the Details panel, we can change the size to be a fill. Boom, there you go. Now to actually fill this up, we've got this fill color and opacity which is currently set to blue. You could click on this to change the color. I'm going to go green, some shade of green. Sure, That's good. But this percent right here is going to determine how Fill this is currently. It is 0% filled. So I'm going to left-click and drag and you can see how this can go between 01. So essentially this goes from a 0 to 1 scale, 0 to a 100%. And you can choose your bar fill type, left to right, up and down, right to left. However you wanna do it, I'm gonna leave the default there. This is going to work just fine for me. So what this created, I'm going to simply compile this. We're going to save it. Awesome. We've got this Widget Blueprint all created. Next thing we're gonna do here is create some script that is going to create this widget. And then we're going to create a reference to it. We're going to add it to our viewport, meaning it's going to show up within our game. And then we're going to add a little bit of script so that once we've got this reference to our HUD, we can toggle the visibility of this HUD on and off. I'm going to be using the ThirdPersonCharacter Blueprint for this. Now, if you're creating something like HUD, typically you would not use the character blueprint to show or hide the HUD. But since that is a blueprint that we have used up to this point, I'm going to use it just for the purposes of showing how to create a reference to a Widget Blueprint. So open up your ThirdPersonCharacter Blueprint. If you forgot where that is within your content browser, you can find it here under third person blueprints. In inside of here, jump on over to the Event Graph. And we want to do something off of event begin play. So I'm going to right-click Typing, begin play, even begin planning. Boom. And often this, we're going to drag out a wire and type in create widget. This is going to currently say constructed none because we don't have any widget set here in which to create. However, if you select this class, little drop-down there, we can find our Widget Blueprint that we've just created. Now once we select this, we set that. It's going to say, okay, that's the Widget Blueprint that you want to create. Great. But we have not saved this to a reference yet. So let's right-click on this return value here. To promote this to a variable. We do this. It's going to create this variable over into my blueprints section. It is going to be of the WB P HUD type. And I'm going to name this appropriately. We BP HUD. As I've done before, I'm going to right-click on this. And in the node comment area, I'm just going to leave this as promoted. That's how we created that reference to our widget HUD. And then what we're going to do is drag off of here and type in Add to Viewport. So essentially what we're doing here is upon beginning play, once our character is spawned in the game this event begin play fires off. We're going to create this Widget Blueprint. We're going to create a reference to this Widget Blueprint inside of this variable. So it's going to capture it inside of here. Then we're going to add it to the viewport, meaning it should show up in our game. Let's go ahead and compile this to make sure that our script is all good and it is. And then I'm going to play just to verify that we see this HUD in the game. And there you go. In the upper left-hand corner of the screen, you can see that we've got our non-functioning Health Bar. Alright, now since we've got a reference to this, Let's create a little script to show or hide this. Inside of here. I'm going to right-click and some empty space. I'm going to bring in, Let's do the five key y-naught. And let's bring in a reference to our Widget Blueprint, drag and drop this. We're going to get it off of this. I'm going to drag off and I'm going to search for a function called set visibility. And I'm going to hit Control C and Control V to create a duplicate, a copy of that, and then a paste of it. This will be our target. When we press this, we want this to be hidden. So set the visibility here to be hidden. And then when we release it, we're going to tell this widget to be visible once again. Now, how did I even know that this function was available to me? Well, many times, back here in our Widget Blueprint, if you look over at the various widgets that you have added to your hierarchy, you can see all of your properties in the right-hand panel over here, the Details panel. And one of them for this particular widget is the ability to show or hide it. As you can see right now, I've got this progress bar, visible or not visible. This entire thing can be shown or not shown. The visibility of this can be visible or not visible. Over here, I am saying, Hey WPP, when I'm pressing the five key, I want to hide you. When I release it, I want it to show once again and we can do this because we captured a reference to our Widget Blueprint compiling. This will check to make sure that your script looks good. Let's say this. I'm gonna go ahead and play. There. You can see it. I'm going to press the five key and hold it down. It is now hidden. And when I release it, it shows once again. So there guys have it. This was not a video on how to create a Widget Blueprint that again, that's a whole another course. But how to create a reference to a Widget Blueprint notes. You can create references to widget blueprints from class blueprints or a level or sublevel blueprint. References to widget blueprints are typically created at runtime, maybe off of a game play or maybe off of a trigger volume when you overlap things like a weapon for some kind of pick up notification or AML pickup notification, that sort of thing. That'll do it all for this video, guys. We'll see you in the next one. 24. Tag References: Welcome back everyone. In this video we're going to learn how tags added onto actors can be used to find objects, create references to objects, and then affect those referenced objects. So a tag, what are we talking about here? Well, a tag is essentially a label or a keyword that we assign an associate with a given actor. And then if an actor has a given tag, we can affect it in such a way we can create a reference to that object. We can call a function on it, do all kinds of cool things. So we're going to demonstrate that here. Before we do if you want to play along at home, I've got three different actors setup in my level. The blueprints ceiling light is located at this location. If you've got the starter content, I've got one of those out here. This fire emitter is in this location in the starter content folder. And then this cylinder I just grabbed from right up here. Boom, a cylinder if you want to play along at home. Alright, so we're going to add a common tag that is a keyword of sorts to all three of these actors. And I'm going to find that tag in the Details panel with my cylinder selected by searching for tag. And I'm going to whittle it down to component tags or actor tags. We want to add an actor tag, one associated with this entire actor. Again, different actors can have different components set up with them. We just want to have one associated with the actor at large. So under actor advanced tags, click this little plus button and we get to name the tag and I'm going to call mine thingy. And just to ensure I don't have any spelling mistakes here, I'm going to highlight it, hit control C to copy it, because I'm going to add this exact same tag too. My fire emitter here. So I've got that tag whittled down here to find my actor tag. Let's add that. We're going to add that here. And then also for my blueprint ceiling light, we're filtering by the word tag. We're going to add that to our actor advanced tag. And let's put that name in here as well. Great, next, while we're at it here, why don't we include this on our BPS over here as well, our example Construction Script, as well as our pickups. So I'm going to navigate to where these are at in my folders here. Bp example pickup. Let's go inside here. If you want to add a tag to this blueprint, you wanna go under your class defaults do a search for a tag. There it is, actor tags. Let's add things in here as well. Go ahead and compile, save that. We can close that out and then we get rid of that from the last video. Let's also get our construction script wall right here in underclass defaults, make sure you got that selected tag. Let's add a tag for this guy. And there we go. So just wanted to show where you would add that inside of a blueprint itself. It's important to note that here I'm adding it to the blueprint itself. For this particular ceiling blueprint, I'm adding it just to this instance of the object inside the level. I didn't actually add this inside of the ceiling blueprint here inside of my ceiling Blueprint Class default. If I search for tag, I won't see it here because I didn't add it to the blueprint itself. Just this particular instance of the blueprint in my level. So let's start off creating a reference to all of these tagged actors that I'm gonna do this inside of the Level Blueprint. So coming right under here, open Level Blueprints, we got a bunch of scripts that I've currently disabled all of the events for. I'll probably clean this up between videos and get rid of some of this old stuff here. Let's come under some empty space in our event graph. And I am going to right-click do a search for the T key, T inputs, inputs. Let's come under a keyboard. Keyboard events. Really, any keyboard event will do. I just want to go with T because T stands for tag. There's a tiki. And often this we're going to drag out a square and we're going to bring in a gets all actors with tag node. So unsurprisingly, this function will do exactly what it says it will do. It will get all actors with a given tag. Here's the name of the tag that we want to find. Anything with the tag thinking and with this out actors pin, it's got this sort of a waffle type icon that is going to give us an array of actors that have this tag. That means a list of actors that have that tag. Let's right-click on this, Promote to variable. And let's simply call this our thingy array. You can see it created this variable over here. So when I press the T key. We are going to store all references to actors that have this thing you tag inside of this array. And this array is going to be a listing of all actors that have this tag. Alright, so that will happen when we press the T key. Let's do something to all of these actors then. Now that we've got a reference to all these actors, what do we wanna do with it? Well, I'm going to right-click and some empty space. Once again, I'm going to bring in the up key keyboard event for up. And I thought that that was appropriate because we're going to be moving up these actors in the z coordinate. I'm going to drag in my thingy array, we're gonna get that. And then off of this, I am going to drag out a wire and bring in a for each loop. Again, we're going to be talking about these for each loops, these flow control nodes later on in the course. What you all need to know for now is that for each item in this list, each item in this array, we're going to do something to it. And what we wanna do is for each item in here, each element, we want to add actor local offsets. And we end, we're going to move it in a given direction at an offset to it. And we're going to change the delta location. That is, how much do we want to change it from its initial location versus where it is the next time we press the up key, up 50 unreal units in the z-direction. So Tiki is going to get a reference to all actors with this tag. The up key is going to look at all items within this array, all items in this list stored in here. And for each item here, we're going to add an offset here that is to move it up in the z location. Now, I'm going to compile this script. Everything is going to look good. However I know, let me save this as well. When I play this in error is going to occur. I'm going to let this happen, but let's go ahead and give this a play. Alright, so I added that tag onto that. They're cylinder, the flames, the ceiling lights that cross and the wall in the background. Let me do shift in F1. So I can minimize this. I want you to see this script firing off here as well. So I'm going to shrink this down a little bit. And I'm going to press the T key. So I've got a reference now to all of those actors bearing that thing you tag. Now I'm going to press the up key, that is the up arrow key. And well, some things move up. But that cylinder does not. And that's the era was talking about. Let me go ahead and escape. And the air is going to demonstrate what is happening here. It's gonna have mentioned that this Static Mesh Component has to be set to movable if we'd like to be able to move it. So static meshes aren't going to just move without us changing one of their settings to movable. So that's easily fixed by going back into our tests level here, selecting our cylinder. Right here. It's talking about the mobility setting of the cylinder, changing this to movable. So once again, if we were to go ahead and play this, let me shrink this script down here a little bit. So right up here, pressing the t key, we've got an array of all the actors with a tag of thinking. And now, once I press the up arrow key, all of them will move up 50 unreal units. We're going to add 50 as an offset every time we press the up key. So let's just think about all the possible use cases of creating references in this way using a tag. Well, maybe you're spawning some different enemies and your level as time goes by during a match, say every 20 seconds. And so you can't ever be sure how many enemies exist at a time in your map. Now say you want to destroy all enemies in maybe some environmental objects. Whenever the player collects super-duper, destroy all item. We could get all actors having a given tag, say upon overlapping that super-duper, destroy all item and then destroy, adjust those items. So all kinds of good, useful use cases for that. One more side note I wanted to give here before ending this video, we can do a check to see if an individual actor has a tag. How would we do that? Well, I've got my cylinder selected here in my level, back in my Level Blueprint, I'm going to right-click. I'm going to create a reference to that cylinder. And off of any reference here, I can simply do a search for actor has tag function. Then I could plug this into a branch node so I could do a search here to see, hey, does that cylinder have the tag of thing? And if it's true, we can do one thing. If it's false, we could do another. Just wanted to point that out here as well. All right guys, that is how you can go about creating references using tags. That'll do to offer this one. See you in the next one. 25. Event Begin Play: Welcome back everyone. In this section of the course, we're going to be exploring events in greater detail. We're gonna be exploring some of the more commonly used events in Unreal, starting off with Event, Begin Play. Now our goal specifically in this video is to gain an understanding of what the begin at play event is, where you can find it and how we can make use of it in unreal. Now, jumping into our level test map, our Level Blueprint here. You can find that by going here, open Level Blueprint. You can see that I've set up some script prior to shooting this video. I'm going to run all of this off of Event. Begin Play. Now it looks a little intimidating, but I'm going to walk you through the different things that I'm doing and why I'm doing it. Now. First of all, how do you get an event? Begin play in here? Well, a couple of methods. One you can right-click and just type in begin play like cell, That's how you can find it. Alternatively, I like to use the hotkey shortcut, which is to simply hold down the P key and left-click. Now, fun thing to note here before we even hook this up is you can only have one event begin play per blueprint. And it doesn't matter how many graphs you have. If you remember earlier in this course, I created a second graph called node types. Now if I jump on over to my node types graph, I'm currently in my Event Graph, Graph. And I hold down the P key and left-click. I can't find it. Alternatively, if I type in a search bar by right-clicking and typing in, Begin Play and I click on it, going to jump me to my Event Graph tab. So that's one thing to note. You can only have one event begin play per blueprint. So then that begs the question, well, what if I want to do multiple things off of the event? Begin play? Do I just need a long strand of script to make multiple things happen? Well, no, you don't. That's where this sequence node comes in handy. We will talk more about the sequence node later on in the course. But just know that the sequence node is something that you can use to essentially split your signal. So by plugging event begin play into a sequence node. You can add more output pins and then make one thing happen, then another, then another, and another, all in sequential order. So let's explore what I'm going to be doing in here. Off of event B in play inside of my Level Blueprint. Well, the first thing I'm gonna do is play a sound event. Begin play is a great event to use if you want some music to simply start up at the beginning of your level. The second thing I'm gonna be doing right down here is getting my player character casting to my ThirdPersonCharacter and then storing my third-person character inside of this variable so that we can make use of it. So casting to our ThirdPersonCharacter and then encapsulating it inside of this variable. Right down below is where we're actually going to be using this variable that we just stored here. We're going to get our character reference that we stored here. We're gonna get our actors location and then we're going to set that inside of this vector variable. So something that is often done off of event begin play as well is something called initializing variables, that is to give it an initial value. Now earlier in this course, and just talking about generally the different variable node types, I create a variable of a vector variable that had default values of 000 and they would be 000 if I didn't give them some other value. In this case, I am initializing it. That is giving it some initial value that is based upon my characters location. So it's going to feed our characters location into this and store it inside of this vector variable. Initializing variables is something that is commonly done off of begin play. And I'm also going to print the results of this off to the screen so that we can see the location of our character reference when this is set. So three things we're doing here, off of event begin play. We're going to play some music. We're going to create a reference to our character. And then we're going to use our character reference to help initialize this vector variable. Here we go. So you can see some initialization of our vector variable right here as being printed off to the screen. You can hear the music. And of course this character reference it as being said. That's not something that is very visual at all, but that is being done off of the event begin play. Next, let's talk about where you can and cannot find Event Begin Play. As you can see it is here in my Level Blueprint. What about my sub level blueprint isn't available in there as well? Yes, it is. And I'm going to click right here to open the sublevel Level Blueprint. And I created some scripts prior to this video in which I am going to delay for three seconds and then play an explosion sound and I'm going to debug so we can see this firing off. But you will notice that once I play in wait for three seconds and nothing seems to happen. The reason for that is because I am not loading this subnet level blueprint. And what I mean by that. If I go back to my levels tab, I need to right-click on the sublevel, change the streaming method from blueprints to always loaded. And now if I go back into my sublevel, I can click Play. You see that event firing off the delay counting down, and that will make Event Begin play, play the stuff that comes after it. So it is available in a low blueprint as well as a sub-level blueprint. Also, the event begin play can be found in actor class blueprints such as our example pickup here. Again, I added this prior to shooting this video. You can also find it in third-person character blueprints. You can see we're using it here to create our HUD and show it on the screen. However, you will not find this in our widget blueprints. Here's our health meter, the Widget Blueprint. And if I go over to the graph tab, and I right-click and some empty space and type in and begin play. You won't find it. Event Construct is essentially the event begin play if you will, inside of a Widget Blueprint, you also will not find it inside of a game instance blueprint, but pretty much every other Blueprint class you can find Event Begin Play. And lastly, one more very important thing to mention about Event Begin played before we wrap up this video. While it's true that this event does fire off when we begin play, what do we do for different actors that spawn in at some other points during play? When does Event Begin Play Start for them? Well, event began play starts for those blueprints. The moment those things is fun. And just to show this, I'm going to scroll down here a little bit in my level test map, and I've set up a little bit more script off of event begin play, where I'm going to be spawning a blueprint, ceiling light that was found MI star contents after three seconds. Now, let me just bring this on down a little bit here. So you can see it's a little bit better. After three seconds in our low blueprint, we're going to be spawning this blueprint ceiling light at a given transform non gotta feed this a transformer. This is going to fail. Let me go in here and I'm going to add a all classes I clicked right here. All classes will find a note. Let's find a note actor just to give us a place in space to reference. I'm going to lift, lift it up in the air like so. With that selected, I'm going to jump back to my Level Blueprint, hold down the R key, left-click, There's my note actor. I'm gonna get that actors transform. We're going to spawn this ceiling light. Now, what I did prior to this video in my blueprint, ceiling light, and once again, that could be found in my star content blueprints. This ceiling light right here is I created this bit of script where I am beginning play. We're gonna delay another three seconds. I'm going to set my point lights attenuation radius. That's essentially how far of an area or point light can affect. We're also going to set its light color to this pinkish color. This event begin play is going to fire off the moment it's spawns into our level. And again, I'm spawning into our level here in my level test map off of event begin play. So let's debug this setting that lake. So we tried to frame this up like that. Okay, compile that, make sure our script is all good. And in here we go off to the right there. After three seconds. That light does indeed turn. So once again, here in my blueprints, ceiling light, this event began play fired off as soon as this actor spawned into the level. So to review event begin play, it is great for running script at the outset of play. In this case, playing some music is great for creating object references. In this case, creating our ThirdPersonCharacter reference is great for initializing variables. In this case, I'm using it to initialize our vector variable here. It's also good for spawning actors after a given amount of time. Plenty of things you can do off of event. Begin play. Well guys, that is going to do it often. This video we will see you in the next one. 26. Event Tick: Welcome back everyone. In this video, our goal is to understand what event tick is, where we can find it and how it can be used. Now, since this is an event that fires off every frame, you must use this event carefully or you risk totally destroying your game's performance. That is, your frame rate can suffer in a big, big way. So use this event with caution. So events it can be found in just about any blueprint inside of Unreal that includes Level Blueprints, sublevel blueprints, and most class blueprints. One exception to that, but I know for sure is the game instance blueprint. We will talk more about that important blueprint type later on in the course. I'm just going to right-click it some empty space here. I'm going to create a new Blueprint Class of the actor type. I could choose any of these. I'm going to choose actor. I'm going to leave it as that default name, and I'm going to simply double-click on it to open it up. And you can see when we jump on over to the Event Graph, that event tick is one of the default events that is immediately available to you. Now, if you were to delete this out, let me go ahead and do that. I could right-click and type in Tick, and I can add it back in there. Now you can only have one of these paragraphs. So if I was to right-click and type in Tick again, in simply going to be like yep, there it is. It's going to jump you right to it. Now I'm going to delete out this blueprint right here and I'm going to jump on over to my Level Blueprint to do some things with event ticks. So open Level Blueprint. There is my event tick. It is also worth noting that you can only have one event tick per a blueprint, not per graph. This is my Level Blueprint. In, in my Level Blueprint, I have currently two graphs, my Event Graph Graph and my known types graph which I created. I was creating my video talking about the different node types in Unreal. So if I was in my Event Graph, Right-click and type in the word tick and clicked on it. It's going to jump me over to my node types graph meal. Yep, there's your event tick. There it is. Now event tick, as we said earlier, it fires off every frame. Now, it's worth noting that you can show your frame rate in the level editors. So we're going to do that now before we continue talking about events here, jump back to your level editor. And here you've got this three line hamburger icon, if you will, go ahead and left-click on that. Right here, show frames per second Control Shift and h, doing that will output your frame rate to the screen that's 120 frames per second that I'm currently running it. That's 8.33 milliseconds. Alright, so something else that's worth pointing out here is you can set a fixed frame rate. This is kinda a little bit of a tangent here, but it's worth noting as well. If you go into your settings, project settings, and you type in frame rates, I like to fill these videos with all kinds of knowledge. I could use a fixed frame rate. Right now it's set to 30. There's no Save button here or anything. And now if I was to jump back to my level editor, they're showing I'm currently running at 30 frames per 2.33rd, 33 milliseconds, going to undo what I just did. So event tick fires off every frame. Let's do something with our events inside of our Level Blueprint. So let me just move it on up here. And I am going to add, we'll add an enemy to our level. Not a fancy enemy of course, but here in my content browser, I'm going to come under my mannequins folder, my meshes folder. You can place anything in your level here. It's going to represent a simple, stupid, non-functioning enemy. I'm going to drag and drop this Quinn simple into my level. And with that selected, I'm going to jump back into my Level Blueprint. I'm going to hold down the R key in left-click to create a reference to our Quinn simple enemy there, if you will. And off of event tick, I'm going to drag off of this and I'm going to type in is valid. I want this question mark version. I'm going to be checking if my inputted objects here, my enemy is valid. That is, does it exists? And if it does not exist, meaning it is been destroyed. We're going to do once. What are we gonna do once? Well, we're going to play a sound indicating that it has gone, bye-bye. We're going to play a sound 2D, and we'll play a confirm sound VR confirmed q. Now if we're going to go with this checking to see if it is valid or not. We need to have some means of destroying this actor. We need to destroy it so that it then checks as not being valid. Remember, this event tick is going to fire off every second. So I'm going to right-click and some empty space down here and we'll do the four key. In off of the four key, I'm going to pull down our left-click to bring in another reference to our Quinn simple. And I'm going to drag off of this and type in Destroy Actor. Right? So the idea here is that every frame we're gonna be checking to see if our enemy Quinn symbol here is valid or not. If it is valid, meaning it exists, we're gonna do nothing. If it is not valid, meaning it's destroyed. Onetime we're going to play this sound and this is how we're going to destroy that actor. So this evaluates is not valid. Alright, let's go ahead and play. And you can see event tick is firing off every frame, but it's not getting beyond this is valid because it is continually checking is valid, yes, it exists in our level. However, once I press the F4 key, here we go. It is been destroyed. And you can see how we onetime played that sound. So that is a perfectly legit example of using event tick. Now, one thing I want to point out here is you can modify the tick rate. Now if our game is running it at 120 frames per second, event tick is going to fire off 120 times per seconds. Now, if I click on my class defaults button right up here, I can modify the tick interval. And again, it says in seconds, the frequency in seconds at which the tick function will be executed. So it doesn't have to fire off every frame. I can fire this off every two seconds, every three seconds, I'll go every five seconds. Now this is going to be a little bit extreme example. But now as soon as I destroy my actor, it's not going to play this sound immediately. Let's go ahead and give this a try. I'm going to click Play. I am going to press the F4 key to destroy our actor here. And then finally it played the sound a little bit lagging after that. And that's because it's only ticking, it's only firing out this event tick every five seconds. So that's a way that you can modify your event tick. Now here is a another practical use case for event tick. Having something rotates to face another thing throughout a game, such as this chair, because obviously you would have a chair rotating the face of player all the time. Now imagine if that was a security camera or a turret look into gunned down in the player and you wanted to attract the player. You could do that every frame it's changing its rotation of re-frame. Now, if you want to play along at home and see how I did this, I simply placed a static mesh chair in my level. You can find when they're in that directory, I changed the mobility for this selected chair to a movable in the Details panel. And then in my Level Blueprint, this is my script for having put that together. You get a reference to your chair by selecting your chair, holding down the Alt key and left clicking. And what I'm essentially doing here is I'm saying hate share. I want you to look at this player and update the rotation of that every frame. Now, we have not even talked about deltas seconds here. So let me, I'll put this to the screen firstly, we'll drag out here, go print string. Delta seconds is the amount of time between frames. So jumping back to my level editor here we're running at a 120 frames per second, which is 8.33 milliseconds. So if I play this, it should show that the time between frames is 0.0083 seconds because we're running at 120 frames per second. A 120 times that number is going to equal one full second. So there you have it. You might also notice that in the upper right, it is not showing my frames per second while I am playing, even though it is doing so in the level editor, the way we can get our frames per second to show up in our play window here is to simply tap Tilda key. That's the one to the left of the one key on most keyboards in the upper left. That's going to bring on a little console bar, if you will, at the bottom, if I type in stat FPS and hit Enter. Now show your frame rate in the upper right there. Good to know. Now you can use the output of Delta seconds in calculations that determine how much a given actor like a platform should move each frame. In this way, you can use that Delta seconds outputs to move a platform the same amount regardless of frame rate. That's a little bit more advanced. I'm not gonna get into that, but just giving you a quick primer on what Delta seconds could be used for most times you're not going to need it though. And finally, at the very beginning of this video, I mentioned about how you have to be careful using authentic. Because if you don't use it in a good manner, you could destroy your game's frame rates. So I'm going to demonstrate what not to do inside of my BP ThirdPersonCharacter. You can find that character blueprint here in this directory inside of your content browser. Inside of here I've pre-prepared a script. We're off of event tick. I am simply getting my actors transform. That is where this ThirdPersonCharacter is going to be located and rotated within the world. I'm then going to be spawning a blueprint effect fire that I've set right here. This is a spawn actor from class node. And out of this, what I simply did is I drug out of this and I am getting the fire audio component out of this blueprint. I'm just drawing that component as soon as I spawned it in every tick here, every frame. Because otherwise the audio for this gets really annoying, really fast. So note that once I click play here, my frame rate is going to be destroyed. It's gonna go from 120 frames per second down to 20 pretty quickly here. So here we go. Look in the upper right here. Notice that it is spawning a fire effect wherever my character is, every frame. And you can see how detrimental that is to the frame rate. And once again, if I go into my class default here and I set my tick rate to be something like, oh, let's, let's set it to every three seconds. This could be something that might be acceptable. So now, instead of this firing off every frame in my class defaults, I'm saying, hey, authentic only fire off every three seconds. And doing this, you can see that my frame rate is going to remain pretty steady at least for awhile, because I'm only spawning that particle effect every three seconds. So if you're going to use events tick and you really don't need to spawn something or rotate something or do something. Every frame come under the class defaults and set your tick interval to some number. Well guys, that is gonna do all for this one for event tick. We will see you in the next one. 27. Event Input: In this video, our goal is to show how we can utilise input events. One of the most common events using gaming to fire off a bit of script. Now when we're talking about input events, we're talking about things like key presses on the keyboard. It could be button presses like the a or B button on a traditional controller. Or it could be something like touching a device, a mobile phone, or an iPad, that kind of thing. Uh, typically these input events are simply registering. Did you press it or did you release it? Input events are not to be confused with access events, which can read in a range of values like your left or right thumbsticks on a traditional control pad can tell if your character is moving just a little or if you're trying to run with them. So access events are different from input events. Now in the example I'm about to show you, we're going to be making it so that pressing a button makes our player character sprint. And then releasing that button causes us to return to our normal locomotion speed. I'm going to be using our ThirdPersonCharacter for this video. So if you want to play along at home, it's in the content third-person Blueprints folder. That's where you can find that blueprint. Double-click on it to open it up. And inside of here you can see that we have already made use of some input events. Specifically, I'm using the arrow key on my keyboard to send out a line trace into the world. And up above here I'm using the five key to hide or show my HUD Widget Blueprint that I am creating upon begin play. If I move over to the left here a little bit, there are some other input events that were here by default. We have an input action jump that this is set in your project settings and I'll show you how to do that and just a little bit. And we've also got a touch input. So both of these are making our character jump or stop jumping. Alright, I'm going to add this sprint script just to the right of our jumped scripts. So right-clicking in some empty space, I'm going to type in the word keyboard to find all of our different keyboard events. And you can bind this to whichever key, like I'm gonna do it with the L key. And I'm also going to bring in a another event as well. I'm going to right-click and some empty space. And I'm gonna do a search for a game pad, face button, bottom. Now, as you know, the PlayStation and Xbox controllers are pretty identical. So gamepad face button bottom corresponds to the x button on the PlayStation controller, or I believe it's the a button on the Xbox controller. You know that diamond configuration over on the right-hand side. So they named them rather agnostic, so as not to call out one particular controller or another. Okay, what do we want to have happen when we press the L key on a keyboard or hooked up gamepad to your computer. Well, we're going to grab our character movement component here, because if we select our character moving component, you can see that we've got a lot of different properties that we can modify about that, including our max walk speed, that is this parameter right here. This is determining how fast our character is moving throughout the world. So I'm going to drag in our character movement controller or Character Movement Component, not controller. For this, I'm going to drag out and I'm going to say is set max walk speed. Once again, that is going to allow us to modify our max walk speed. And I'm going to hit Control C and copy that Control V to paste that. Like so. And so when I press the L key and release the L key would all want our max walk speed to be. Well, you can see that currently I have my max walk speed set to 500. I'm going to say when I release it, I want it to set it back to 500. But when I want to sprint, I'm going to set this to be something like 3 thousand something kinda crazy. Now I currently don't have my gamepad face button hooked up to this as well. But I can, I can make it so that by either pressing the L key or the face button bottom on a gamepad, I can set our max walk speed to 3 thousand. Or if I release the alkene or release that face button bottom, I can set our max walk speed back to what it was. Going to left-click, drag, tap the C key. This is my Sprint script. Compile this to make sure that the script is looking good. And then let's go ahead and set up click Play. And I'm going to set our debug option right up here to be our ThirdPersonCharacter. Let me just bring in that play window once again. Alright, so you can see we hit shift in F1 to kinda move this down a little bit. Now you are going to be able to see as I press the L key, that script firing off. And then when I release it, it's going to set my max walk speed back. So WFISD to move around, holding down the L key, moving much faster, releasing it. Going much slower. Alright, now this is not ideal. I've got two separate input events essentially doing the same thing. And they're also not very descriptive. I've gotten L, a key and a gamepad face button bottom, essentially doing the same thing. Is there a way that I can simplify this? And the answer is yes, you can. What we're gonna do is jump back to our main level editor. And over in the settings, project settings, we're going to come under the left-hand side and select the input category. And in here we can create our own action mapping, input events. We've got access mappings or action mappings. It's very important that you do this under the action mappings. Now if I expand out this triangle right here, we can see that one action mapping input event already exists called jump. And this is interesting because if we go back to our third-person character, go back to our jumps grip, we have an event node called input action jump. The reason this exists is because in our project settings we created a jump action mapping that is an event node named jump. And currently if I expand this out, I can see that two inputs will call for this input action to happen. A spacebar on your keyboard or the gamepad face button bottom. So we're gonna be adding a new action mapping here. Click this plus button to add a new action mapping. And we're gonna name it whatever we want. I'm going to call mine sprints. And I'm gonna say, this is gonna be bound to L key. Or clicking. I can add as many of these I want. I'm going to make it so the gamepad, Let's do face button, right? Sure. Gamepad face button, right? Either of these pressing the L key or the gamepad face button rights would make it so that our character can sprint. Now there's no Save button or anything in here. With this created, I can jump back to our ThirdPersonCharacter Blueprint. I can now right-click in some empty space and type in the word sprint. And it will find our new action event that we just created called Sprint. Going to name the node input action sprint, I can now delete out these two nodes, hook them up thusly. And if I were to jump in and play once again, W, a, S, and D to move around holding down the L key. And you can see that I am sprinting, releasing will gradually, slowly back down. Now, the next very important thing to realize about input events is that while you can add them to a whole host of Blueprint types, not all of them will fire them off by default. However, some will. If you were to add input events to your Level Blueprint, this will execute as expected. You press the Z key, it's going to print out this string level to the screen. It will also do it for character and pawn blueprints. So if I press the X key within my ThirdPersonCharacter Blueprint, it is going to print this out as well. It will also do it for player controller blueprints. And now that's gonna be something we talk more about later on in the course. But inside of my project settings right here, under maps and modes player controller, that is the blueprint type that I'm talking about. You can use input events inside of the player controller blueprint without any sort of special setup. However, in something like an actor class blueprint like BP example, pickup here. If I was to press the C key, one of these in my level, it's not going to print this out to the screen. So just to demonstrate this, let me go ahead and click Play, clicking on my window here to activate that, I'm going to press the Z key. You see that texts level appearing in the upper left. If I press the X key multiple times, you see that texts printed out. However, if I press that C key, that texts that's supposed to say pickup here in the upper left, that's not going to print out. And that is because actor class blueprints are not set up to register input events. By default, however, you can change this within the class default of this blueprint. So if I select my class defaults here over in the right-hand side, I've got a category called input. And as auto receive input in here is currently disabled. However, if I change this to player 0 because I've currently got a single-player game. That'll make it so that now when I press the C key, it'll print this out to the screen. Let's go ahead and try this. Now when I press the C key, you can see the texts pickup now is printed out to the screen. Now, it is worth noting here that here in my class defaults I had to change this inside of my actor class blueprint. For the auto receive input to be player 0. If you look in something like say your ThirdPersonCharacter Class default and you go to the input section. It currently also says auto receive input is disabled as well. However, once again, character and upon class blueprints level blueprints and a player controller blueprints. They will register these by default, even though this is a little misleading here saying auto receive input is disabled. Next, we need to talk about how unreal prioritizes the same input event when used in multiple blueprints. And to demonstrate this in my Level Blueprint, I'm using the X key to print a string. I'm also using the x input inside of my third-person character now. And I'm also using it inside of my BP example pickup. Well, it's hooked up in three areas. So if I click Play and press the X key, which one is it going to prioritize? And you can see is prioritizing my actor at class blueprint right here, because I have enabled in my class defaults that I will receive input from player 0, me, the loan player. So the prioritization goes as follows. If you have a setup like this using the same input after class, BP's will be prioritized first, followed by Control or player controller blueprints than level controller blueprints and then Character Controller blueprints. Now, what happens if two blueprints of the same type receive inputs? Well, in that case, we would take in this higher input priority. Now to demonstrate this, I'm going to unhook Just to make it perfectly clear, the X key inside of my ThirdPersonCharacter and inside of my test map. And now I've got my example pickup hooked up to the x key. And I'm also using my BP example construction script inside of here. I'm also going to be hooking up my X key to print out this string. Also note here inside of my class defaults. I've set up under the input area for player 0, that is me to receive input here. Currently both of them are sets to input priority 0. Input priority 0, there it is. So which one is it going to show? Is going to show this pickup or is it going to show the construction script? Well, if I play it in press X, it's going to prioritize the one that I added that x input to. Most recently. How ever? If I was to go into my example pickup and change the priority to a larger number, something higher than what is in the construction script. It could be one, it could be 100, it could be 5 thousand. Sure, Let's just go 5 thousand. It should now print out pickup as soon as I press the X key. There we go. And finally, one more thing I wanted to add about input events within your graphs is that if you have that node selected, there are some options over in the Details panel you can fiddle around with. This is a quick way for you to change the input key right here. You can also add a modifier. So instead of in this case pressing the X key, you could be forced to press the Alt and x keys at the same time in order to make something happen. But the one I really wanted to talk about that I learned through trial and error was this execute when Pause options. A lot of games, you have it set up so that if you press a certain button, you can pause the game. And then if you want to unpause it, you press that same button. We'll check out this setup. I've got going here. I've currently got it set up so that when I press the X key, I am going to pause the game. And then when I released the X key, I'm supposed to be unpause it and the game, but watch what happens here. I'm gonna go ahead and click Play. You can see this spinning health pickup over here that's going to really show off that the game is paused or not. I'm pressing the X key and everything pauses. I released the X key and everything remains pause. And the reason for that is I am not allowing this event to continue to be executed when the game is paused, that's currently set to false. So if I want to make it that this will continue to execute even while the game is pause, I'm going to check this box. And so when I press the X key now, it'll pause the game. However, when I released the X key, it will un-pause game because this is also going to execute when pause. Here we go, holding down x, it's pausing it and now I'm going to release ECS. And it also fired off that pressing, or in this case, releasing of the X key. So there you have it guys that is gonna do it all for this one about input events, we will see you in the next one. 28. Event Axis: Welcome back everyone. In this video, our goal is to learn what access events are in unreal, how we can create them, in how we can use them. Now in actuality, our character blueprint already has some access events inside of it and working. Let's go ahead and check those out. First, coming into your content third-person Blueprints folder, you will find your BP ThirdPersonCharacter. Double-click on that to open it up. And this is where we left off creating our sprint input event, that action input events. And this already had jumped input action event that the fine folks at Epic Games had already included with this. Now up above you will find some axis events and it even says it in the name. We've got an input axis event for moving forward and backward, one for moving left and right. This controls our character's movement. And then up here we have some camera input axis events, one for the gamepad, and then one here on PC for you, a mouse folk. And this is determining the movement of our camera left and right and up and down as we're moving that all around. Now, where did these axis events even come from? Well, if you remember from our last video inside of our project settings is where we can create not only input action events, but also these input axis events. So I'm going to come under my edit button in the far upper left of the editor. This is another way that you can access the project settings. Inside of your project settings come under the inputs option along the far left-hand side. And as you can see, we've got action mappings that we dealt with in the last video. And here we've got access mappings in here all the names for the various axis events that currently exists inside of our editor. Now if I expand out one of our axis events here, I can see that I can bind not only keyboard buttons to a given named access event. I can also buying some controller inputs as well that is similar to the input action mappings that we had in the last video, like our jump and our sprint. Now, we'll talk about what these scale values mean a little bit later on here. But before we even get to that, let's define what an axis events even in is how does this differ from an input event, one of these action input events, well, the main difference is access events are events that are fired off continuously, that is, once per frame to really drive home this point, let's jump over to our third person character blueprint. And if I zoom out just a little bit here and click Play, you can see that my various access events are firing non-stop. And it needs to because if it's gonna be handling our character movement per se, it needs to be updating our movement every single frame forward and back, left and right, as well as the camera movement right. Now another defining trait of access events is that they can output in axis value and this ties in. If I jump back to our project settings, these scale values that you see along the right-hand side of the various inputs. For w, we have a scale of one, and for S we have a scale of negative one. Now, to see these at play, let me jump back into my BP ThirdPersonCharacter. And I'm going to modify this script here just ever so slightly. I'm going to right-click and some empty space and type in print string. And I'm going to take our input axis, move forward and backward, pipe it right through here. And I'm going to be outputting the axis value. It's going to convert this float into a string, and it's going to print it out to the screen. Let's go ahead and do this now. And you can see once again, this is firing off every frame along the left-hand side, you're seeing a value of 0 because I'm not pressing down either W or S. Now, when I press the W key to move forward, look along the left-hand side of my play window. You see all those values change to one. My axis value is one. When I press the Esc key, it all changes to negative one. Now, on a keyboard is all or none, right? There's no gradient as you can get with an analog stick where you can just kinda nudge it just a little bit. On a keyboard. It's just one. Give me all of this going forward, or the opposite of one, which is negative one. We're using the values of one and negative one to mean one thing going forward, or the opposite of that thing in this case, which is going backwards. Now, if this is all little confusing, you can mouse over this scale value on this function node for adding movement input. And they can tell you that it can be used also for analog input. It does not have to be just one or negative one. These scale settings are just determining the range. And you can have a range with an analog stick, whereas you cannot have that with keyboard events. Now, I currently do have a controller hooked up to my computer to demonstrate this. Let me jump back in here. Click Play. And now I'm going to be using my Xbox controller and pressing forward with the left thumbstick ever so slightly. And you can see the value is 0.08. And as I nudge it forward more and more, it is giving me good as getting me closer to one. Whereas if I pull down on the thumbstick ever so slightly, and then more and more and more and more, it's getting me closer to my other bounds, which is negative one. So the analog stick is allowing me to go somewhere between negative 11. Now to further drive home this point I have a graphic here for you. Looking at a bird's eye view, top-down view of our character. This is our left thumbstick. In the Project Settings under our access mappings, we set our w to have a scale value of one That's as far as we can go, that equals you are going forward as fast as you can. On the opposite end. Our S key has a value, a scale value of negative one, meaning the opposite of one, in this case going in the reverse direction. Now again, on a keyboard, if you press W, There is no, no in-between here. You're either going from 0. I'm not moving all the way to one, I am going forward and full speed. If I tap the S key, that means I am going backwards at full speed. There is no in-between, however, with the left thumbstick, you can make it so that you could just nudge it forward a little bit and get halfway to your bounds of one or negative 0.5 to your bounds of negative one going in the reverse direction. Now, it is worth noting here that your scale values do not have to run from one to negative one. You could set some other scale values, but oftentimes that is the range set. Alright, Next, let's go ahead and create a couple of access events that we can make use of. So I'm going to click this plus button under Access Mappings, make sure you do not do this under Action Mappings. Plus let me collapse my move forward and back. I'm going to name this first one companion. Move horizontal. And I'm going to set this to my L key. We're gonna do some keyboard events will do L, the L key. And the scale for this is gonna be 11 more time. I'm going to set the opposite of this to be the J key. And that's going to have a scale of negative one. Then I'm going to add another axis of mapping here. This is going to be called companion, move vertical. And we're going to set this to have the icky with the scale set to one. And the opposite of that of that is going to be the K key and set the scale for that to negative one. Now what we're gonna be aiming to do here is to add a component to our ThirdPersonCharacter. And using these Access Mappings, we're gonna be able to move that object around. It's gonna be a simple sphere. So companion, move horizontal, companion, and move vertical. We've set that up in our project settings in the input category, Let's jump back over to our ThirdPersonCharacter. And the first thing we're going to do before we even deal with those access events that we've just created. We're going to add a components. So click under components, we're going to add a component. We're going to add a simple sphere components. Now over in the Details panel, actually let's go to the view port first so we can see that sphere, that is a giant, enormous sphere. I'm going to firstly set the scale down. I want to set a uniformly down. So let's go ahead and click this lock button so that if I change one of these values, 2.5, it will change all three of them. That's what that lock icon does. I'm also going to set the location to be to 20 in the x-axis. Just too, set it out in front of our character just a little bit. Now I'm also going to create two variables to help us out with our script that we're gonna be writing here. The first is going to be coming under variables plus it's going to be called companion horizontal rates. And this is going to be a float variable because it's going to be a decimal point value. I'm going to right-click on this. I'm going to duplicate this and this is gonna be called companion. Vertical rates, mips misspelled there a little bit. And if I compile, I can set some default values here. So I'm going to set my horizontal rates to be ten. And I'm also going to check this box, for instance, editable that'll come into play here a little bit later. And I'll do the same for my companion Vertical rate. I'll set that to ten as well. Also check this box, for instance, editable. And let's go ahead and save that. Next, let's go ahead and create some script over in our event graph using those axis events that we just created. So moving over to the left here a little bit, going to right-click and some empty space, I'm going to type in and move horizontal. And there's my axis event for companion, move horizontal. Now, don't be confused between the axes values and the axis events. We want companion move horizontal with a little arrow icon right there. Boom. Now I'm going to right-click and we're going to type in move vertical, vertical. That little right arrow icon indicates in events as well. Alright, and what we wanna do is we want to move our sphere here a little bit every frame. So go ahead and drag and drop this into our graph. Right here and down here. And I'm going to drag out of our sphere and typing add relative location. So we want to update the location of this sphere, every single frame. I'm going to plug this in right away. The delta location is how much we want to change our relative location. So to do this, I'm going to drag out of our axes value and do a search for a multiply node. I want to multiply this by our different rates here. I really could have done just one variable here and call that just companion rate. But just to play nice here, I'm going to plug in our companion and horizontal rate directly into there. And then I am going to pull backwards off of this delta location and type in make vector. We're looking for a make vector node. Now again, this vector value is looking for an x, y, and z. We only want to change the location for this axis events. In the y-axis, we're going to be moving it horizontally. So the y-axis, the y-axis, that green arrow. So that's gonna be that scripts. And we're going to do similarly down here. I'm going to copy and paste these three nodes right here, 123 highlighting all three of them, control C, control V. Tidy this up a little bit. The sphere is the thing that we do onto move around. And we got to make sure we get our axes value in here, in our companion, in this case, Vertical rate right here. Once again, we could have just created one variable called companion rate, since they're the same value. But I do want it to show off this instance editable feature here in just a little bit. Alright, we're gonna compile this. We are going to save this in. Now, if we look back in our project settings, you can see that if we move the L and the J key, we're going to move this companion, if you will, horizontally. And if we press the I or the KCI, we're going to move it vertically. So jumping back into our level editor here, I'm gonna go ahead and click platelet. Actually, let's fire this off from our ThirdPersonCharacter. I want to see the script firing off. So click play here. You can see once again, these are firing off nonstop. I should really unhook that print string. In fact, let me do that now. I'm going to unhook this print string from earlier because that's just gonna be confusing. Alright, I'm clicking playing. Those events are firing off. You can see that little sphere there in front of me. I'm going to do the input axis, move horizontal. So J, K, L key, like so. Icky and KCI is also moving it horizontally as well. And the reason for that is because I made this mistake of simply having both of them changing the y location. I'm going to hold down Control, left-click and plug this into the z location and that should fix up that issue. Now. J and L and I and k. Yes, you can put it through the floor. Now one fun feature here is that because we're doing some multiplication here to ultimately determine the rate at which we are changing the location of our sphere. I can go back to my level editor. I'm going to change my place settings, clicking on these three dots right here to the selected viewport. Once I do that, I'm going to play the game and my select the viewport. My ThirdPersonCharacter, which has spawned into the level here is now showing up in my outliner. That's what that yellowish color indicates that it was spawned into existence. And selecting this, I can search for a companion. And I can see these two variables that I have exposed to the editor here from my BP ThirdPersonCharacter by checking that instance editable box on each of these variables. Now what this allows me to do is as I press the R or the J and L key, or the I and K keys, That's great. But shifting F12 gain control, I can modify these values down in the editor now, so I'll change the horizontal rate to be quite slow and the vertical rate to be quite fast. Then right-clicking back here, my viewport, J and L, it's updating slowly, but up and down is going quite fast. So that's just a fun feature I thought I would throw out there as well. Once I escape out of here, it is worth noting that those variable values switch back to their defaults. That's just to play around with different values in the game. A few more good to know items before we wrap this video up, as with the input action mappings found in the last video, you can select these events. And over in the right-hand side in the Details panel, you can modify a few things about them, including execute when pause, I fell to talk about this, consume input one that is also available on the input action mappings with this, if it is set to true, then that input will only work for the blueprint that has the highest default priority that implements it. Alright? That can be found again in your class defaults. Remember, under your input, this input priority, so that consume input only work for the one that's got the highest default priority. Now, another thing to note here with this, this fires off every frame, right? So you might be wondering, well, if I modify in my class defaults, the tick rate, will that affect this as well? No, it will not. Affecting the tick rate will only affect that event. Tick event, it will not affect the rate at which this ticks off. This is gonna go off every frame, whether you change this or not. All right guys, that is gonna do it all for this video, we will see you in the next one. 29. Event Begin Overlap: Have you ever played a game and wondered how when your character is walking down that dark hallway in a horror themed game, a zombie jumps out at just the right time to scare you. Or maybe you're playing a game like Uncharted. And as Nathan Drake is shimming along the edge of a rocky cliff, the rocky cliff just so happens to collapse as he passes a precarious looking area. Now the way that's done in games is through something called trigger volumes. And more specifically, when you begin overlapping a trigger volume are going. This video is to show how we can use trigger volumes to initiate an actor begin overlap event. Now, this is one of the most common events triggered in all of gaming, and thus this is an essential events to know about. Alright, we're gonna get started here in the upper left of our editor, right here under the, uh, quickly add to the Project button, if you will. We can find volumes, trigger volume. You can place one this way into your level. Alternatively, you could come under the place actors panel, which will add a place actors panel to your level editor. In here you can find different tabs of different actors, including a Volumes tab. And in here, these are all listed alphabetically. You can find a trigger volume. Let me go ahead and place one of these. And alternatively under the Basics tab right here, you can find different shapes of volumes to add a trigger box or a trigger sphere. There is a few subtle differences between the two, although what we're aiming to do with these is going to be similar. It doesn't really matter which add. I'm going to add this Trigger box just to show off a couple of differences between this and my trigger volume. Now if the Trigger box selected in the Details panel, it's gonna give me access to a line thickness option under the Shape category. So I'm going to set that to ten right away. And then for the box extent I'm going to set that to be something like, well, let's go 300 by 300 by 300, something nice and big. I want this to be placed somewhere in front of my players. Start actor, but not too close, so I'm not overlapping it right away. We'll go something like that. It's fine if it's penetrating through the floor a little bit. Now, you can also set a shape color here. So if you unselect it, it will show that shape color of green. Otherwise, when you select it, it, it's got that yellow highlight. Now, this is just a show off, a little bit of difference between our Trigger box and our trigger volume. If I've got my trigger Volume selected, you can actually change the shape of this. This does not have to be cubic in shape. And to do that, you'd come under your brush settings. And under your brush shape, you could change that to be a cone. You could change that to be a staircase if you wanted to, a cylinder. And then there's different properties to change depending on the brush shape. But for the purposes of this video, I'm gonna get rid of this and just roll with this Trigger box. Functionality will be the same between those though. Alright, so we've got this actress selected in our level. I'm going to do some scripting here inside of our level blueprints. Let's go ahead and open that up. And I'm gonna put this in my Event Graph, Graph. And in some empty space, I'm going to simply right-click. And when you right-click with an object selected in your level, you can add an event for that object. In this case, it's Trigger box five is what is being called. And under the collision section, I would do a wanna do an add on actor, begin overlap. When something overlaps this Trigger box. We can do something and we can find out who the other actor was. This will output, it will let us know who the other actor was. Just to help visualize this, I'm going to drag off of my execution pin here and bring in a print string function. And I'm going to plug this other actor directly into this to get the display name of whatever is overlapping this, if I was to compile this and play, run my character through this and look in the upper left of my play window here, when I overlap this trigger volume, it will show me that it's a ThirdPersonCharacter overlapping this. Now you can't see this trigger volume currently in the level. Let's go ahead and fix that before we go any further here. So I'm gonna go back into my level editor here with my trigger box selected. I've got this actor hidden in Game checkbox checked, meaning this will be hidden in game. If I uncheck this, then go ahead and play. I can now see that trigger volume in all its ugly glory. Alright, let's make something happen when we overlap this trigger volumes. So going back to my level blueprint. I can get rid of this now, left-click and drag there so that I'll put the other actor. Well, let's drag out of this and let's do this casting to our third-person character just to ensure that we only want something to happen when our ThirdPersonCharacter is overlapping it also, we're going to be directly impacting our ThirdPersonCharacter here as well. So it's kind of a dual purpose why we're doing this. So when the other actor is the ThirdPersonCharacter, what do we wanna do? Well, we can reach into our ThirdPersonCharacter here in modify something about it. Including if I bring open my ThirdPersonCharacter Blueprint. Including we can modify some properties in this character movement components. So let's do that. And we remember the Character Movement Component can control things like how fast or a character moves. That's that max walk speed property right over here. So back here in my Level Blueprint, I'm going to drag out of my as BP ThirdPersonCharacter and typing character, whoops, character movements. We can find that at the very bottom here, get the Character Movement Component. And what do we want to modify inside of this Character Movement Component? Well, I wanted to modify this max walk speed. So I'm gonna go back to my Level Blueprint here. We're going to drag out of this and type in set max, walk, speed. Now you see this kind of thing done in games all the time. In fact, recently I got done playing Final Fantasy seven remake. There are areas in that game where Cloud strife is walking along and his movement speed slows. So what's happening there is cloud is overlapping a Trigger box and the character max speed is being set to down to a walking pace to prevent me from running through an area. Maybe I'm going through a tight space or something like that. I'm going to set the max walk speed down to 200 here when I'm overlapping this Trigger box, Let's compile, make sure our script is looking all good here. And then let's play. Now let me set my debug option up here to my level test map so you can see this event firing off. Move this on up. Alright? And you can see that I'm running at a decent pace. But when I go an overlap this trigger volume, I slow on down. Now you can see that when I exited this trigger volume, I don't speed back up. And that's because this is an on actor begin overlap event. It's affecting my characters setting my max walk speed when I'm overlapping it, but I'm not telling it to go back to any usual max walk speed when I end that overlap. Now that's a very basic example, but let's take this a few ridiculous steps further just to show you the range of things you could do on an actor begin overlap. Well, one thing you could do is you could drag off of this and you could play sound at location. What location? Well, we could say our trigger box's location. Let's right-click and some empty space. I've still got my trigger box selected in the level. So let's create a reference to a Trigger box. Drag off of this and say Get Location, get actor, location. Don't really need to do this at a given location, but I'm going to play some music at a given location. Sure. Right. That's something we could do. Something else we could do is we could dry off of this and we could spawn actor from class. What do we want to spawn? Well, let's first of all, we need to tell us where to spawn. So using our Trigger box once again, I can drag off of this and say yet actor transform. So what do we want to spawn at that location rotation? Let's spawn in sure, some smoke showing. Then we can also do something like drag off this and type in spawn system at location. Now system is going to spawn any Niagara particle system. So unreal had this thing where they used to every particle system called cascade and that was the older system. Some of the explosions and fire effects that you've seen me use thus far. That's the older particle system, but the rolling with the Niagara particle system from Huron. So if you wanted to add a Niagara particle system, you can go to the Epic Games Store and in the marketplace under Unreal Engine five, you could come under visual effects. You could set the max price to free. And you can look to add some of these Niagara particle effects to your project. That's pretty simple. I'm not gonna do that now because it's going to take a little bit of time. But if you were to select one of these, you could add to the project. Select which projects we wanted to add it to. What the heck? I am going to add this probably after this video at the project. And that's how you would do that. As soon as you click on this button, back here in your level editor, you would see the appropriate folders show up that would have those particle effects inside. And that would then allow you to slot in an appropriate system. Of course, you would need to tell this where you want to spawn it. Alright, so just to demonstrate this, let's go ahead and click play one more time. And when we overlap this, slowing down, playing some music, and our blueprints effect is emitting some smoke right? Smack dab in the center. Archery. Lastly, it is important to realize that these begin overlap events are not just restricted to these trigger volumes that you find here in your place actors panel. On the contrary, I would venture to say that most of the begin overlap events that I use in scripting are found inside of blueprint classes themselves. Now, to demonstrate this, let's go back inside of our bp example pickup. Double-click on that to open it up. And if you remember from the beginning of the course, we were using a sphere collider, a trigger volume to check to see if our third-person character was overlapping that in order to collect it. Now if I come under this components panel right here and click Add, if I scroll on down, there are different types of trigger volumes are under the collision category, but there's box collision, capsule shape collision, and sphere collision. Now with any of these added to a blueprint, if you select it over on the right-hand side, you can see that you've got a begin overlap event associated with it. This is at the very bottom. Alternatively, if I was to right-click on this and come under Add events, that same event is available here as well. Just as a reminder here, my event graph. Here's where I'm using an odd component, begin overlap. This is a trigger volume of sorts. It's just an odd component. It's a component trigger volume currently in a spherical shape. And it always list the name of the component here in parentheses, just like in the Level Blueprint, it lists the name of the trigger volume in parentheses as well. This is just an actor begin overlap in my BP example, it's on component begin overlap. They are both overlap events in which you can fire off some script. Well guys, that's gonna do it all for this one. In the next video, we will talk about the end overlap events. Will see you there. 30. Event End Overlap: Welcome back everyone. In this video, our goal is to show how trigger volumes can also be used to fire off and overlap events. Now sometimes you want something to happen to when you begin to enter an area and sometimes you want things to happen when you exit an area. The end overlap event is for those times you want something to happen when you exit an area. Now we left off last video where when I entered this volume, this trigger volume right here, it would slow my character down. Now I did a few more ridiculous things like play some music and spawn a particle effect, that sort of thing. But I am not actually speeding my character back up once I exited that volume. So in here, we're going to explore how to do just that. Now before we even get to that, I'm going to jump back into my Level Blueprint right here. And I did finish off adding a Niagara particle system at the very end here. And I just wanted to point out in the last video, I directed you to the Epic Game Store. And while we're in here, I went to the marketplace and we were seeking out some visual effects. You E5, I went under a UE five visual effects and I think I was pointing out under the free packs. This one right here, this is the old cascade system. If you want some Niagara effects, go with one that says Niagara right here. Now I did include this between videos. And so thusly when I play it now, you will see I've got a queen at shower that is going to be spawning in there as well. Just wanted to point that out to complete that last bit. Alright, let's get on with the end overlap. So you can see on the begin overlap where slowing our character down. Well, let's speed them back up. Now, just like we showed off in the last video, if we want to add this event to our Level Blueprint, you need to make sure that you've got that actor selected in your level. So let's go ahead and make sure that we've got trigger volumes selected. You can select it here or over in your Outliner. Either way we will do. And back in your Level Blueprint. That's how you can get back into the love blueprint. Go ahead and right-click and some empty space, we can add an event for this which is known as Trigger box five for me, don't be alarmed if it says something else for you. Trigger box 27 or whatever. Really depends on how many trigger boxes you've added thus far. Here we want to do in an overlap. Alright? We're also going to do a casting to our ThirdPersonCharacter. We want to find out if the thing that ended the overlap Cast to ThirdPersonCharacter was the third person character. Now, if it was the ThirdPersonCharacter that ended overlapping, that trigger volume, we want to grab in, get our Character Movement Component out of that ThirdPersonCharacter. And then we can drag out of this and type in set max, walk, speed. And again, I know that this property exists because inside of the character movement component, inside of my third-person character, there is a max walk speed parameter. So it was 500 before. Let me just jump back into my third person blueprint just to show this off driving home Character Movement Component, the max walk speed is currently set to 500. So over here in my Level Blueprint, I'm going to set that max walk speed back to 500. So when we end overlapping that trigger volume, we should, we should get back up to our normal speed. And I just want to show that these events are going to fire off here. So let me set my debug option right there. Bring my character back on. Alright. You can see he was running at 500. Inside of the trigger volume. When I exit and overlap back up to 500, you could see right down here these events firing up. Alright. So consider the other possible uses for an end overlap. We could make it so that when we and overlapping we could stop playing some music that we spawn, that we can't stop this music because this is a fire and forget. But if you spun into music, we could save that out to a variable and then stop playing their music. Perhaps you could use an end overlap to stop hurting the player. Maybe player was in a poison gas zone that was affecting their health as soon as they overlapped it. But when they ended overlapping that they're no longer losing health anymore. Or perhaps it could be something like you see in Uncharted or Final Fantasy seven, that when you begin overlapping of volume, you cannot draw a weapon, but when you end overlapping that volume, you can draw that weapon. That can be done through Boolean variables set inside of your ThirdPersonCharacter. Well guys, that's gonna do it all for this video, we will see you in the next one. 31. Event Begin Cursor Over: Welcome back everyone. In this video we're going to create a couple of blueprints and also change a project setting just so we can show off how cool mouseover events are. Now these are great events to know about if you want to make something happen when mousing over an object, such as an item of changing color, like some kind of a highlight effect, or making an item description appear maybe the name of the object that you're a cursory hang over. Or maybe some texts that says press X to interact or pick up this object, that kind of thing. Now this is going to be predominantly a PC type of event, but it's good to know about regardless of what platform that you're developing on. Just to see all that can be done here in Unreal. Alright, to show this off, we're going to create an accurate class blueprint. And you can put this in any folder you want. But I'm going to come under my scripting overview folder, and I'm going to right-click in some empty space, come under Blueprint class. After class is the one we're looking for and I'm going to name this BP underscore mouse events. Then we're going to double-click on this guy to open it up. We see our default scene root right here. We are going to add a single component. So come under the Components panel, click Add. We're going to add a sphere components. Great, and let's go ahead and drop this right into our level. Probably good idea to place it right in front of where your character is going to be spawning in that players start actor. So we can see this right away and then jump back into your p.sit mouse events and head on over to the Event Graph. Now, we want to make something happen when we mouse over our sphere here. So what events do we have available for this? Well, with our sphere components selected over in the Details panel at the very bottom, you can find all of the events associated and available to you for this particular component, including On begin cursor over. So if I click this plus button, I can add this event to our graph and it'll jump me right to it. Now, you can also add this events if you were to, right-click on that component. And then the little fly-out menu add event, you would find it in this list. The reason it's not this list is because it's already added to our graph. But if it was not added to our graph, we can find it here as well. Alright, so what we want to have happen is when we move our mouse cursor over the sphere, we're going to change our material. So let's grab a reference to our sphere. Left-click and drag this into the graph. And we're going to drag out of our sphere in order to talk to it, to change something about it. I'm going to type in set material. And once again, I knew that this is a property I could change about this component because if I select my sphere, one of the available details is the material. So that's a good hint if you're ever wondering, hey, what can I change about a given component while simply select that component. And in the details, look at all of the different things that could possibly be changed about it. Now I'm going to set my material here to be something quite obnoxious. Going to type in vertex green, That's what I'm looking for. And the reason I'm not finding it is because if I click this little gear icon, I want to search not only my normal content but my engine content as well. And is vertex green not in here? Let me just type in green there it is. Vertex color view mode, green only, that's the one I'm looking for. So if I compile this, I can see that my scripts here is good to go. I'll save it as well. You might think, okay, if I jump into the game and I put my mouse cursor over this fear that this will work. Well. It's actually not going to work yet. We need to do some work inside of a player controller blueprints to actually enable these mouse over events. Now, player controller blueprints is something we're going to talk a lot more about when we talk about framework blueprints. But in order to do this particular video justice, I have to wade into these waters. For the purposes of this video, all you need to know about the player controller blueprint is that the player controller works in tandem with a character or Pawn Class Blueprint to affect your playing experience. The player controller is essentially the puppet strings. The character is the Puppet. You are the marionette. Overly simplified analogy, I know, but the player controller blueprint has some mouse settings inside of it that we need to set in order to make this begin cursor over event actually happen. Let's go ahead and create this player controller blueprints. So back here in our level editor, I'm going to create a whole new folder to house this player controller blueprints. So I'm going to right-click on my scripting folder. We're going to create a new folder. And I'm going to call this framework because we're going to be adding some frame work type Blueprints later on in the course framework. Blueprints are some high level blueprints to determine things about your entire project. And inside of here I'm going to right-click Blueprint class. And one of the most common ones is a player controller blueprint. It controls a pawn used by the player. That's the description there. And let's go ahead and create this. I'm going to call this BP underscore player controller. We're going to double-click on this guy to open it up. Not much here, however, in the class, the class defaults button with that selected over in the Details panel come under this mouse interface section. This is the really important part. One thing you want to make sure that you do is show a mouse cursor by ticking this box, we're going to ensure that our mouse cursor that I'm waving around right now is going to be present on the screen. And the other biggie that you need to set here is enable mouse over events. That is critical for this cursor over events to happen. Make sure that you compile and save us. We can go ahead and close out of here, but we're not done yet. We've created this player controller blueprint, but we have not told our project to use this player controller blueprint. So exiting out of here, go back to your main level editor. You can come under Settings, project settings, and in the maps and modes section, we've got this player controller class. We want to set this to our customer bp player controller that we just created. In doing so, we're telling our project here that we've created to use this player controller class. And that player controller class. Remember, has those mouseover events enabled? Great. Now we can jump back into our level. Let's go ahead and play. And you can see my cursor is present on the screen and it turned green almost immediately here. Let me go ahead and play. Okay, it's not green. I must have weighed my mouse over it immediately. So let me just right-click and some space here. That sphere is that whitish color and as soon as I mouse over it, boom, turns green. Now, jumping back into our bp mouse events blueprint, you can see how I could extend this functionality to play a 2D sound, a confirmation sound of sorts when I begin mousing over the sphere. But I'm not doing anything when I ended that overlapping of the sphere. We'll deal with that events in the next video. Alright, I want to show off one more example here before we finish up this video, we're going to do this next example inside of our bp, a ThirdPersonCharacter Blueprint. So I'll hop on over there again. You can find that in third-person blueprints. Inside of our ThirdPersonCharacter. We're going to set the material for our character when we begin mousing over it. Now the reason I'm gonna be showing this is to show off a parameter that you're going to need to have set in here in order to make these cursor over events to work. So what I wanna do is when I am a mousing over this capsule component, that is this invisible capsule encapsulating our character. Wants something to happen. We're going to change the mesh, that is the material, if you will, the color, the mesh of the color of our, of our mannequin here. Let's go over to the Event Graph. And with this Capsule Component selected, I'm going to right-click. We're going to add events on, begin at cursor over. It's going to add this event to my Event Graph. Then I'm going to drag in my mesh that is this whole mannequin, if you will, drag this in. And then I'm going to drag off this and type in a sets material. And I'm going to make it so that our material changes to, I'm going to change it to green as well, that obnoxious color. Very nice. Now, I'm going to go ahead and compile this, save and play. And so now you can see when I mouse over my sphere, yes, that changes green. You'd expect the same when I mouse over my mannequin here as well, but doesn't seem to be working what's going on here? Well, if you're looking to do something like this, what we need to do is come back into our capsule components. And in the collision settings, we want to expand out our Collision Presets here. Collision Presets right there, it's currently set to pawn. We're gonna change this to custom. And we're going to allow our Visibility channel here to be blocked. Essentially these mouse over events check to see if the visibility is being blocked and if it is being blocked, this is going to fire off right now we are ignoring this. That's how we're detecting if this mouse over event is even happening, happening. It's doing a visibility traced into the world. Right now. It's just ignoring that if we set this to block, it will recognize that yes, that trace has hit something, in this case the Capsule Component. Let's go ahead and change that material. Alright, let's compile this and save once again, clicking play here at sphere turns green and now look at that. My mesh turns green as well. Why not the whole thing? Well, the reason the whole thing is not turning green is because if we select our mesh here in the Components panel and come under Materials, I'm only changing out this element is 0. I'm not changing out the element one, which is determining the color of other parts of our mannequin. So if I was to change this to element index one, it would be changing those parts as opposed to those parts. Good to know. What are some possible uses for this type of event? Well, once again, you can show button prompt, interact, destroy, pickup interact. You can have some kind of an item highlight effect. It could be a sound, it could be a particle that could be a material change like we've done here. Well guys, that is gonna do it all for this one. We will see you in the next one. 32. Event End Cursor Over: Our goal in this video is to continue our exploration of mouse cursor events by firing off and event when we end mousing over an object. This is extremely useful for making an object returned to its normal state whenever we're done checking it out, just as we did in the last video where we moused over this sphere, it turned green, but when we don't mouseover it anymore, We end that mousing over. It doesn't return back to its normal state, same with our character. So let's add some end cursor over events to set those things back to their normal state. Sir, in my ThirdPersonCharacter Blueprint. And from the last video here, all we're doing is when we're mousing over our capsule component right here, we're making it so that are the material on our mesh turns green, at least element 0 NOT element one. Let's go ahead and set that back. Now the way we can set that back is simply to right-click on our capsule component here. At event we have this end cursor over. Let's add this to our graph. And I can simply copy this node right here, control C, control V. We can use the same mesh reference here to set that as our target. And we're affecting element is 0 right here. We're going to affect element 0 down here. However, we need to change the material back to what it was. And what was that material once again, well, it was as MI Quinn. And we can jump to this by clicking right here browsing to that in the Content Browser. It says MI Queen. It's located in this series of folders with that material instance assets selected back here in our ThirdPersonCharacter. And make sure you've got this selected. We can simply click this arrow right here to slot it in under the material. Let's compile. That script is looking all good. Save it as well. Click Play. And now when I mouse over, our character, turns green, at least in those areas were elements 0 is affecting our mesh here. And when I mouse off of this, sets it back. Cool. Let's do that with our bp mouse events sphere as well. Jumping to our event graph here, we're doing something when we begin cursory over this sphere. So let's select our sphere. Let's right-click here and some empty space at events for ending cursor over. And I'll do the same here. Control C to copy, control V to paste. We can use that same sphere reference, or you could add a new sphere reference, just showing off multiple ways you could do something. Both are targeting the same element index. This one only has one element index for the material elements 0. And it is using this basic shapes material. I can search for it here, or I could do like I did before this time, let's simply search for it by clicking on this drop-down arrow. Type in basic shapes, basic shape material. And let's try this, compile, save and play. And I'm also over the sphere turns green. In fact, let's show off this script firing over here. It turns green, turns white, turns green turns white, and you can see those events firing off as well. Pretty straightforward stuff. Use it in tandem with that begin cursor over event. And once again, in order to make any of these cursor over events even happen, or those end cursor over events. You have to set those settings in your player controller blueprints to accept those mouseover events, guys, I'll do it all for this one. We will see you in the next one. 33. Event On Clicked: Welcome back everyone. Well, over the last two videos, we showed how to setup a player controller blueprint to detect when we're mousing over something. And then the opposite of that, which is ending mousing over something. We're gonna be taking that a step further in the next two videos here to detect when we have clicked on something, as well as when we have a release that click. Let's get started here inside of our bp mouse events. And what we wanna do is we want to detect when we have clicked on this sphere. So in order to do that, we can right-click on our sphere component here. And in our Add Event little fly-out menu here, I can add an on-click event. That's one way to do it. Or alternatively with that components selected. Down at the very bottom of the Details panel is our list of available events for that component. I'm going to click here this plus button for the onClick event. That's going to jump us over to the Event Graph and add that event to our graph. So we're going to set up a very basic script here. What I wanna do is I want to talk to our sphere components so I can drag this in or drag this in down here. Either will do, I'm going to get it. And I want to set the world scale of this object when I click on it. However, I don't want to set this to a hard and fast number. I want to do a little bit of a very basic math. So what I'm gonna do is drag out of this. I'm going to get its current world scale here by typing and just get world scale. That'll give me its current world scale, which if I select my sphere here, The world scale of this is currently 111. And I want to make it so that every time I click on this, I'm simply going to add a little bit to it. So dragging out of the return value here, use that plus button to add an add node. And we're simply going to add 0.1 in the x, y, and z dimensions, making this ever so slightly bigger every time you click on it. So the first time you click on it, we're going to be targeting our sphere. We're gonna be setting our world scale. It's gonna go from one to 1.1 across the board, then clicking on it again, it'll set it to 1.2, et cetera, et cetera. Let's compile the script and save it. And this all looks well in good however, you'll see that once I click Play up here and I am debugging this mouse events object here. I can go ahead and highlight it and it turns green. However, when I'm clicking on it, nothing seems to happen. Now the reason nothing is happening here is because I need to dig back into my player controller and check a box that enables click events. So if you forgot what your player controller blueprint was, we had it in our framework folder. Double-click on that to open it up. And inside of here with a class defaults button selected come under the mouse interface section. And just as before where we enabled a mouseover events, we need to enable click events. Now once we do this, note this right down here, the click events keys. So we're checking this on. Yes, we can recognize click events. And down below, we can set what registers as a click event. By default, it's going to set the left mouse button, but you could click here. You could click there multiple times to add different keys. So I'm going to delete this because I only want the left mouse button. So that will work. It will enable left mouse button. It will register, that is a click event. This is also worth noting here that down below we've got a default click Trace channel and it's set along the Visibility channel. Let's go back to our bp mouse events. And if I select my sphere here and look over in the Details panel, come under the collision section. You can see that if I come under Collision Presets, which is set to block all dynamic for this particular component. Down below, my trace channel, for the Visibility channel named or the trace channel named visibility is set to block. This is important because so long as this is set to block, it can recognize a click event. Also going back to my bp player controller, it shows that the trace distance for this is 100 thousand unreal units. So the way it works is if I click here in my world, like so, that object is less than a 100 thousand unreal units from the place that I am clicking on the screen. So it will register that as a click event. If it's further than that, it will not register it. So let's give this a play here. I'm gonna go back to BP mouse events so we can see this firing off, clicking play and tucking this down here. So it's recognize them mouseover. As soon as I click on, it gets a little bit bigger. Clicking again, a little bit bigger, a little bit bigger, a little bit bigger, a little bit bigger. So there you have it. To enable this onclick event to work inside of your bp player controller, you need to have enabled click events. And then also said at least one click event key. Guys, that'll do it all for this one. We'll see you in the next one. 34. Event On Released: Welcome back everyone. Well, this is the companion to the previous video. We made it in the last video that once we clicked on our bp mouse events blueprint here, the sphere, we're making it incrementally bigger. We're going to change up our script a little bit and we're going to make something happen when we release our mouse-click. So we make something happen when we click the left mouse button down. But when we lift up on that, we want something else to happen. Let's go back into our bp mouse events. Currently I've got it so that as soon as I click on the sphere, it gets a little bit bigger. I'm going to delete out these two nodes and I'm going to simplify this script here a little bit. I'm going to hit Control C and Control V to duplicate this. And what I wanna do is also target the sphere. However, I want to add an unreleased events, so I'm going to right-click on my sphere at event. And on release, this will fire off once again. Once I lift up my left mouse button click here. We're gonna make it so that when we click on our sphere, we're going to set the size to be two across the board, double the size. And when we release it, it's going to set to be one across the board. And I'll move this to the upper left here, and we will compile that. Make sure the script looks good. Let's go ahead and play this. And you can see that once I click on, it gets big. Once I release, it goes back to its normal size. Big, small, click, Release. Pretty straightforward stuff. The one other thing I'll throw in here is in your bp player controller. So long as under the class defaults you've got enabled click events, as long as that's checked on and you've got a click event key of some sort that all enable the onclick event to work, as well as the release event to work. So kind of a two-for-one there. Alright guys, that is going to do it all for this one. See you in the next one. 35. Event Hit: Welcome back everyone. Event hit is the topic of this video and this is a super important events to know about because collision between actors is happening in all kinds of games all the time. Imagine in a shooting game, you shoot a bullet, hits a wall. You see a little bit of dust fly up and you see a bullet D cal left at that point of impact. Or imagine you're planning a racing game. You bang into another car and you see some sparks fly up. That is an event hint going off behind the scenes and making those sparks fly up. That bullet decals appeared that point in the wall. Alright, let's explore how this event can be used. Now, I am going to be using this cube actor place in my level, it is named cube. It is a static mesh actor. You can place any static mesh actor into your level to check out what we're about to check out. But if you want to play along at home, I went right here, came under shapes and I got my cube right there. With that selected, I'm going to jump over to my Level Blueprint. And in some empty space, I'm going to right-click and we're going to add an event for that actor. We've got selected come under the collision section. And here we've got add on actor hit. Just like our overlap events. It can tell us who was the other actor that in this case hit us. We're gonna check to see, in this case, if it is the player character that hit us. So let's right-click and some empty space type in, get player character. We're going to see if the other actor is equal to the player character. That is, are they the same thing? Is it the player character that hit us? This is one way of doing this checking to see is the player character, the other actor that hit us. If they're equal, then we're going to drag out of here, bring in a branch node. And if it indeed is true that the player character was the other actor that hit us. If that's true, we're going to drag off of here and type in plays sound to D. That is a non localize sound, and I'll do my good old explosion. Q, because that is very distinct. That's something happened. Also, what I will do is I'm going to destroy that mesh. So I'm going to right-click and some space here. We're going to create a reference to our queue here. Drag off of it and type in Destroy Actor. Alright, let's go ahead and compile this to make sure that our script is looking good. Green check mark says yes it is. And then I'm going to go ahead and click play here. And so you can see the script firing above. Let's run our player into that cube. Here we go. Bam. Now at this point, it's worth slowing down just a little bit to explain how this collision was even detected. How did this even work? Why didn't my character just pass right through that cube? Well, for starters, let's check in our third-person character blueprint. I've got that open up here. And I've got the capsule component selected. All the other components are attached to that. That is the invisible component surrounding my character here. And if I look over in the Details panel under the collision section, I've currently got my Collision Presets set to Custom. And you can see how the collision here is setup to block everything, all different types of objects. Now, what type of objects are there? Well, this particular third-person character is a pawn object type that is listed under the object type. And this pond is set up to block world static objects, world dynamic objects, other ponds and all these other things right here. Now let's compare this with what we see on our cube. Now I've got my cube selected here in the level itself that is a cube instance. This cube instance is comprised of a static mesh components, and that's Static Mesh Component. If you select that, that is where the actual tube mesh is slotted in. Scroll on down here and look at the collision settings. Are collision preset here is currently set to default, so I can't really drill down and see all those other settings. However, if I was to change this to custom just momentarily, it will expose the current setup of the collision for this cube. You can see that the object type listed for this cube is a world static object type. Now, this is set to block a pawn, as is our ThirdPersonCharacter are pawn is set up to block a world static object as well. Long story short, they're meant to collide with one another. One thing is not going to pass through another. Now, if I was to change my cube here. To ignore collisions with a pawn. Remember my ThirdPersonCharacter is set up as a pawn object type. Let's momentarily set this to ignore ponds. Watch what happens now. Try to run my pawn, my character through that and nothing happens. It does get a little wonky thing with the camera. But long story short, that on actor hit event never occurs. Let me go ahead and change that back here to block. And it'll change the collision, present it back to default. Alright, now let's dive a little deeper here because there is some nuance you should know about wood working with this event. We're going to right-click in some empty space here I'm in my contents scripting overview folder. And I want to create an accurate class blueprint actor, BP underscore events. Hit is what I will call this. And I'm going to double-click on this to open it up. And I'm going to add three components here. I will add a cube. Going to zoom on back here. I'm going to add a sphere, going to move that off to the right a little bit here as well. And I will add scrolling on down. We'll add Sure, a cylinder. Alright, now it doesn't really matter what actors you have. You have attached to other ones. If they're attached or not. That doesn't really matter for the purposes of this video, what I do want to get to though, is the Event Graph going to delete out these events and then some empty space gonna show how you can add event hit. The first way, Right-click type in event hit. That'll get you event hit. Alternatively. Another way you can check out what events are available within a given a blueprint is over in the My Blueprint panel under the functions section. If you come under the override, dropped down right over here, select this. It's got a whole list of events available to you for this a blueprint actor, including event hit. Now that's all a little misleading, at least I found it confusing when I first got into blueprints scripting, because under the functions area, you can find different events, I guess with their meaning here is anything that you add beyond these various events. That is the functionality essentially that you're adding for when you hit something in this blueprint. Alright? So what I want to show off here is drag off type in print string. And we want to find the other thing that hit us. So I'm going to drag out of here and typing get display name. The reason I'm doing any of this is to show that this particular event hits will fire off if we hit any components that we added, it doesn't matter which one. So let's go ahead and play here. I'll set my debug objects too. Well, firstly, I've got to add this to my level donor. That would be helpful. Going to add this to my level, drag and drop it in here and rotate it around a little bit. There we go. Go ahead and play. Our debug object is sets. And now when I hit any of these components that will fire off, that will fire off. And then I'll fire off. It didn't matter which component I hit that event hit did fire off and you can see it in fires it off multiple times. Which is something to be aware of because in many cases you don't want it to fire off multiple times like that. To remedy that you could add a due once node in-between here so that the first time you hit it, it only does it one time. But to get to our next point here is you can add an event hit when you hit a specific component. I'm going to select my cube here. And if I right-click, I can add an event, add on component heads. So this on hit is specific to hitting just this cube. Let me drag off of here and just type in print string. And I'm just simply going to put it in the word queue when we hit that Q. So framing up my script like this, I'll click play one more time. Now you can see that when I hit this cube, both of those events are firing off. However, if I hit adjust the sphere, just that top event hit will fire off. Not that odd components hit because that on component hit is specific to that cube. Now, one very important bit of nuance to understand about event hit is what happens if you have physics objects in your level. And by that, I'm talking about an object that can be kicked around or respect to gravity dropdown, et cetera. Let me go ahead and click play here and show you what I mean. You see that chair falling on down to the ground, that is a physics object. Now these are really simple to set up. If you have a chair, some other static mesh in your level, any static mesh will do. Here's where I found that chair in my starter content over in the Details panel. If I select my chair instance, come under the static mesh component, but come on into the physics section. I've set this to simulate physics. Now there's a whole bunch of properties that you can set up If an object simulates physics. But as soon as you check this box, this is considered a physics object. If I go into my BP event hit, you saw that chair hit this actor class blueprint. Note that when I click Play, none of these events are firing off. Kit events will always fire if it's character movement that's triggering the hit, these hit events will not fire if a physics object hits it. Unless the actor or wanting to detect a hit has a particular checkbox checked. So let's go ahead and do that. I'm going to come under my components, my cube component inside of BP event hip and over in the Details panel under the collision section, what I'm looking for is Simulation generates hit events. If I check this box and then I click Play. You can see now that both of those events triggered. Now what happens if I drag this chair above, say the cylinder and then it looks above the cylinder. And then click play. Those events do not fire off. And that's because I would have to select my cylinder and do the same thing here. I would need to check this box for simulation, generates hit events. So very important bit of nuance to understand their, their nose guys event hit. One of the most popular events use in all our blueprint scripting. That'll do to offer this one. See you in the next one. 36. Event Any Damage: Hello, hello. Our goal in this video is to begin exploring some of the damage events available in unreal. Now, damage is obviously a big part of many games, and it's good to know that unreal already has existing functions and events within blueprints scripting to help implement these concepts. We're going to explore event any damaged first and then branch out from there. Alright, the ThirdPersonCharacter is going to be the star of this video. So find your way on over to this directory in the Content Browser or content drawer. Double-click on it to open it up. We're going to start off by adding a variable. We're going to add a health variable. So come under variables plus. And we're going to add a new variable simply called health. We will leave it of the float type. It could be an integer because health can sometimes be represented in whole numbers as opposed to decimal numbers. But we'll go with a float type there. We'll compile it and then give it a default value of 100. That's a nice round value. Now, while unreal does have some damage related concepts and events related to damage embedded in it. It does not have any concept of health. At least as of today's recording imbedded into unreal. You have to create a health variable inside of your character blueprint, and then you can deal with it from there using the various damage events. Alright, with that created, Let's add an event, any damage. Couple of ways to do this. You can right-click type in any damage. You can find it there. Alternatively, you can find it in the functions section of the My Blueprint panel in the override drop-down there is events, any damage. Alright, with this events added, we want to modify our health variable in some way. So this is how this works. Let's go ahead and drag our health variable into the graph. We're going to get it. When this event fires off, it can output how much damage was done. Now we wanna do here is take our health variable. We're going to drag out a here, type in the minus symbol we want to subtract. So we're going to take our character's health and we're going to subtract our health by the amount of damage that was done. Then once that calculation is done, we're going to update our health variable. The way we can do this is drag and drop this right onto the output pin and set that. So we're taking our health, subtracting the damage amount from it, and then setting that is our new health value. Pretty simple and straightforward. Then what we're gonna do is drag off of this and bring in a less than or equal to sign. We're going to say if this is less than or equal to 0, then we're going to branch. If it's true that were less than or equal to 0, our health is dropped to 0 or below, then we are going to destroy the actor. In this case, the target is us self. We're going to destroy this entire thing. Now before I link this up, I'm simply going to sneak in a print string node here. So we can see our health value dragged out of here. We'll type in print string. And we'll go like this. And if we plug our health into this in string, it's going to convert this float value into a string. So that's what this is doing right here. It's converting a float to a string. And let's compile this, make sure that this script is good to go and it looks like it is. Now, note that this event won't do anything yet because we haven't told this actor to be impacted by the concept of damaged in any way. We're gonna do that next year back here in our level editor. And let's go ahead and add a trigger volume. I'm gonna do that by coming under here, place actors panel. I'm going to add a trigger box and place it somewhere in front of my players. Start actor. With that selected. I'm going to set the line thickness to be a little bit thicker so I can see it in the level. I'm also going to make the box extent be 200 by 200 by 200. And I'm also going to scroll on down and uncheck actor hidden game so that we can see it. Alright, with that all done, Let's jump on over to our Level. Blueprint. I'm going to right-click and some empty space. We're going to add an event On collision on begin overlap. We're going to check to see if the other actor that overlapped us was the third person character, not the game mode. The character. If it is, what we're gonna do here, is dragged out of here and type in apply damage, a-ha, applied damage. Now, this base damage right here is going to allow us to input how much damage we would like to have done to our ThirdPersonCharacter. So works like this. You decide how much damage you'd like to call it. Let's punch in a number of say, 25.5, something ridiculous like that. It's set here and then here when this event, any damages called, it will output that here. So you're passing that damage along. Alright, with this all done, let's go ahead and click play here. And I want to be my ThirdPersonCharacter Blueprint. So we can see this script fire off or not if we screwed everything up, Let's go ahead and click Play. And we should see are damaged value updated right up here in the upper left because we're printing this to the screen. Let's overlap this. And I am not seeing it. And the reason I'm not seeing it is because I forgot a step back here in my Level Blueprint, I forgot to have this damage actor be set as the third-person character. So if we do this, we're saying, Hey, ThirdPersonCharacter, this whole applied damage function, fire this off and make sure that in doing so, you are making this event any damage fire off. So I'm calling this function if you set the damage actor in this case to be ThirdPersonCharacter, it will cause this event any damage to fire off. Let's try this once again. So you should see that damage value update here as soon as that overlap this trigger volume. And there you go, he saw fire off. If I do it again, you will update the health again until eventually I go beyond that threshold and boom, I am dead. Now, just a couple of notes here back in my Level Blueprint. This damage type class. There is the ability to add fire damage, lightning damage, water damage, all that kind of stuff. In Unreal. It does not need to be set and it's beyond the scope of this video how to set that kind of stuff. This server icon, that node indicates that this function only executed on the server for single-player games, the local client is considered the server thought I'd throw in those notes. Something else worth pointing out here is that if I go back to my ThirdPersonCharacter Blueprint and instead of subtracting here, I did. Dragged out of this and type in ad. You don't actually have to treat this as a negative thing. You could actually use this whole concept of damage as a healing means. So instead of subtracting, you could do something like this and add that amount. So if you wanted to have a healing pond of sorts, you could do that too. One final note about event any damage is it's meant to be used for general purpose damage, like damage incurred by your environment, safe from fire or poison, that kind of thing. Alright guys, that's gonna do to offer this one. See you in the next one. 37. Event Point Damage: Welcome back everyone. Well, we're on to the second of our three damage events. In the last one we talked about event any damage. That What's your general purpose damage event to use for things like environmental damage. And this one we're going to be talking about event point damage. Now point damage is damaged meant to be dealt by projectile weapons, hit Scan weapons, even melee weaponry. And I'll even add a fourth one here. We're going to be dropping a physics box on our players heads so it can be used for something like this as well. Now while functions similar to prevent any damage, it does have some added info that can be passed along, which makes it ideal for a projectile style damage applications. Now, in the interest of time, I've set up a bunch of stuff prior to shooting this video, but I'll show you exactly what I did so you can play along at home if you're wanting to follow along with this example. Firstly, you place a static mesh actor into your level and place it right above where your players spawns in that Player Start actor. I'm simply using a cubed Static Mesh actor, but anything will do and you can grab a cube by coming under here, shapes cube. And then with this cube selected in the Details panel, I selected my Static Mesh Component. And there's two checkboxes I was sure to check. One is simulate physics to ensure that this box is going to fall on top of my character's head. And also down in the collision section, I made sure to simulate generate hit events. Setting that to true as well, because I do want this to generate a hit event. Now with this selected over in my Level Blueprint, you can find that by coming under here, open Level Blueprints. I then right-click with that cube selected into the level, right-click and add an event for that. And I added an actor hit and it shows that that is the name of my cube. Now what I'm wanting to do is once I hit something, I want to call this function apply point damaged. Now you saw me apply any damage in the last video. So something similar here. This was the apply any damage from the previous video. We're doing something similar here. We're going to apply a point damage. And just like before we need to feed this a damaged actor, before it was a third-person character. Here we're going to go a little bit of a different route. We're going to drag out of our hit result from our hits when our cube hit something. And all you need to do is drag out here and type in break and then breaking that hit result, you can extract all kinds of information about the hit that occurred between that cube and whatever it hit. One of those things that you can extract is the hit actors. So if you plug your head actor into the damage actor, we can call this point damage event on the Hit Actor blueprint. We'll get to that in just a moment. Also, we can pass along where this hit came from. What I'm doing here is out of his head, we're breaking the hit result and I'm saying, Hey, where did this occur, the x, y, and z location. And we're passing that on to the hit from direction essentially providing a coordinates x, y, and z where that hit is occurring. Something else you need to do here before you compile is you need to pass along this hit information from this hit events over into the hit info of your apply point damage function. With all that done, you can compile and save that. And this is all well and good. But the next thing you need to do is jump on over to our ThirdPersonCharacter Blueprint. Once again, over in the Content Browser, you can find your ThirdPersonCharacter right at this location. Here I set up this event point damage and all the things that I wanted to occur. So firstly, where do you get this event points damaged? Well, two ways you can right-click and type in point damage. You can find it in your right-click menu. Alternatively, if you did not have this added to your graph already, you could come under functions and then the override section, you could find the point damaged function in here as well. It's not listed here because it is already added to my graph. Now once it's hit occurs back in our Level Blueprint, once again, we're passing along the Hit Actor and we know it's going to hit us a ThirdPersonCharacter. It's going to call this point damaged function, which is then going to result in this event being fired. And what we're saying here is we want to do this just one time because this is an event that as it hits things over in our level, this cube can bound around. It could hit our character multiple times. We only wanted to register one hits, so we only are going to go beyond this 0.1 time. What I'm doing here is I'm passing along the amount of damage that I've specified back here in my apply point damage function. Here, I'm just saying 50.5 just because this number right here gets passed along out of our event point damage. So I'm subtracting this from our health variable over here and setting that as our new Health. I'm just printing this out to the screen. Then, then the last thing I'm doing here is I'm going to spawn in emitter at location. This is the old particle system here, the cascade particle system. I'm just using an explosion here. And what I'm doing out of event point damage is right over here. This hit from direction. I'm passing this information along, come out of here in hit location to provide the location where I want this explosion to occur. What results is this? Now you saw that the flow of execution right up above. And here I am in my ThirdPersonCharacter. Let's do this again. From my Level Blueprint. Zoom out a little bit. So once again, keep your eye on this script firing off. Bam. You can see it's firing off multiple times there because it's hitting the floor in addition to hitting my character. Now, if you wanted to use the newer particle system instead of this spawn emitter at location, you could delete that out. And if you do have any Niagara particles in your project, you can simply specify one of those here. I've got a coin shower which does not look as cool as that explosion, but check that out right here. Now one thing I haven't mentioned yet, but need to is if you're going to be using this point damage in an instance like I am using it, you want to be sure that you're only using this event point damaged? Look what I did up above. I disconnected my event any damage. Now if I hook this up as well and notice that I'm doing this health modification here to, well, it's going to result is both events firing off. And you can see my health actually dip below a negative one there. When you're calling. If I apply point damage, you're also going to be calling not only event point damage, but event any damage as well because the point damage is technically any damage. So just be aware of that instance as well. Now note, while these events are similar, the advantage of event point damage is that location can be passed along. You've got some other things that you can pass along here as well, but that location is chief among them. Alright guys, that's gonna do it all for this one. See you in the next one. 38. Event Radial Damage: So there you are minding your own business and then you step on a landmine, you suffer great damage. You fly halfway across the screen and plunge to your death. Event. Radial damage is the cause for such instances and Unreal Engine games. And what makes this event unique versus the previous two damage events is that it is perfect for area of effect damage. With event radial damage, you can specify an origin point where maximum damage is applied, and also a radius upon which falloff can be applied. So the further away you are from the origin, the less damage that occurs to your character. Alright, so I've set it up an example prior to shooting this video and I'm going to walk you through exactly what is going on here. Follow along if you want to play at home. So what I did here is I placed a simple trigger sphere into my level. You can find that by coming under the place actors panel. And in my basic tab, I simply place a Trier's finger in my level. In here, I simply set my sphere radius to be 1,000. And I'm also making this appear by simply coming under the where is it? Once again, the rendering section, rendering, rendering, rendering. There it is. I am choosing to not have this hidden and game. I'm also setting the editor billboard scale. That's this icon up to five, just to make this very obvious, to see next, what I did is width this actress selected, I jumped on over to my Level Blueprint. And inside of here, I created a reference to this triggers fear by holding down the RT and left clicking, so long as you have that selected in the level. And then I dragged out of this and got the actors location. Now what I'm doing here is upon pressing the E key, you can have any key binding of your choosing. Once again, Level Blueprints will recognize input events. I'm then spawning and emitter at this location, the center point of my sphere, I'm just scaling up the explosion to be extra big. Once again, if you don't want to do the old school cascade emitters, well, you can do a spawn system at location for the Niagara particle effects. And then this is the key node that we're talking about here, applying radial damage with fall off. Now, note, if I right-click and some empty space and type in apply radial, you can do apply a radial damage and also apply radial damage with fall off. Both of both of these we'll call the radial damage event that we're gonna be making use of in just a little bit. However, I like this one a little bit better because it does have the ability to specify an inner radius and an outer radius as well as base damage and then minimum damage. What this allows you to do is specify a falloff range. So essentially what I'm saying over here, let me just get rid of this is my inner radius. Once again, my sphere is 1,000 unreal units in size. That's this right here. The sphere radius is 1,000. Back in here I'm saying the inner radius is 200 unreal units, the outer radius is 1,000 units. The damage at the epicenter of the origin and within this inner radius is going to be 100. So anything within this inner radius is going to suffer to the maximal damage that at the outer radius, at the extreme limit, I'm gonna do at least one damage. Now I did put in as damaged fall off value. This determines how quickly damage will fall off from the center point, the origin points to the edges you can play around with that number to have more or less of an extreme fall off. And then the rest of these inputs are all optional. But in order to get the system working, this is sufficient. Now, coming into my ThirdPersonCharacter Blueprint, I set things up. Thusly, I got my event radial damaged, which you can once again get by right-clicking, typing in radial damaged, there's that event radial damage. Another way to get this event is over in the functions overrides section. You can find this in here if you did not already add this to your graph. And here I'm passing along this damaged received. I'm subtracting that from my health variable and setting that as my new health value. Now, what damage amount gets passed along wall that is really dependent upon how much my character was at the center of this damage when this occurred. Now back here I'm also printing out this health value to the screen so I can see how much health was actually subtracted from my base level 100 there. Then what I'm also doing here is a little bit of extra stuff. This is not really necessary in order to see this even happened. But what I did here is I'm grabbing my Capsule Component. I just dragged in a reference to this. And I did a set simulate physics function on here. Check that box. This is what is going to get my character flying through the, through the air. And this is what's going to send him flying through the air a radial impulse, impulse at the point of impact. All I'm doing here is I'm passing along the origin, the center point of my radial damage right here, I'm passing along that triggers, trigger sphere location as the origin. And this is where I'm saying I am sending out an impulse, imagine like an invisible pulse wave. So the radius of this impulse is going to be 1,000. And I set the strength you can play around with these values to be half 1 million. Now back in our level here you can see my player start actor is gonna be starting just outside of this radius. So if I was to click Play and I've got my ThirdPersonCharacter Blueprint now open and I press that E key. You can see that I'm not doing any radial damaged because my character is not within this radius. However, once I do get within range, now note that I am just barely stepping foot inside of this radius. Look up here in the upper left. It's going to show how much health from my initial value of 100 is subtracted. So I'm gonna, I'm gonna guess I'm going to end up with a value of like 89 or something like that because I'm just barely in here, so I'm going to press the E key, ended up with 87. So almost 13 health was subtracted by just barely stepping foot. And let's try this. Once again. This, I'm going to step right towards the middle. So this should do maximum damage. And if we go back into our test map, you can see that the applied radial damage fall off. It's showing that inside of this inner radius of 200, I should be doing the full 100 damaged. So let's see if that is in fact the case. Let me open up my ThirdPersonCharacter Blueprint. Once again, tap that Iike and in the upper left it should show 0.0. And it does. So you can see, as said, simulate physics and the head radial pulse. It is all for fun and games. Now, one last bit of information to pass along here, just like the point damage. If you do have any damage hooked up as well. Doing Radial damage will cause event any damage to trigger two. So now I should be doing some damage to my character, as well as seeing this text Hello up here as soon as I press the E key inside of here. So you can see Hello did appear as well as some health being subtracted. Alright guys, there is event radial damage. Let's quickly recap the different damage events. So any damage is good for environmental damage. When you didn't take damage at any specific spot. That's great for stepping through fire or poisonous gas, that kind of thing. Point damage is good for specifying a given location where damage occurred. Great for projectiles hitting the player. Radial damage is good for explosions and specifying a spot in origin where maximum damage occurred. And this type of damage can fall off the further away from the origin it is. That's going to wrap this up. We will see you in the next video. 39. Event Destroyed: Welcome back everyone. Events destroyed is the topic of this video and our goal is to learn what causes event destroyed to fire for an actor and how we can use that within a script. For this video, I'm gonna be using our Level Blueprint here. You can find that here, open Level Blueprint. And I'm also going to be using our third person character blueprints. You can find that here in this directory. I've also done some setup work ahead of time. If you follow it along with the previous videos for various apply damage type nodes, this will all seem very familiar to you. However, if you just jumped ahead to this video, let me show you what I did ahead of time in preparation for showing off event destroyed. Now for starters here, I placed a Trigger box in my level and all I did here is I simply sized up the box extends to be 200 by 200 by 200, set my line thickness to be ten. And also I made it so that in the rendering section where it is that rendering section, once again, There it is. I said actor hidden game to be unchecked. Then with this Trigger box selected in my level, over in the Level Blueprint, I right-clicked. I created an ad on actor begin overlap for that trigger box dragged out of the other actor we're casting to our ThirdPersonCharacter to make sure that it is the ThirdPersonCharacter overlapping us. And then if it is, we are going to apply damage to our ThirdPersonCharacter, I'm doing 25 points of damage here. Then in the ThirdPersonCharacter Blueprint, this should look familiar to you as well if you follow it along with the previous videos. On event, any damage getting called. And once again, this gets called when this applied damaged function back here in our Level Blueprint fires off. This, then fires off. All I'm doing here is I am taking our current health which starts at 100. We're going to subtract the amount of damage that is supplied right here in our applied damaged function in the Level Blueprint 25. We're going to subtract that from our health set that as a new health. And if our health happens to be less than or equal to zero, we are going to destroy actor. Now this is the important function right here. Because when this Destroy Actor function gets called, event destroyed fires off as well. So if I was to just go ahead and play right now, this is what I'd have. I click in play here. Let me set my character as my debug objects, bring out my play window once again, over here in the upper left you're going to see that health value decrements. Reminder, my health system is not hooked up to my meter here at all. We could change that later. Maybe we will 75, 50. You're seeing that event fire off up above and then boom, our character is destroyed, but events destroyed we can further use to make something else happen. So let's add event destroyed, and there's couple of ways we could add this one. We could right-click and some empty space, Typing events destroyed. That's one way. The second way, of course, is over in the My Blueprint panel under the functions area, you can override events, destroy the target here is going to be an actor. And as you can see, our Destroy Actor, the target is inactive. So in this case, our ThirdPersonCharacter, we're saying, Hey, destroy ourselves. So there is no outputs here. We are destroying ourselves. Once this gets called, we are going to be making a call over to this event to fire off. Alright, so let's make something happened here. Let's drag out of here and type in spawn emitter at location. Once again, you could do spawn system at location that is the Niagara particle system. I'm just going to be using the old school explosion. There we go. And of course we have to supply a location for this. So let's simply right-click and some empty space and type in get actor location. The target is our ThirdPersonCharacter is location. And let's do something else is drying off of this. And let's spawn actor from class. Let's spawn in some fire, our blueprint effect fire. We have to supply a spawn transform. So I'm going to right-click. We're going to get actor transform. Once again. The target is our self. You're a ThirdPersonCharacter. And then lastly, let's just drag off of here and print string. And instead of the string thing, hello, Let's just say something like destroyed D steroid, if I can spell that right. Alright, so as we overlap that trigger volume, we're gonna be applying damage to our ThirdPersonCharacter. That damage is going to be applied to our health value right here, once our health is less than or equal to zero, and that is true. We are going to destroy this actor. This is going to cause event destroyed to fire off. And then it's gonna do all of this stuff right here. It's always a good idea to compile. Make sure your script is good to go. Let's save that, and let's go ahead and play. And let me actually move this up so you can see this firing. Here we go. 12, that health is decreasing. Three now, look right up above the play Windows. Well, for event destroyed to fire off. Boom. There you go. We did spawn that explosion, and we did also spawn that blueprint effect fire. Now I'd like to go ahead and show off a one more example before we wrap up this video. And just to show you what I've done here is back here in my level, I added a cone right over here little bit beyond the bounds of my trigger volume. You can find that in your place actors panel right over here. But any static mesh will do if you want to play along with that guy selected. What I've done in my Level Blueprint is if I scroll over to the right where you couldn't see this off to the right before. I'm just going to be extending the functionality. We are damaging our player. What I wanna do here is bring this on. So in addition to applying some damage to our character, I'm going to wait 3 s the first time I overlap this Trigger box and I'm going to destroy our cone. I got a reference to my cone here because with that selected, if I hold down the Alt key, I can left-click and bringing a reference to my cone. So I'm saying, hey cone, you are the target actor I want to destroy. Now down below. With that cone also selected, you can right-click and some empty space and say, Hey, when you're destroyed. Once again, I'll show you how I got this onDestroy. Here is I've got that cone selected. I can add events and under the game section you can add on destroyed. And if I select it right now, it's just going to jump me to and say, hey, I got you. Then what I'm doing is I can extract some information from my destroyed actor. I'm supplying that actor right here. I'm saying, hey, I want to get your transform. Let's spawn are BP example pick-up, and then let's play a sound. So this is going to happen the first time we overlap this Trigger box. So ignoring all this damage to the ThirdPersonCharacter right now in 3 s, some are going to destroy our cone, and then this event destroyed is going to play and we're going to have this spawn. Let's go ahead and give this a play. Let's compile that first. Make sure it looks good. Going ahead and plan here, let me set my debug object to be my test map and bring out my play window once again. Now the first time I overlap this in 3 s, that cone is going to turn into the pickup. There you go. So a couple of uses for event destroyed. You saw me just demonstrate a couple of right now. Number one would be to spawn a particle or a sound at a locale of destruction. Number two would be to spawn and other actors such as a loo drop when killing an enemy. Alright guys, that's gonna do it all for this one. We will see you in the next one. 40. Custom Events: Custom events is the topic of this video, and this is a super important topic because custom events are some of the most used events in all a blueprint scripting. So our goal in this video is to learn what they are, how they're added, and why they're useful. Now a custom event is an event that you get to name and call for it to fire whenever you'd like. Alright, so seeing is believing, I'm gonna be using mainly the ThirdPersonCharacter Blueprint in this video, but I'll be dabbling a little bit in the Level Blueprint. So go ahead and get those open. I'll be starting off in the ThirdPersonCharacter Blueprint. And firstly, we need to add one of these custom events. Well, how do we do that? Right-click and some empty space type in the word custom. And under the add event category, we have added custom event. Now the moment I do this, it's going to add events to my graph, but it's going to prompt me to give it a name. I'm going to call this add health. Now, if at anytime you want to change the name of your custom event, two ways you can do that. You can simply just double-click on this and it'll give you the ability to change it here. Or with this event node added this customer vendor and add it over in the Details panel. You can change the name of it over here as well. Alright, so adding health, Let's go ahead and make this event actually add some health whenever it is called. Now not right now. We've gotten nothing to actually call this event. We will take care of that in a little bit. But to actually make this do something, let's drag in our health variable. I'm going to get this. I want to drag off of this type in the plus button. We're going to add some amount to it. Let's add 010. Sounds good. Then I'm going to drag and drop my health on top of this output in order for us to set our health. So we're getting our health, we're going to add ten to it and then we're going to set it. Sounds good so far. Let's go ahead and print this out to the screen as well. So print string. If I take this output of my sit health and plug it into the string, I'm gonna get a little conversion node to convert one data type to another, a float to a string that'll print it off to my screen. And then let's also drag off of here and type in spawn emitter at location. Once again, you can spawn a system, Niagara particle system. I'm just going to use the old school explosion because I like to use that for pretty much everything. It's very visual, right? So we're gonna spawn and explosion where? Well, let's get our actors location here. Yet, factor location. The target is ourself, the third-person character. Let's plug that in here. And then let's just play a sound as well. Drag off a few play sound. 2d. 2d sound is one that is not at a given locale. It's just a great for Menu sounds. By the way, I'm gonna do compile, compile, success. Either one of these will do, alright, compile and save that. That looks like a fine script. Alright, so we need something to actually call for this event to happen. So this is going to be a rather academic example, but just to make things easy here, I'm gonna do is right-click in some empty space. You can put in the one key. And I'll say that off of pressing the one key, we're going to drag off of this. And now if I type in Add Health, Check this out. I have a node that I can add, a call function node called AddHealth. So what I'm essentially going to be doing here is when I press the one key, I am calling for this custom event called AddHealth to fire off. This is a wireless connection and that's one of the benefits of using custom events and secrete these wireless connections. Now it could very easily just say, Hey, off of the one key, do all this. However, sometimes you've got very complicated scripts and you want to keep things nice, clean and simple. This is a good way to create a wireless, wireless firing, a wireless calling of that event. So this calls this, which is going to make all this script happen. Let's go ahead and compile and save. Go ahead and play here. And I'll try to frame this all in. So watch. Once I press the one key, it's going to make this all happen. You're going to see that emitter occur. You're going to hear a sound, et cetera. Here we go. And I can just keep doing this again and again and again and again. So these wireless connections are cool and all, but that's not really all of the benefits that you get from custom events. With custom events, you can also call for this event to happen from another blueprints. So let's go ahead and call this event from inside of our Level Blueprint. So if you forgot how to get into your Level Blueprint from now, there you go for the 100th time. And I'm going to right-click and some empty space and I'm just going to bring in the, let's do the seven key or any other keyboard event. Then I'm going to right-click and some empty space. We're going to get player character. We're going to drag off of this. We need this in order to Cast to ThirdPersonCharacter. Because we need to supply our casting of the ThirdPersonCharacter with an object and that suffices get player character. So in doing this, we're checking, hey, is our player character the ThirdPersonCharacter? And if it is, we can talk to our ThirdPersonCharacter in some way, shape, or form. That includes calling a custom events. So for this to work, you need to make sure that you have compiled your ThirdPersonCharacter Blueprint. Very important here. Once you've compiled this, you will now be able to find this AddHealth over in our Level Blueprint. Let's go back here, drag out of your ThirdPersonCharacter and type in, Add Health. And look once again, we've got that calling of the function at health. That is the same sort of node that we had in our ThirdPersonCharacter. Addhealth target is ThirdPersonCharacter. Over in our Level Blueprint, AddHealth target is ThirdPersonCharacter. Alright, compile this, save and play and shake it out. I can press the one key. And the one key again is adding. Some are calling that custom event from inside of the ThirdPersonCharacter. But now I'm going to press the seven key. And I've got my level set as my debug option here. So you're going to see this fire off. Here we go seven. That's can call it as well. So that is one of the main benefits of a custom event is once you've got a reference to that given blueprint, in this case, our ThirdPersonCharacter. You can then pull off of that and find that custom event. You can make a call to that customer event. Alright, with that, out of the way, let's get onto some of the nuances, some of the other things that you can do with these custom events. I'm going to jump back to my ThirdPersonCharacter Blueprint here. And what I'm gonna do is I'm going to drag off of this little red box here. What is this? This is an output delegate. So what can I use this for? Well, let's set up an example. I'm going to right-click and some empty space here and type in events. Begin play. I had this hooked up to my creation of the widget, my HUD widgets. Olivia disconnect this by holding down the Alt key. Left clicking, I'm going to steal event begin play quickly. I'm going to bring that all the way down here by my adding Health custom event. Then I'm going to drag off of this and type in set timer by event. Upon beginning play. That is our ThirdPersonCharacter getting spawned into the game. We can have some event fire off whatever event we plug into it. Now, this works for not only a custom event, but I'm showing it here with a custom event. This could work for other events as well. You can see event B in play and other events have this kind of a delegate as well. So I'm going to take this, plug it into here, and I'm going to set my time to be 5 s. And I'm also going to set this to be looping. So now let's understand what I've got going on here with this custom events. I'm going to say a pond beginning play. We're going to call this function, this set timer by event to happen. What's going to happen here is every 5 s, this event that's plugged into this set timer by event function is going to fire off. And it's going to be happening every 5 s because we've got this looping checkbox checked. So check this out. So let's compile this and play. So no event B employee already happened. Every 5 s. Can wait another 5 s. So this event begin play fired off at the very start. Once I started up my game, my character respond in. From there. You're not going to see this fire off anymore, but it will continue to run this every 5 s, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam. Alright, so now you know that with the customer event created and added to your graph, it's up to you to make sure that you call for that customer vent to fire. Sometimes that can be a little bit annoying when you're testing things because maybe the conditions you have setup to call that custom event are a little bit complex. Is there something that you can do for testing purposes to make having that customer event fire easier? Well, there is with this custom event selected over in the Details panel, you have a call-in editor checkbox. Go ahead and check that. This is a very important step here with that checked, go ahead and click this compile option. Once you do that, notice this icon right here on your custom event is going to change from that arrow icon to this little f sort of looking thing in the diamond. What this is going to do now is if we jump back to our level editor, once I play, we're going to see our ThirdPersonCharacter be spawned in. It's going to be present in our outliner. I'll then be able to select that. And over in the Details panel. There'll be in AddHealth button that I can go ahead and click to manually cause a custom event to fire. I make this happen. I need to kind of side window this a little bit. I'm going to click Play. All right, there's my play window over here. Now, over in, my main editor. Going to have to peel this down a little bit, sorry for this lack of space. There is in yellow my ThirdPersonCharacter, I'm gonna go ahead and select that spawned in that so that yellow coloration indicates. And down here in the Details panel. If I do a search for AddHealth, I can now find in AddHealth buttons, so I've just made it, I've just set it up. So here in the editor, I can manually call this custom event. So note that once I click on this, it's going to make all the following script happen, which is going to create the explosion in OneNote. So if you're looking over here as I click on this Add Health, it's calling that custom event, bam, bam, bam, bam. You're seeing that health tick up as well. But of course that is not all checkout. What else we can do with custom event with this selected over in the Details panel, I've got this input section. What can we use this for? Well, let me click this Plus button right here and show off a quick example. We get to create an input. Notice how this just popped on a new parameter input, and there's the name of it. So let's go ahead and name it. Let's call this health to add. And you can change the type. Notice I updated the name and an updated here. I don't want this to be a Boolean, so I'm gonna change this to be a float. And I will just modify my script as follows. Let me just go ahead and make it so that our health to add, Let's not cross the wires, right? We're going to call AddHealth. When we call AddHealth, we're going to find out how much health we want to add, add it to our existing health and set that as our new health. Now, note that this is all a little confusing, at least in this stage because input is what this is called. And this is on the right side of a node. And as I mentioned before, outputs are on the right side of a node. Inputs are on the left side of a node. This is all a little bit misleading here, but it makes sense if you scroll down here and note that this AddHealth calling of this custom event added an input right here, health to add. So in adding this input to our custom event, you've added this as an input on the calling of that custom events. So let's change this to, let's go 25. And now if I go ahead, compile, save, play. Note that whenever I press one key, it's going to call for this custom event to fire off. Every time I do, it's gonna say, hey, add 25 health to our existing health and set that as our new health. So here we go. You can see it's incrementing 25 up every time. So just to recap here quickly, why use custom events? Well, number one, if you're going to call a custom event within the Blueprint that you've created, that custom event, you can create these wireless connections which keeps things nice, neat, and clean. But the main benefit of a custom event is with one created in one blueprint. So long as you have a reference to that, given a blueprint, as we do here in our Level Blueprint, you can make a call over to that custom event, which is the most powerful thing about them. Or guys that is gonna do all for this video, we will see you in the next one. 41. Variables Overview: Okay, So with events in the rearview mirror, we're going to be shifting our attention to the topic of variables and our goal in this specific videos to learn and variables are when it comes to programming, or in our case, blueprints scripting. Alright, so what even is a variable? Well, you can think of variables as containers that hold a specific type of information. And I love the fact that in unreal, these containers, these variables are sort of capsule shaped. If you imagine a capsule being able to hold some kind of thing, you get the idea of what variables are all about. They hold something, in this case, hold some data and actually specific types of data depending on their types. Now, these containers, these variables exists within a specific blueprint. So right now I'm in my Level Blueprint. These variables that are created over in my, My Blueprint panel exists only in this specific blueprint. If I jump on over to my BP example pickup that was an actor class blueprint. I have a few variables in here, this pick-up sound being one of them. I have a Delta seconds variable as well. These only exists inside of my BP example pickup. Let's take a look at our ThirdPersonCharacter. There are variables that exist just inside of my ThirdPersonCharacter. Now these containers, these variables can be created. These containers, these variables can have a default value assigned to them or they could be empty. And just taking a look at our third-person character here, I've got this health variable and it's currently has a default value of 100. And these containers can have their content changed over time. Their contents can be varied. As we can see here, a third-person character starts off with a health value of 100. But you've seen in previous videos modify this health variable to change. It doesn't have to stay at 100. If I take some damage, it could go down to 75, 60, etc. Or I can heal back up and find my way back in full health and 100. So where can you create these variables? Well, there's a couple of different ways to do it within the My Blueprint panel. Way number one is you simply click on this Add button right over here. There you can create a variable. Another way is within the My Blueprint panel, find the variables section, and click on this plus button right over here. So it's worth noting that some blueprints may have inherited variables. That is, variables that came along with the parent class that your current blueprint inherits from. However, they don't show up by default over here into my blueprints panel. You can expose them. So the way we could do this is by clicking on this gear icon and you get this little fly out menu, show inherited variables. Go ahead and click on this check mark means that that category is shown. And now you see a whole bunch of different categories populate under your variables section. And you can expand these out by simply clicking on any of these triangles. Let me just expand out this pawn category here. And now you can see all of your different variables over in the My Blueprint panel hover. It's kind of annoying, clicking on them all individually like this to see what their default value is. Is there an easier way? Well, of course there is. If I click over on the class defaults button at the very top here of my blueprint, I can see all the different variables that exist for this parent class is character, this specific of BP, ThirdPersonCharacter. Note I have a upon category of variables. And over on the right-hand side it's showing all these same variables and it's showing all their default values. That's kind of handy. This class defaults button. Note too, that the variables that we created earlier in the course, we've got the health variable and whatnot. They belong to a category called the defaults. And WPP HUD was under the category of default. So if we come onto our class defaults, once again, we can see we have a default category and those exist currently under there. Now note different parent classes have different amounts of inherited variables. But if you click on that class defaults, you get to see all the variables that you can change about a given blueprint, including the ones that you have created and you get to see all their default values as well, pretty handy. Now something else worth noting here that while a given class may have a whole bunch of variables associated with it. So to do components, so if I was to go over and select my character movement component over in the Components panel. You can see that this movement component, this character moving component, has a whole lot of variables associated with it. These are all variables because their contents can be changed. Now note some common lingo you or hear a lot when it comes to variables is that you can get the variable or you can set the variable. Now let me just jump on over to my Event Graph quickly. And I'm simply going to use my healthier. If I left-click and drag this out into the graph, I'm just simply left clicking and dragging. And I released. It's going to say, do you want to get your health value or do you want to set your health value? So let's explore these. In getting it. We can say, Hey. How much is in here? And let's put that into some other node. In this case, we're saying how much health exists within this capsule, right? Conversely, I can left-click and drag and say, let's set health. Now, with this type of node, a setter, you can determine how much health this is going to be changed to. Again, a variable can be changed. Here we're getting the current contents. Here, we're setting the contents the value of this variable. So if I wanted to change the value of our health, I could say, you know what health, I want you to be 50. Now I just hard-coded this in by typing in a number. But it could have another variable that could plug into this that would determine that it's new health amount. Note however, that with a getter, you are simply extracting that data from that variable. With a setter. You need to hook in an execution wire. And execution wire needs to set this. So some event or some other node leading into this needs to flow into it. And you could have something flow out of it as well if you want to continue on with your script, but you must have something flow into this execution pin right here in order to set, that is to change the value of that variable. Now a couple of shortcuts that you can use when trying to get or set a node. You saw me, it left-click and drag and you get that little menu there to get or set it. A shortcut here is if you hold down the Control key and left-click and drop that in like so, you get that variable. Conversely, if you hold down the Alt key, left-click, drag and drop, you get a setter for that variable. So very important lingo to understand there, you're getting the value of a variable or your setting that variable to some new value. And finally, one very important thing to remember here is you must compile a blueprint in order to set a default value. So I'm going to jump over to my BP example pick up here, that's this guy. And let's just say I wanted to add a variable that's going to contain how much health to heal our character once we overlap it. So I could create a variable by clicking on this plus button. We'll call this amounts to heal. However, over in the Details panel says I can't give this a default value unless I compile it. So if I click over in the upper left by that yellow question mark, compile means good to go. I can now give this a default value. I'll say 25. Great. That's also important because if you're trying to access this variable from within another blueprint, that is a necessary step. And just to demonstrate this, let me show you that I have an instance of this blueprint, my BP example pickup in my level, I'm gonna jump on over into my Level Blueprint, open Level Blueprint. I'm gonna hold down the R key and left-click to create a reference to that example pickup. And now if I was to drag out of this and type in what did I call that amounts to heal. I could now get the amount to heal if I needed to find that and print it out to the screen or something like that. Or I could drag out of this and type in amount to heal. And whoops, not yet. Amounts to heal. We could set that amount. So if I wanted to change the default value here to some other valuable, again, that's what variables allow you to do to change the contents of that container. I can say, You know what, I don't want you to heal 25. I want you to heal just five instead. I could do that as well. All right guys, it's going to wrap it up for this quick overview on variables. We'll see you in the next video. 42. Boolean: Welcome back everyone. In this video, our goal is to learn what a Boolean variable is, how to create one in how it can be utilized when blueprint scripting. So firstly, what is a boolean variable? Well, a Boolean variable is a variable that contains true or false information. And we talked about in the last video, variables are essentially containers that hold some kind of data. A Boolean variable is a container that simply holds true or false information. So imagine a capsule and inside is a piece of paper. And on that piece of paper says either true or false. That's all it can be, either true or false. And depending on the contents of that, you can pair it with something like a branch node in order to create branching path of execution. If it's true, do this. If it's false, do that. So here I am inside of my third-person character blueprint, and we're going to show off an example here. Let's start off by creating a Boolean variable by coming under the My Blueprint panel variables, this little plus button here. And we're going to create a variable called can jump. And I usually like to put a question mark after it. I'm going to hit Enter here. I personally, and this is my own personal preference. Like to name my Boolean variables with a question mark. Essentially, is this true or is this false? Now I can change the type of variable either by clicking right here, and you can see it is Boolean by default for me, I can click right there and change it, or would that variable selected over in the Details panel? I can change the variable type over here as well. Just fun fact for you here. When you go to create a new variable, it will set the type of the variable to be whatever was the last type of variable that you created. So what are we gonna do with this can jump? Well, first of all, we need to give it a default value. In order to do that, we need to compile the blueprint. So let's go ahead and compile it. And with that done, we can set a default value. I'm going to say yes, we can jump by default, check that box. Checked means true, unchecked means false. Let's go ahead and check that box. Now let's go ahead and put this Boolean variable to use. In order to do this, I'm going to create a little bit of space here between our input action Jump, which will fire off when we press the Spacebar, and our jump function right here. So with our can jump variable down in the My Blueprint section, let's left-click and drag that into our Event Graph. Do we want to get it or set it? In this case, we want to get the contents of that. We want to find out if we can jump. What I'm gonna do next is drag off of this and bring in a branch node, one of the most common nodes in all of Blueprint scripting. You can see this branch node can take in a red variable type that is a Boolean variable type. That's the condition here that allows us to plug something into this to evaluate, Hey, what are the contents of this variable? Now it's just fun facts here. If I left-click and break this wire, we could hard set this condition to be true or false, true, false. But I want to read in the contents of this variable. So I'm setting this as my input of the branch node. Now let's sneak this in-between here. In here I'm going to cut this wire by holding down the Alt key and left clicking. And I'm going to set my script to be like so once I press the space bar, which is going to fire off this event, we're going to evaluate, is this variable true or false? If it is true, we will jump. If it is false, we will do nothing. Now currently is set to true. So you would expect that indeed, we will jump. Let's go ahead and compile. And let's play. And if I set my debug object here to be my ThirdPersonCharacter. Let me go ahead and bring this on. Now you'll see that script fire right over here. When I press the space bar. You'll see that I can in fact jump once I release it. By the way, this stop jumping is going to fire. But because this evaluates to true, I can go ahead and jump. Now if I was to change this, I'm going to hold down the Control key, left-click and changes to false. Now we're going to see, hey, is Ken jump set to false? Well it is not. So if I was to go ahead and play, you will see now I press that space bar. But it's never actually going beyond this branch node is dying right here because the contents of this variable can jump. Boolean variables set to true is not set to false, so it is making it so our character, it cannot jump. Okay, so admittedly, that was a rather academic example, but let's go with something a little bit more true to life. Let's go with this scenario whereby your characters just entered a crowded building. And oftentimes in games, you'll find that when you're inside of a crowded building, they disable your character from running. They disable your character from a drawing a weapon. And in our case, we're going to say our character cannot jump. Now my computer crash between little cuts here. So make sure you've set your input action jumped script to be as follows. We want to say can jump, which is set to true by default. We're going to branch it and make sure that on true, we're going to say yes, you can jump. What we're gonna do here is inside of our Level Blueprint, change the contents of this variable. So when we are inside of a trigger volume, we disable our character from jumping. And when we're outside of it, we flip it back so it can jump. Let's go ahead and do that. Now we need to go back to our level. Inside of here. We're going to place a Trigger box. And once again, you can do that by coming under. Here. Bring on your plates actors panel with this basic tab, you can find your trigger box. Place that in front of your players. Start actor. I'm going to quickly size it up to 100, 200, 200. Let me set the line thickness to be something like ten. Something nice and thick. I'm not going to worry too much about the policeman of it. And down below, I'm going to change the rendering so that actor hidden end game is unchecked. That'll make it so we can see this. Now, this Trigger box selected. Let's go to our Level Blueprint. You can bring on your Level Blueprint by going here and here, right-click. And we have that trigger box selected in our levels. We can add an event for it. Let's add one for begin overlap. And we're also going to add one for end overlap. In what we wanna do is check to see who the other actor was. We want to check to see if it was the third-person character. So I'm going to drag out of here, type in third person we can cast to our ThirdPersonCharacter. Like so. If it was the ThirdPersonCharacter that overlapped us, guess what? We can reach inside of our ThirdPersonCharacter Blueprint. And we can access those variables that live inside of it, including that can jump a Boolean variable that we just created. So really seeing, I'm going to set my ten jump, I'm going to type in can jump like so. And there is my variable. I can either get it or set it. In this case, I want to set it. So I'm going to say that when our character is overlapping that trigger box, we cannot jump. We're going to leave that as false. Left-click drag, going to highlight these two nodes, control C to copy, control V to paste. I'm going to hook this in like so and like so. And we're going to say that when we end overlapping that trigger box, we're going to say yep, you can jump once again. So inside the Trigger box, we're going to say, Nope, you cannot jump outside of it. We're gonna say, yes, you can remember back here in our ThirdPersonCharacter Blueprint, we are checking when we press the space bar, we're checking the contents of that variable by default true. But over in our Level Blueprint, when we're overlapping that trigger box, we're changing it to false. When we're ending it, we're changing it back to true. Go ahead and compile this quickly. Make sure our script looks good. Save it. Let's go ahead and play and a phrase this up. Let me just move this up just a tad here. Can't actually, I cannot move this while we're playing. So let me just note that up here. Play once again. Alright, here we go. I'm outside of that trigger box spacebar. Yes, I can jump. We're going to move my character inside of it. You see, it is switching that variable now to be false, mousing over it. I can see that as well. Let me go ahead and press the space bar. I cannot jump. However, once I leave this, that variable gets flipped back to true and I can jump. Alright, let's talk through some possible Boolean use cases that you see common in games. One could be, is the door lot true or false? Do you have the key card, e.g. how about can you fire a weapon? Do you have any animal left, true or false? What about can you pick up an item? Are you close enough to it, true or false? What about can you equip an item? Are you a high enough level, True or false? What about can you buy an item? Do you have enough money, true or false? Those are all possible. Example use cases of a Boolean variable. Alright guys, that's gonna do to offer this one. See you in the next one. 43. Integer: In this video, our goal is to learn what an integer variable is and how it can be utilized in your own gaming projects. We're gonna be starting off in our ThirdPersonCharacter Blueprint. So that's where you can find it in your content browser or content drawer. Double-click on that to open it up. And before we even create an integer variable down here, let's talk about what an integer even is. Well, this is a container. This variable type is a container that holds whole number information. That is, numbers without a decimal point. These can be positive or negative numbers. Now, you can think of some example use cases for where whole numbers are used. Things like score values are oftentimes printed out in whole numbers. Money values, how much gold or silver, that kind of stuff you have. Or what about a character's level? Level one through 100? Those are usually whole numbers. Now, integers are often used to drive logic as well, e.g. you might check to see if the given value of an integer save experience points earned has reached a certain threshold. And if it has, the player levels up, alright, let's create an integer variable. Over here are my blueprints panel. This time I'll create one by clicking right here under the add button. Let's create a variable. And by default it's going to make the type the same as whatever your last variable created was. So it's starting off Boolean. I'm going to call this total XP earned. And you can change the variable type either here, which I will do. We want to set this to be integer not integer 64, but we'll talk about those differences a little bit later on in this video. So you can change it here at the variable type or in the Details panel, you can change the variable type right here as well. We'll talk about these differences later on in the course. But for now, just know the variable type that you want to change is in this drop-down menu. A little bit more nuance to explain while we're here, we can set a slider range for this variable as well as a value range. Well, what does that even mean? Well, to really drive home this point, let's compile our blueprint so that we can set a default value. And now if we set a slider range and let's try from zero to, let's go 50,000. Like so. And our value range is, we'll say 0-100 thousand. We've essentially set some caps on how far we can take this value. Now the slider range comes about when you left-click on this, see how arrow icon went from my mouse cursor to left and right arrow, I can left-click. And if I move this to the left, I can't go below zero. However, if I move it to the right, I can go up to a cap of 50,000, that is the slider range. However, if I was to click on this and put in a number and I'll try 200,000. This is hard inputting it and press Enter. It's going to cap it to my value range here it's saying my value range is 0-100 thousand. That's the highest that I can set this. The slider value determines how much if you left-click in here, how much it'll go if you simply left-click and drag it. The value range is if you click on it, What's the max and minimum numbers? You can hard input. I'll set this back to zero for the time being. Next, let's jump over to our event graph and create a simple script to make use of this integer variable. I'm going to right-click and some empty space. I'm going to type in keyboard and I'm gonna look for the keyboard event. Any of these will do just fine. But I'm going to look for x because we're gonna be doing something worth our experience points here. So when we press the X key, what do we wanna do? Well, we're gonna take our total XP earn. I'm going to hold down the Control key, left-click and drag to get that variable, the contents of which are currently zero. And then I'm going to drag off of this. Bringing the add operator plus button will get you there. We're going to add 100 to this. I'm just going to hard set this. Then I'm going to set a new XP earned value. So I'm going to hold down, actually, I'm just going to left-click and drag and drop this right on here. I'm just going to hold down the Alt key, left-click and drag. But if I just drop this variable right here on this output, they'll give me a setter. Okay? Well, we're gonna be doing from here is dragging off of this. Let's print this string. Let's print the amount of this to our screen. Brings in a little conversion, converting an integer datatype to a string datatype. I will then drag off of here. And we're going to do a search for a greater than or equal to node. We're going to say if our total XP earn is greater than or equal to, we'll say 500. And I'm just going to set. These, on the node themselves, I could contain these invariables themselves, but let's just go with the hard value of 500. Drag off of this, bring in a branch node. We're going to hook this in like so. And we're going to say that if it is true, if our total XP earned is greater than or equal to 500, what we're gonna do then is drag off of here. Do another print, screen, print screen, print string. And our string here is simply going to read on Gratz your level two. And let's just change the text color here to be somewhat noxious color like hot pink shore. And make that appear on the screen for 5 s. So that's our scripts right here. We can left-click and drag to put a comment box around this left-click and drag highlight those all tap CQI. And we'll call this R using an integer to level up script. I'm going to change the comment box here over in the Details panel to black. Alright, compile this to make sure your script is good to go. That's what we've got going on here. Let's go ahead and play and see that we're making use of this integer variable. Okay, so every time I press the X key, let me set my debug objects here to my ThirdPersonCharacter. Every time I press the X key, you're going to see this fire off. In the upper left. I've got 100 XB. We start off with zero, added 100. Our new total is 100. Once again, 200300400500 congrats, you are level two. So that is one example use case of an integer variable. Alright, let's try one more example this time accessing this variable from another blueprint, our Level Blueprint. I'm gonna go back to our level here. Let's make sure we have a Trigger box placed in our level. You've seen me do this several times. I'm going to place a Trigger box in my level. I'm just going to size it up a little bit. Let's go 200 by 200 by 200, changed the line thickness to ten. You're getting good at this by now I'm gonna go down to the Rendering section. Ensure accurate hidden game is not checked. With this selected. I'm going to jump over to our level blueprint. In any empty space, in any graph that you choose. I'm going to right-click. We're going to add an event for that trigger box. When we begin overlapping it, we're going to drag out of the other actor, see if that is the ThirdPersonCharacter. And if it is, we can now extract some information from our ThirdPersonCharacter. That is, we can access any variables that live inside of our ThirdPersonCharacter Blueprint. Once again, once you have a reference of some kind to a given object, in this case, our third-person character. You can access the variables called functions inside of it. It's cetera. So I'm going to type in total XP earn. Let's get that amount. And let's drag off of here. Do the same thing. We're going to add 100 to it. And then let's go ahead and set that variable drag off of here, total XB. We can set it. Of course, with centers you have to pipe in and execution wire. And let set that as the new XP amount. So let's compile this Save. And now what we have going on here is anytime we overlap this, we're going to increment our total XP in that manner. Here we go. So looking in the upper left, I overlap it once, and I didn't print it out to the screen. So that would probably be helpful to do. Drag off of this type in print string. I'm not going to be doing any level up and just hoping to show that this is actually incrementing that variable. Alright, there's our scripts, compile, save, play. When we overlap that trigger box, 100, overlap it again, 200, 300, etc. So imagine you could give your character experienced points if they reach the top of the mountain, that kind of thing. Finally, earlier in this video, I said I would describe a little bit what the difference is between an integer or integer 64 variables. So let me just jump back to my ThirdPersonCharacter Blueprint. I'm going to temporarily create an integer 64 variable. Let's go ahead and do that. Plus, I'll call this int 64. We'll change this to an integer 64, variable type compile save. The difference is the range of possible values. So with an integer 64, you can have a wider range of values. Again, that's in the positive and negative, going to left-click and drag this all the way over. It might even run off the screen there. It does not. You can look up on line for the range of this, but essentially, with integer 64, you get a much wider range of possible numbers. It's not quite infinite. In 64 is do take up a little bit more memory, but it's not that much in most cases. And just about every case in integer should be just fine. Let me go back to my regular integer and show you the range. Whoops, I got to take off my cap here, deletes my cap, delete. Let me just set this to none and like so. Boom, that's the limit for an integer variable number that goes in the positive and the negative in 64, infinite nine. And that is the range for the int 64. Again, that goes in the positive and the negative direction. Guys, that's gonna do it all for our discussion of the integer variable. Very useful, very handy to know that'll do to offer this one. See you in the next one. 44. Float: All right, welcome back everyone. In this video, our goal is to learn what a float variable is, how to create one, and how it can be utilized when blueprint scripting. So firstly, before we get started here, what is a float? A float is a variable that holds a decimal point value. Again, it can be positive or negative. Now, in Unreal, this variable is oftentimes used to hold a time value or to determine a percentage like zero to 100%. And that's usually represented with 0.0, meaning 0%, and 1.0 equaling 100%. Let's show off a couple of different use cases here. I'm going to be inside of my BP ThirdPersonCharacter. And I'm gonna be piggybacking off the script I used in the previous video when we were showing off an integer. Let's go ahead and create a variable. Gonna do it by clicking right here. And let's call this delay. We're going to set a time delay before making our string print off to the screen here. Again, we want to make this a float variable so you can change it here. Changing it there, or conversely, you can change the variable type with that variable selected over in the Details panel. Now, once we have that created, we can compile to set a value. Once again, floats have a decimal point value, so let's try 1.5. That'll be our time that we're going to delay this printing of our string. Let's bring in our flow variable holding down Control, left clicking and dragging will bring in a getter of that variable. And you can see floats are this lime green color. And then let's just bring in a delay node so I can right-click it. Some empty space. Type in delay. There is our delay node. And let me just sneak this in right over here. Like so. So once again, this delay function node, we could hard to set a delay which is currently by default at 0.2 s. Or we can plug in some afloat value again, on the left side it's asking for an input. And the input is looking for is a float. So you could hardcode it, or you could store it in a variable. So we're storing it in here. Our current delay is set as 1.5 s. So upon pressing the X key, we're going to find out our total experience points earned. We're going to add one to it. And we're going to set that as our new variable for the total XB earned that integer. Once this has equaled or exceeded 500. Once that's true, we're gonna delay by this amount 1.5 s, and then print off that message that Congrats you are level two. Let's compile our script. Make sure it's good to go save it. Here we go. Play. Let me just tuck this over here so you can see this all working. Okay, so pressing that X key, we haven't exceeded this threshold yet too. You can see that amount right up here. And we are outputting some weird value for x p earned because I forgot to set XP earn back to zero from the last video. So I need to fix that up. Let's set that back to zero. That'll screw things up. Compile save, play one more time. X I got 100, 200,300,400.500 XP delaying and then congrats your level two. Now you can see that once we've exceeded that, that delay kind of countdown count counts down here in the script, which is pretty handy. You can see as I press it again because we're exceeding that threshold, that it counts down pretty handy. Next, why don't you jump over to this a bit of script back in your BP ThirdPersonCharacter Blueprint where we were creating our HUD and adding it to the viewport. I destroyed this a few videos back. So what I'm gonna be doing here is let me bring on my vent, begin play. It's going to jump me way down here. Let me just move this event B in play into position. And if you did destroy this a little bit of script, this is how you can get it back. Event Begin Play. We're going to create widget. This is a Create Widget node. You can set your WB P HUD back in here in order to create that Widget Blueprint. Then on this pin I right-clicked on this and promoted it to a variable in order to encapsulate that with any variable. And then we added this to the viewport. With all this done, we click Play. We can see that that health meter is added back to our screen here. Now that's all relevant because we're gonna be using a float variable to drive how much health is displayed in this health meter. So. Inside of your mind Blueprint panel of your ThirdPersonCharacter. Sometime back we did create a health variable. If you didn't, you can go ahead and do that. Now. Currently it is set to a default value of 100. Now I mentioned that float values are oftentimes used to have a value between 0.0 and 1.0 to determine a percentage 0% all the way up to 100%. So we're going to set this float value to 1.0, meaning full health. And then down below I had some script to set the visibility of that HUD. Turn it on and off. I'm just going to destroy this one instead, I'm gonna do is when I press the five key, I'm going to increment our health down a little bit so we can see a decreasing. So I'm gonna hold down Control, left-click and drag this in. And then I'm going to drag out of here and I'm going to bring in the minus key, the subtract key. And I'm just going to say decrease it by 0.1, that is 10%. And then we're going to drag and drop this onto the output in order to set the health. Okay, So we currently have this bit of script going on inside of our ThirdPersonCharacter. We can compile this and save. Now if I press his five key right now, you're going to see nothing happened to the actual meter itself. And just to prove that, I'm pressing F5 and it seems like, okay, the health meters not going down. That's because we need to bind this variable to this meter. So that's going to involve us going over to the WPP HUD asset, doing some work inside of there. So we can locate this asset by coming to this node right here, clicking right here to browse through this asset within the content browser. There it is. And go ahead and open this up. Okay, inside of here we want to click on our progress bar. We can either do that right here in the visual layout or over in the hierarchy. You can select that progress bar widget. And then over in the Details panel, under the progress section, you can see we've got this present value and currently it is 1.0%. Again, this meter goes from 0.0 to 1.0. So if I left-click and drag and move this to the left, look at the meter over in the left-hand side, that green bar is dropping down as I decrement this from 1.0 to 0.0. So that's all well and good. But how do we associate our health value over in our bp ThirdPersonCharacter, this right, that, how do we associate that over with this particular widget? Well, we need to create a binding here. And the way we can do that is with this progress bar selected, right where this present value here is. You've got this little bind option. Go ahead and click on this. We want to create a binding. It's going to jump us hear from our Designer tab over to our graph tab. Once we do that, let's do this. Create a binding. And now what we've done is we've created a function, is created a graph tab up here called Get percent. We can rename this. I'm gonna do that now. And it's given us these two nodes. Firstly, let's rename this. I'm going to click on this, press F2, and I'm going to call this Get Player health, like so. And then holding Control, mouse wheeling. And let's zoom in on this a little bit. What we wanna do is let's right-click in some empty space type in get player character. We can drag off of this and Cast to ThirdPersonCharacter. You've seen me do this multiple times. Let's where this inlet so why are the scene like so? And once we do this, we have access to all the variables or functions, or we can call custom events inside of our ThirdPersonCharacter. Well, we want to extract that health variable. So let's drag out of here, type in, get health. There's that float health variable. And look, this is looking for a float inputs. We can plug in our health as extracted from our ThirdPersonCharacter and return that. So we can compile and save this. All we're doing now is associating are ThirdPersonCharacter is health variable with this meter. And it's going to drive this percentage. Maybe I should change the color of this from lime green. Does something a little bit darker. Let's go dark blue, something like that. Make it a little bit more visual here and compile save. We can click Play from here. Actually, let's do it from our ThirdPersonCharacter. We can see this script working. Click Play from here. Okay? And we have created our health widget upon beginning play. And now when I press the five key or health is going to decrement by 10% every time we should see that reflected in our health meter up here as well. So here we go. 555-55-5555 by five, all the way on down. And now check this out. Now that we have a health float variable associated with our ThirdPersonCharacter. And now that we have that variable bound to that meter inside of our WPP HUD. We can go back to the very beginning portion of the course where we created this BP example pickup and make it so that when our character actually picks this up, that some of our character's health is restored. So if you forgot where that blueprint was, we had an in this directory right here, content scripting overview. I'm going to double-click on this to open it up. Inside of here, we're going to create a little space between our ThirdPersonCharacter node right here and this playing of the sound, so you can shove that off to the right. Well, we're gonna do here. Let's try to frame this all up so you can see it. We're going to drag out of our ThirdPersonCharacter. We're going to get its health. That float variable. Well, we're gonna do then is add in amount of health that we want to heal anytime we overlap this blueprint. So we're going to add another variable here. Let's call it health to add. This will also be a float variable. We need to compile this in order to give it a default value. So let's heel 20% of our character's health that would be point to remember, our health is running from a scale associated with our health meter from 0.0 to 1.0. So 0.2 would be 20% health. We're going to drag and drop this into our graph. We're going to get that. We're going to add these two numbers together, dragged out of here, type the plus button to bring in an ad node, like so. And then we're going to drag out of our ThirdPersonCharacter and we're going to set that health. So here we're getting the health. We're adding this amount of Health Anytime we overlapped his pickup. And we're going to set that as the new health variable. Again variables, you can update their values. Alright, so that's gonna be our script, right? There are updated script. Let's compile this a little bit of a bonus here I want to add to our health to add, go ahead and select that variable. If you check this box called instance editable, what this will do is make it so that back in our level editor, we can actually modify how much health that this particular blueprint can give. And we can change it for each instance of it. So let's compile and say that once again. And I'm going to drag this out and I've got one instance of it currently in my level. Let me go ahead and hold down Alt, left-click and drag. So I've got two of them. And with the second one selected over in the Details panel, I've got this health to add that's been exposed now once we check that box called instance editable, I'm going to change the health to add on this one to one. We're going to say that that's the full health one. I can change the scale here as well. Let's change it up to be 22.2, just to make that very apparent that that's gonna be the full healer. Alright, so with that, this one right here is gonna be the small healer. It's going to add 20% health. This one, we'll add 100% health. Let's go ahead and play this. And if you remember, if I press the five key, I can decrease my health. Or I'm going to overlap the first one here. We're going to get 20% health back. Five key, little bit more all the way down and overlap and the big guy, and we're all the way back to full health. And so there you have it. Floats contain decimal point values that can be positive or negative. And oftentimes they're used to hold time values or to hold a percentage ranging from 0.0 to 1.0. Guys, that'll do to offer this video, we will see you in the next one. 45. Name: Welcome back everyone. Our goal in this one is to learn what a named variable is, how to create one, and how it can be utilized when a blueprint scripting. So there's oftentimes a lot of confusion in Unreal whether or not a name, a string, or a text variable should be used. So over the course of the next three videos here we're gonna be talking about some of the subtle differences between those three. So starting with the name variable, name is a piece of texts used to identify something within a game. Now we're gonna be using a couple of name variables inside of this video. Identify a level to transfer to. We're going to be transitioning from this level to another one. We're also going to be using a name to identify a socket that we want to attach a prop to. This could be something like a sword to hand, that sort of thing. Now, a name, a name is a variable that is case insensitive, and that means uppercase or lowercase doesn't matter. In a named variable is used for alphanumeric characters, that is all letters and numbers. Alright, we're gonna get started here inside of our Level Blueprint. So if you don't already have that open, you can come here and open your Level Blueprint. And let's create a couple of name variables. So under the My Blueprint panel, we're going to add a variable. I'm going to call the first one level underscore 01. I currently do have it as a name variable. However, if you wanted to change it, right there is where you can do it. There's the name. Alternatively, with that selected over in the Details panel, you can change the type right here as well. Now I want to create a duplicate of this variable and call it level two. So a couple of ways I could do this. Firstly, I could right-click on it and duplicate it that way. However, I could also do control plus D with that highlighted. In order to create a duplicate level, O2 is what I want to name this. Let's go ahead and compile so that we can give these some default values. Starting with level one, I'm going to input my level one as starter map. And notice how I spell this all lowercase. Next go on to level two. And with this, set the default value to be Minimum, underscore default. And I'm doing this in all caps. You do have to make sure that you spell it correctly. Now if you're wondering why I input those as default values, it is because back here in our level editor, inside my story content maps folder, I have two maps that exists inside of this star content maps folder. One called minimum default. Notice how it's spelled just the M and the D are capitalized and then a starter map level. And notice that the S and the M in the vet our capitalize. So I'm intentionally not using the exact same casing with name variables. You do not have to have the exact same casing. They are case insensitive. Alright, going back to your level test map, go ahead and compile and save that. And then in a graph of your choosing, it could be the default event graph or another graph that you created. Let's go ahead and create a simple script. I'm going to right-click and some empty space type in keyboard so that I have a keyboard events. I'm going to use the L key because that would make sense for transitioning to another level. I am way zoomed out here holding down Control, mouse wheeling up. Let me zoom in on that L key event. What I'm gonna do is drag off of here, bring in a branch node. And if this is true, we want to open a level by name. And I'm going to duplicate this Control C, Control V. And if it's false, we want to open a different level name. What level named? Well, check this out. It is looking for a name input. Now I could have hard-coded this by just inputting this. However, I'm storing these level names inside of these variables. So I'm going to drag and drop level one onto here and level two onto here. So if our condition here turns out to be true, we're going to transition to our starter map level. And if our condition turns out to be false upon pressing the L key, we're going to transition to level two. That's the minimum default. Now currently our condition is hard set to true. However, if I was to right-click and some empty space and type in random bool. This handy node will simply output a random ball randomly choosing true or false every time we press the L key, pretty handy. Here we go. Let's compile this and save and give this a play. Alright, so pressing the L key here, we should be transitioning to one of these two levels. Here we go. And I get a travel failure. And this must be because I must have not copied over one of the names correctly. So level two here, Let's check minimum default. And if I check back into my Minimal defaults are high. We do have to spell it correctly. I did spell it incorrectly. So let me go ahead and fix that up. It's good to learn from our mistakes. Minimal defaults. Leg. So Compile and say, let's try this once again. Again, it's case insensitive. It doesn't matter if these letters, these characters are capitalized or not. However, you do have to have it spelled right? So pressing the L key, we chose level to that time. So we get this weird level here, going to exit out of here. So that was leveled to those chosen in. Let's make sure Level one works correctly. Stopping it playing once again, pressing the L key, one was chosen, and there you go. Next we're going to use a named variable to attach a prompt to our ThirdPersonCharacter. So if you don't already have your ThirdPersonCharacter asset open, come under content third-person blueprints double-click on them to open it up. And inside of here, find your mesh component. We need to do a little bit of setup work before we even make use of any name variable. We're going to add a sockets to our skeletal mesh. So select your mesh and over in the Details panel come under Skeletal Mesh. Click right here to browse to that asset in the Content Browser. Then you're going to want to double-click on this SK M Quinn, simple. And then in the upper right you've got different tabs. Click on this skeleton tab and what we wanna do is add a socket to our character's hand. So this is our Skeleton Tree, all the different bones within our characters skeleton. So I'm going to search this for a hand. And let's add a socket to our characters right hand. I'm going to right-click on this hand. And with right-clicking on that hand bone, we can add a socket. And we've just added a socket. That's the little icon is, I'm going to click on this and I am going to rename it here. So the socket name I'm going to set to be hand socket like so. Now, fun fact here is you can add a preview prop so you can see what this looks like. When something is attached to the socket here, I'm going to right-click on this hand socket. We're going to add a preview mesh. And let's add a lamp, preview mesh like a ceiling lamp. Obviously something like a sword or a dagger would be better here, but we're not gonna be too particular with this. I'm just going to right-click in here, press the space-bar. You can see how this could be positioned in such a way you could move it here like so. I'm not going to worry about being super careful with this. You can rotate it, something like that. And again, you could spend a lot of time fiddling where this socket exists. We're offsetting this relative to our hand here. So you can input some numbers up here for the location and the rotation, et cetera. Or you can fiddle with it here in the preview window as well. Again, I'm not going to be super specific for this. For the time being. Let's go ahead and save this. And next, let's jump back to our ThirdPersonCharacter and create a couple of variables. So jumping back to our ThirdPersonCharacter, we're going to create a variable clicking this plus button. This one is gonna be called sockets name. I'm gonna change this to be a name variable. And I'm going to change the default value here. If I compile, what did we call that hand sockets, I'm just gonna do all lowercase your hand sockets. And notice that that's going to be not exactly the same casing as how we did it here over in our skeleton. We call it hand socket with the capital H and S. Back in our ThirdPersonCharacter, we're just going all lowercase. Now I'm going to add one more component here as a prop to attach to our socket. So let's pretend like we've got a sort of source. I'm going to add a static mesh components. And we will call this our sword, even though it's gonna look like a lamp. And with that sword components selected, that Static Mesh Component over in the Details panel. Let's slot in as a static mesh or lamp, ceiling lamp. I'm going to position it very, very shoddily. Let me just turn off movement, Snapping right up here. And I am not going to spend a long time on this at all. We're just going to go something crazy like that. Sure. Like That. Looks like the buster sorted from Final Fantasy. Sure. And then we're gonna go over to our event graph and we're gonna right-click and some empty space, I need an event key. Let's do the R inputs, or actually let's do keyboard. Let's see what we got for available keyboard events. Let's go to zero key. Sure, That'll work. We're going to drag out of this and attach. And what we're looking for is attaching one component to another. I've got several options here. Let's do attach Component, two components, sword. The sword. Whoops. That is a thing that we want to attach. The parent is the thing that we want to attach it to. In this case, it is our mesh. And remember, the mesh is the thing that has a socket associated with it. So let's drag and drop our socket name right there. So couple of things we need to fix up here is our location and rotational rules. We want to set this to be snapped to target, like so. So this should be our script. We want to attach our sword, That's the target. We want to attach that to our parent mesh. And where specifically, well at are named socket and we set our socket name as hand socket. So compile. Let's say, let's play. Now, look at that fine sword on my characters bag. While it looks terrible, let me press a zero key and boom, it is now attached it to our hand socket. All thanks to that name, variable, saccad name. Now let's summarize. A name variable is a piece of texts used to identify something within a game. Name variables consists of alphanumeric characters, that is all letters and numbers. And they are case insensitive, meaning casing, capitalizing, or lowercase does not matter. Guys, that'll do it all for this video, we will see you in the next one. 46. String: All right, welcome back everyone. In this video, our goal is to learn what a string variable is, how to create one, and how it can be utilized when blueprint scripting. For this video, we're gonna be doing work inside of our bp, a ThirdPersonCharacter, that's the directory where you can find that. So let's go ahead and open this up right away. So as you may expect, you can create this String variable over here in the My Blueprint panel by either clicking Add variable or under the variable section, clicking this plus button. And I'll create our first two string variables right from the get-go here. This first one I'm gonna be calling first Name. And once again, you can change the type of the variable either from this dropdown string is what we're looking to do here, or would that variable selected over in the Details panel under variable type? And I'm going to duplicate this right away. I can right-click and duplicate it. Or with that selected, I can use that hotkey there, which is control plus D. And I'm going to change this one to lastName. Then I'm gonna go ahead and compile this so that we can give this some default values. So for the first name, I'm going to come under the Details section and type in mr. With a period. And then I'm going to add a whitespace right after it. Last name, I'm going to add one drop. Alright? Now let's talk about what is a string variable? Well, a string variable is a variable that can contain any letters, numbers, or symbols. Or strings are useful for dynamically manipulating text at runtime using some ready-made functions and we'll explore some of those later on in this video. Strings can be searched, they can be modified, and they can be compared against other strings. Note, because of this, strings are preferable to name variables if you want to manipulate text in some way while the game is running. So strings are a little bit more expensive than name variables. But I mean, if you're running a smaller game or even a larger game, I mean, the cost isn't that much greater. Okay, So let's create our first script that's going to be utilizing some of these string variables. So here's some empty space in an event graph. I'm going to right-click. I'm going to bring in, Let's try the seven key. Any keyboard event will do. Let me zoom up on this. And you've seen me use this function many a time dragging off of here, print string. So this node can take in a string variable. Now there are many things that can be converted into a string, but that pink pin right there, if you hover over it, it says it's looking for a string variable. If I was to plug in our socket name, it will convert it to a string, will actually, if I go like this and drag out here and say toString, I can convert that to a string variable. Many other variables can be converted as well into strings. But let's show off our two string variables and how we can append them together. That is to attach one to the other. So I'm gonna hold down Control, left-click and drag in my first name and holding Control left-click. And I'm also going to get my last name as well. As many names are presented. It's firstName followed by last name. So a way that we can manipulate these two separate strings is by appending them. So if I right-click in some empty space and I come under the utilities section way towards the bottom because it's all in alphabetical order. Utilities. We can come under Utilities string. And at the very top there's a function called append that is to concatenate two strings together to combine them. So we can take our firstName and append the lastName onto it. And that'll give us the final result. Like so. If I compile this, make sure my script is looking good here. Save, let's go ahead and play. Now when I press the seven key, you should see my first and last name combined up here. Here we go. Seven, you see Mr. wander all combined. Now in that utilities string section, there are a lot of functions that can be used to manipulate strings. Let me just find another one here. I'm gonna drag off my last name, like so. And I'm going to type in two upper, again, it's going to find it in the utilities string section. I'm going to go like this, hooking this into the B section as well. Now if I was to compile, save, and play, what you will notice in the upper left when I press that seven key is notice how it changed the entire last name string into all uppercase. So that's kinda handy as well. A lot of ways to manipulate strings. That's one of the main benefits of making something a string is all those different functions to manipulate them. I'm going to show off some of the other manipulating functions over in the Level Blueprint because I've prepared some prior to this video. So I'm going to jump out of my ThirdPersonCharacter and go into my Level Blueprint once again, that's how you can do that by clicking right there, open Level Blueprints. Here I've got several different functions. There are many more that we're gonna be exploring here. Again, you can find that by right-clicking and some empty space going under the utilities string section. Here, all the string manipulator functions you saw append. So if I was to, I'm going to drag and drop each of these into my ready-made function here, my print string function script that can fire off with the S key here. So if I was to try this out, you can see how by pressing the S key, I can append that dollar amount after the texts of money. Pretty handy. Alright, let me get rid of that guy and we will move time seconds to string. This is another one I really like. What this will do, and I prepare this one ahead of time, is I changed this float variable to have a value of 500. So if I was to change that into seconds, how many seconds is that? Well, this will do the work for you. So if I press the S key now, you can see how that prints it out in a nice time form. Let's delete that one out. Let's try splitting a string. So if this is my source string July 4th with a comma 17, 76, and I want to split it at this in STR, this little alright. Here, to the left of that I will get July 4th. To the right of that, I would get 17 76. So let's go ahead and give this a try quickly. Splitting a string. I'm just getting to the left of that comma, pressing the S key. July 4th. And if I was to hold down control and getting to the right of that, now I would get that actually it'd be a whitespace in 17 76, but you can't see the whitespace, it's just going to show a 17 76. Now something cool you could do here is we could convert these into variables that we could change out. So you could right-click on this, promote that to a variable and call this independence date independent state for the United States anyways, those internationally, that would be some other date hopefully for your independence, should you enjoy that luxury? And so in doing that compiling, you can see how we created the variable in that fashion by right-clicking and we promoted it to variable. Note that it automatically takes that information that you had hard-coded in that their function in that spot and automatically populated that string variable. So just thought I would throw that out there as well. Let's look at another one here, this replace function. You can also find this under the utilities strings section and you right-click menu. Super handy because you could see a scenario like this. And again where you've got a source string that says the door is locked. You can change some texts that you specify, in this case locked to the text open. So that's another advantage of these string functions. You have all these different ways of manipulating the texts. So here we go. This should say is that the door is locked, I'm saying changed locked to open. So pressing the S key, the door is open. And so there you have it. A string variable is a variable that can contain any letters, numbers, or symbols. They're useful because they can be dynamically manipulated at runtime. And once again, to find all those functions right-click and you want to come under Utilities. Way at the bottom here, utilities string and you've got a whole host of functions to manipulate those strings. Well, that'll do it all for this one guys, we will see you in the next one. 47. Text: Welcome back everyone. In this video we're going to be learning what a text variable is, how to create one in how it can be utilized when blueprints scripting. So this is the third out of this category of variable, namely the name variable, the string variable, and the text variable. What is the text variable and when should it be used? Well, texts variables should be used for any texts a user may see during a game. Texts you may see on an in-game HUD, or maybe some texts that you see in menus or maybe on a high score screen, that sort of thing. Use this type texts that you want to localize. So if you're looking to translate your game and all the text that goes with that into German, French, Spanish, all that kind of stuff. You're going to want to make sure that that text is in the text variable type. Now, text variables are case sensitive, whereas named variables were not case-sensitive. They were case insensitive. Tax variables are case sensitive. Alright, we're gonna be doing a little bit of work inside of our WB P HUD. So that's where you can find that we created that some videos ago. We're also going to be doing a little bit of work inside of our ThirdPersonCharacter Blueprint. So you can find that in the third person Blueprints folder as well. So open both of those guys up. I'm going to start off in my W BP HUD. Now, you may remember when we did this some time back. All we did is we created a horizontal box. And inside of this horizontal box, we added a text widget as well as a progress bar. Now, I have this thing health for the time being, but I'm gonna change this over in the Details panel. Do you simply say character name? Character name. This is of the texts variable type. In fact, if I hover over this flag right here, you can see that this is some texts that can be localized that checkbox is on. I'm also going to change the name of this particular widgets to character name or character texts. How about that? We are talking texts variables here. Just to make that a little bit more clear. So what we're gonna be doing now is E inside of our ThirdPersonCharacter, I'm willing to be creating a text variable. And I'm going to give it the name that I wish to name our ThirdPersonCharacter. So I'll hop on over there. We're going to create an association here in just a little bit. But hop on over to your ThirdPersonCharacter. And we're going to create a new variable. And we're going to call this our character texts just to make it extra clear. And we're going to change this to a text variable type. We're going to compile that. And I'll call this my superhero. That sounds like a fine name. Now with this text variable created, I'm going to compile here and save. And now we're going to associate this variable to our W, B P HUD so that we can actually read in this superhero texts. So jump on over to your WPP HUD. Select where it says character name. And over in the Details panel where it says text character name, we need to create a binding. I'm gonna do that by clicking on binding. Create binding. And this is going to jump us from the Designer tab over to the graph tab. That's just what happened there. Designer tab takes you back to this visual layout. Graph tab is where you can create some script. And more specifically, it jumped us over to creating a brand new function. So right now our function is called get character texts. Texts is zero, which is a horrible name. What it's done is it's opened up a brand new tab here. And here is the name of the function that we're putting together. I'm going to rename this by hovering over this. And we will rename it. F2 will also lie to rename it, and I'll call this gets character texts. So now what we wanna do out of here is much like we did with our Get Player health. I'm just going to jump over to that function really quickly by double-clicking on it. We were getting our player character and we were casting to our ThirdPersonCharacter so that we could get that variable information. I'm going to highlight these two nodes, left clicking and dragging. I'm gonna do Control C. And then I'm going to double-click on the function I just came from. I get character texts. And then in here I'm gonna do Control V to paste that. I'm going to wire this through like this. And once again, once you have a reference to your ThirdPersonCharacter, you can extract some information from it, including any variables that live inside of it. So I created that variable inside of my third-person character here called character texts. So back here to my WB P HUD, inside that function, I'm going to drag out here and I can do a search for a character texts. I want to get it and look at the return value that this function is looking for. I mentioned that over in the Designer tab that this particular text widget, we're binding this to some actual texts. That's the output we're looking for here in our graph tab. That's looking for the return value of a text variable. So we're going to plug this texts right into here. Like so. And if I compile and save and I now play, you'll notice that in the upper left, it now says superhero, the name of our character as we specified inside that character texts variable. Okay, something else I wanted to show off with a text variable here is the way that you can format some texts because I think a lot of you will find this useful as well. Now in order to do what I want to show off, we're going to jump back into our ThirdPersonCharacter. And then we'll jump back here into our WPP Hudson. Don't just close this out just yet. Let's go back into our ThirdPersonCharacter. Like so. Let's create a brand new texts variables. I'm going to come under Variables click plus. And I'm going to call this one health status leg. So I'm going to change the health status default value to be something kind of interesting. So we're going to compile here and watch what I'm going to type in here. Let me expand this out a little bit. I will put you have, and this is gonna be a curly bro, sorry, curly bracket, not straight bracket holding down the shift, left curly bracket, health. Right curly bracket holding down Shift and pressing the bracket button, HP remaining. Now while. Now why I have done this is because with our text variable here, we do have the ability to format our texts and change out these contents right here to have this read, you have 100 HP remaining, you have 50 HP remaining, that kind of thing. Now the way that we can do that is through a format texts node. So I want to format this. I will do some scripts here and then it will bind this back to our WPP HUD. So herein are ThirdPersonCharacter Event Graph. I'm going to right-click and let's try the nine key. Any input key will do. Nike will work just fine for now. And I'm going to drag off of here. Actually, let's not drag off of here just yet. I want to bring our health status, drag that and we're gonna get that. And then I'm going to drag off of here and type in format text. Okay, so current leaves only has one pin, but we're going to add a pin here. And currently it's labeled as zero. However, if I select this format texts node, I can change up here the argument that is gonna be this input pin. To be often this should be spelled exactly as we have a written in our health status. So I have capital H E, H E a L T H, health. Just like that. With your format, text nodes selected change the argument there to be the exact same, and that will show up as an input pin on this format text node. Next, what I'm gonna do is I'm going to take our health variable here, like so. This is currently a float and plug it in down here. Now this is currently gray, meaning it can take in anything. So I'm gonna plug in a float variable, and so it will say, Okay, you want to plug in afloat, this will now be a float input. It'll change it to whatever type of inputs you put into it like so. And the result here, I am going to promote this to a variable. Right-click promote. And it created this new text variable down here called results. I will change this to help result. I think that'll be a little bit more descriptive. So now what we're doing here is when we're going to press the nine key, we're gonna take our current health status here, this sentence, if you will, we're going to swap out what we specified right here, this health and the reason we have this exact health in the curly brackets is the exact same here in the arguments is so that it will read that is the texture that we're trying to swap out. And then the result here will be the result of this line with the health being swapped out for whatever this float value is. Now realized that this is in a decimal point form. So we're gonna get a value here, 0-1. And normally you would want to read in 100 health, that kind of thing. But that's going to be fine for demonstration purposes. I'm going to compile this last bit I need to do here is I need to bind this health results overnight, WB be HUD. So in order to do this, I'm going to hop back on over here. Let me go back to my Designer tab. I'm going to quickly drag and drop a text widget somewhere about there. This is not asked to be super precise. This is just gonna be hanging out here. I'm not gonna show or hide it or anything like that. I'm just going to call this my health status. And currently if I was to play this is just going to show us health status on the screen. Like so, health status. However, I want to bind this to our variable, our health status variable inside of our ThirdPersonCharacter. So we need to create this binding by going here, bind, create binding. And as jumped us over to the graph tab, we're going to change the name of this function, hitting F2 over here to get health status like so. We're going to do like we did with our other functions here, I'm going to double-click on this other function. We're going to grab these two nodes, control C. Jump back to our health status function that we're working on, control v. Like this. And now we can do is find inside of our ThirdPersonCharacter, make sure you've compiled this. We want to grab this health result variable. I shouldn't change this to Help Desk, I'm going to call this health good health results. Let's be a little bit more precise. They're dragging out of our third-person character type in health results. We want to get the health result, not the health status of health results. There are two similarly named. And now, if I was to compile, save, notice that our ThirdPersonCharacter, once we pressed the nine key, that's what we're going to update our health result here. So I'm going to press the play button. And once I press the nine key, you have one HP remaining. Now, somewhere here in this ThirdPersonCharacter, I was decrementing our health. Well was that with the sick, the five key, right? So by jump back in here. And I'm pressing the five key to lower my health. Now if I press the nine key, it should update this. Now I have 50% health, the five key lowering, lowering, lowering. I shouldn't have 20 per cent health. So I'm going to press F9 key. Once again, you have 20% health as well. And I could format this to be more sensical, but you get the point. And finally, I did make mentioned that any user-facing texts, be it in the HUD or in the menus, that kind of thing that you want to have localized. It should be within a text variable, that kind of texts. It should be within a text variable if a user is going to read it in different languages. Now, how do you go about with that whole process that is way beyond the scope of this video. However, I will point you to this particular bit of documentation. In the Unreal Engine five official documentation, you can come under docs dot Unreal engine.com. You can see the address right up here. A lot of information about how to get texts localized with that guys. That'll do it all for this one. We will see you in the next one. 48. Vector: Welcome back everyone. The vector variable is the topic of this video. So let's learn how to create one and how to utilize one within some blueprints scripts. So firstly, what is a vector variable? Well, a vector variable is one that contains three float values, that is numbers with a decimal point. They're typically used to specify x, y, and z 3D coordinate data. However, they can be used to contain R, G, and B, that is red, green, and blue color data. Alright, to show off a few examples here, I want to make use of our Level Blueprint, but before you even jump in there, let's make sure you've got a Trigger box place within your level because we're gonna be making use of that to show off some use of vector variables. So if you haven't already done so, come under right here under the place actors panel, with the basic tab selected, you can find a Trigger box. Go ahead and place one of those in your level. And then all I did here was I set my box extends to be 200, 200, 200, line thickness of ten. And under the rendering section, I just turned off actor hidden and games so that I can see this trigger volume when I am playing. Alright, with this Trigger box selected, then jump into your Level Blueprint. Right away. What we're gonna do is right-click. You've seen me do this 1 million times. Now. We're going to add on actor begin overlap event. We want something to happen when we overlap this Trigger box, and we want it to happen only when the ThirdPersonCharacter is the other actor. That overlaps us to drag out of there typing Cast to ThirdPersonCharacter. The first thing I wanna do here is simply warp to another location. Now, in order to determine which location we want to work too, we could hold that in a vector variable. So let's come under our variables section. Click the plus button and let's call this our warp, too locale. And to change this to a vector variable, once again, you can click here and set it as a vector variable. Or with that selected over the Details panel, you can change the variable type to a vector as well. I'm going to compile here. And we can see that once we do, the default value is set to 00.0 and these are decimal values. These are three float values. And you can see as I'm highlighting over these, these are x, y, and z coordinates typically. Also you can click this little down arrow to expand that and show the x, y, and z. What I'm gonna do here is set this to be a value that is above, up in the air, above my trigger box. So what I'm essentially going for here is I want to overlap this. I'm going to spawn in right here. I'm going to overlap this and then I want to warp to a location that's right above it with the idea that I'm going to fall somewhere down close to it. And then I can repeat it again and again. So I'm going to copy the location of this Trigger box with this selected over in the Details panel, I'm going to right-click right about here and copy these coordinates. Then I'm going to jump back to my level tests map, Level Blueprint, come under my warp to locale. And right here I'm going to right-click and paste it to paste in those same values. However, I want to set my z value to be higher so that I'm not warping right back into the same box. So I'm going to set my z value here to be 2000. Know that depending on where you place your trigger box, your values here will be different. You just need to know that your x and y can say the same as your trigger box. The Z you're going to want to set to be a bigger number so that you end up warping above the bounds of that box. Now what we wanna do here is when we overlap this box with a third-person character, we want to drag out of our ThirdPersonCharacter and type inset actor location. This is a function node that can move your target. In this case, our third-person character to a new location. And what do you know we're storing that location inside of this vector variable. So I can left-click and drag and drop this right on top of our new location. And I'm going to compile this to make sure our script is looking good here and it is, let's save it, and let's go ahead and play. So once I overlap this, I should warp to a location that is above it somewhere. Here we go. There we go. You can see I just keep falling down through it again and again and again. Let me try to move myself away from there. Infinite loop. But you get the idea. Now you can see how you could expand this script right here at a sound effect, maybe smaller particle effect at the location of where we overlap that trigger box and at the warp to locale. But the location of the Trigger box, that is an example use of a vector variable. Now let's make one more use of a vector variable and use it to specify a color. For this, I'm going to left-click on this warp to locale Control D to duplicate it. It'll duplicate that variable and I'm just going to call this new color. I'm going to simply add an input key here. Let's try the, I don't know the nine key and see if that's available. The nine key, Sure, Any input event will do. And I'm gonna drag off this and type in print string. And it's going to print out the text Hello. However, if I expand this down, I can specify a text color. Now if I hover over this input pin, it says that this variable type is a linear color structure. That's the type of variable it's looking for. And we can create one of those by right-clicking on it and promoting to a variable. But the idea here is I want to show off how a vector variable could be used to specify a color. Now, if I select my new color variable here and I compile so I can add a value here. It's copying over the data that came from my warp to locale. So let me just set this back to 00.0. Now if you're using a vector variable to specify an RGB color, you need to know that these values would essentially run from 0.0 to 1.0. You're essentially specifying what percentage of red or percentage you want of green and what percentage you want a blue. I'm going to set my new color here to be 1.0 for the r-value, the b and the g, I'll leave as zero. So I'm essentially saying give me 100% red, no green, and no blue. Now if I try to drag and drop this on top of my text color is because they Nope, can't do it. However, if I drag and drop it in, I get it. And then I drag this into the text color input. It's going to convert my vector to a linear color structure type. Now in doing this, I can compile, save, make sure my script is good to go. Let's go ahead and play. Now when I press the nine key, you will see that the text Hello shows up in red and that's being driven by my vector variable where I'm using that to specify an R, G, and B color value. And there you have it. Common uses of vector variables include using them for spawn or respond points, or perhaps for starting and ending points of a moving platform. And we'll explore that one later when we do a lesson on making use of timeline nodes within blueprints scripting. Guys, that'll do it all for this one. See you in the next one. 49. Rotator: Welcome back everyone. The rotator variable is the star of this video. So let's learn how to create one and how it can be utilized within a blueprint script. First of all, what is a rotator? Well, rotator is a variable that contains rotational information. Now, objects can be rotated around three different axes, the x, the y, and the z. And this can inform how much we want a given object to be rotated, storing it within these rotator variables. Now before we get to any of that stuff, I just want to point out here with any objects selected in your level about how rotation revolves around a given axis. So right now you can see I've got my trigger Volume selected here, my trigger box, and I'm currently within my movement mode, indicated by that for arrowed widget. Now, if I was to switch this over to rotation mode, we can see how if we rotate around the x-axis are red arrow here. That involves moving like that. It moves around that axis. Likewise, notice our y-axis here pointed off in this direction. If we were to change this to rotation, we will be moving it around that axis. Likewise, if we've got our z-axis here pointed up and down, if we're rotating around that axis, we're essentially moving it like this. Rotating it like this. I need to be grammatically correct. Alright, with that, I also made one more change between videos in that I created a brand new folder here and our scripting folder simply right-clicked, created a new folder and call it actor. Bp's. What I did here is I moved all of my blueprints that were in my overview folder. I simply drag and drop them, left-click and drag them inside of my new actor BP's folder. Because that just seemed like a more descriptive name. Overview folder. It's kind of outlived its useful life. So I'm going to create a new blueprint here inside of my new actors BP's folders. By right-clicking, we're going to be creating a new blueprint class. This will be an actor class blueprints. So choose actor. And I'm going to name this BP underscore rotating door. We're gonna be creating some rotator variables inside of this blueprint. Firstly, let's go ahead and double-click on this to open it up. And I don't want to add a couple of components. So the first component I'm going to add by coming under my components section, is going to be a box, box, box box. Let me just do a search for box. There it is. Box Collision. And with that selected, I do have some details I want to set for this over in the Details panel. I want to set the location to be negative 45 and the z location to be 110. You'll see why here in a little bit. Let's kinda up in the air like that. Also, I'm going to change the box extent to be 170 in the x, 60, in the y, in 110, in the z. So it's kinda tall, something like that. Alright, with that done, we're going to add a static mesh component. I'm going to add this. We're looking for a static mesh. And currently this Static Mesh is attached to our box. We'll fix that in just a little bit. I'm going to call this my door mesh. Alright, with this selected over in the Details panel, I want to set our static mesh to be, click this little drop-down, S M underscore door. Now this is an asset that lives in the starter content prompts folder. Honestly, you can use any sort of door like mesh, but this one works well. So let's go ahead and use it. Side note here, this mesh does not have any collision on it. I know you can just walk right through it, but it's going to be fine for showing off the rotation of a door mesh. Let's go ahead and place that. Now, I mentioned that this is currently attached to our box. I'm just going to drag and drop this on top of our box to make it so it's not attached. It shouldn't be too big of a deal, but just to play along with me at home. Alright? Next one we're going to do is we're going to create a couple of variables. So in the My Blueprint section, under the variable section and click the plus button. We're going to call this first one, the start located, start rotation, not location rotation. We're going to change the type here to be a rotator. Then I'm going to select this once again and do Control and D to duplicate it. This is going to be art and rotation. So with that, we're going to compile so that we can set some values here, are starting rotation, make sure you select that. We want it to be 00.0. Then go ahead and select your end rotation. We just want our and rotation along the z-axis to be 90. So, you know, if you open a door at 90 degrees, you're essentially going to be starting with it, like this is a bird's-eye view. And then the end is gonna be kinda like that, right? It's just going to open it. Swing this from here up like that with my mouse. That's nice, Mr. Waldroup. Alright, next, let's go ahead and do a bit of scripting in our event graph. So we have some event nodes here by default, we can left-click drag, get rid of these. And now we want something to happen when we begin overlapping that box. And then when we end overlapping that box, and that is this box right over here, I jumped over to my viewport tab. So let's go back to my event graph. I'm going to right-click on my box component. We're going to add an event for when we begin overlapping it. And then let's right-click on it again at event for end overlap. Now we want to specify that it is the player character that is overlapping us. Now, I could cast to my ThirdPersonCharacter. However, there's another way I can go about doing this. So I'd like to show off different techniques. I'm going to Right-click type in get player character. And what I'm gonna do here is check to see if the other actor is equal to. I'm just going to type in the equal symbol. If that's equal to my player character. If they are equal, I'm gonna hold down the B key and bringing a branch node like so. Other actor is equal to my player character. What I wanna do is rotate the door open. Now in order to do this, we're gonna be making use of a timeline node. Now I've got an entire video later on in the course that's gonna be dedicated to this. So we're gonna be jumping the gun here a little bit. This video is not about creating a timeline. So if you don't even fully understand what's happening here, just bear with me. Even though I'm gonna do my best to explain it as quickly as possible, right-click and some empty space and do a search for a time line node. Once you type in the word timeline, it's gonna be weighed the bottom here for adding a timeline. And this is a very special node. And one of the things that's going to allow you to do is give it a name. I'm going to call this my door rotation. You can see it's got a lot of input pins, a lot of execution input pins where we can play it. We can stop at this node, can be double-clicked upon in order to specify an animation of this is a timeline. We're gonna be animating our door over a given timeline. If we double-click on this, we can add a timeline to our window here, so I just double-clicked on it. We've got our door rotation timeline node right up at the top here. We want to add a track. We want to add specifically a float tracks. If I go into track right here, click the Plus button. We want to add a float track. A Float Track allows us to change a float variable over time. So we're adding a Float Track. We can rename this track and I'm going to call this rotation. Now what I wanna do is I wanted to specify some points in time. So the way I can add a point to this graph is by right-clicking and adding a key. That's one way to add it. And with this first point, added this first keyframe, as it's called, I'm going to specify a time of zero. A value of zero. Hit Enter. And that's going to place it right here in my track. Next, I'm going to right-click again at another key. That's a way I could do it, or I can hold down the Shift key and left-click. That's another way to add a key. I'm going to select this key. And I'm going to set the time at one, meaning 1 s, and the value at one. Now it's going to jump it off the top of the screen here. But if you click these arrows, you can frame it up like that. Now I also want to change the length of my track here to currently be 1 s as opposed to 5 s. That's essentially specifying how long I want this track to be. I want this to be as long as my last keyframe here, I want this to be 1 s. So what essentially I'm gonna be doing here is I'm going to be changing the value of a float variable named rotation from zero, a value of zero at 0 s to a value of one 1 s later it's going to be slowly, gradually changing that 0-1 over the course of 1 s. Now this rotation float variable, if I jump back to my event graph here, notice this is called rotation. You can now see that my door rotation timeline has an output, and this output is a float value. It's going to output this float value. And again, if I jump back into this timeline by double-click on it, double-clicking on it. I'm going to be changing the value of that 0-1 gradually over 1 s. Now this is useful because we can use this to drive something called a loop. So if I right-click and some empty space, I can do a search for a node called rotator. Now this is going to be confusing at first, but I'm going to describe how this works. Alert node allows us to go from one value to another over a given amount of time. And in fact, if we rotate or if we mouse over the top of this node, it says we're going to linearly interpolate between a and b based on the Alpha value that we provide it. So it's going to work like this. A rotation is gonna go 0-1. That's the value. It's going to go between 0-1 over the course of 1 s. When Alpha is zero, it's going to read in the value of this node are starting rotation. Note that our starting rotation is basically 00.0. Now, as our rotation value here goes 0-1, we're going to gradually be moving from our a value, our b value. So as our rotation here goes like this, 0-1 over 1 s, it's gonna be continually moving away from a to B over 1 s from 01 is going to move us from a to b. So our end rotation is going to specify our ending rotation. We're starting at this rotation. We're ending at this rotation. Now this is all well and good, but the return value here needs to be plugged into set relative rotation function. Or we're gonna be doing here is saying, hey door mesh, that's the component that we want to rotate, drag and drop that in our graph. Then drag out of this. We want to set your relative rotation. That is changing your rotation relative to where from where you started. So our final setup is going to look like this. Let's walk through this to understand this a little bit more thoroughly. Now upon overlapping that trigger volume, we're going to find out if it is the player character that was the overall factor, the other actor that overlapped us. If that's true, we're going to play, play this timeline. It's going to go 0-1, a rotation value if float value over 1 s. And as it's doing this, changing the value of this variable 0-1, we're gonna be going from our starting rotation to our end rotation over the course of 1 s. That's what this is doing. And the return of this going from a to B is going to be telling our door mesh to rotate over that one seconds. Let's go ahead and give us a tribe. We won't even worry about our end overlap for now. But in order to do this, we need to drag and drop this into our level. Let's drag and drop this into our level. I'll place it right over here. We're gonna go ahead and click Play. And you know what? In order to do this, I should make sure we are doing this in a new editor window like so. And also, I'm gonna do this from inside of our, our blueprint here so you can see the script at work. So let me just kinda tuck this way up here. We're going to click play here. We've got our debug setup to a rotating door. Bring it on our Playing window here. And as I overlap this, you can see it rotated it 90 degrees. Now, as you can see, once I get away from that trigger volume, it doesn't set it back or anything like that. And it's already set the rotation of this to be open. So it's open. Now I want to make this close. We just need to tap into a similar setup like we've got right here. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to drag out a here. Type in the equal sign. Once again, we're going to find out if other actor is equal to our player character. Once again, we're going to copy our branch control C, control V. And if this is true that the other actor ended our overlap, if that's true, we're going to reverse this timeline. We're going to reverse that door's rotation. So let's compile this. Save in play. Going to take this away over here so you can see the script firing off. Alright, So timeline is played. Then let's end our overlap. Watch for the script to fire off. Open Sesame. Lows, just like that. And so there you have it. In this video, we use the rotator variable to specify a starting location for our door mesh, as well as an ending rotation for our door mesh. It's as simple as that guys that'll do it all for this video. See you in the next one. 50. Transform: Welcome back everyone. The transform variable is the one we're dealing with in this video, we're gonna show how to create one and how it can be utilized when blueprint scripting. Now an excellent use of the transform variable is when you are specifying a point within a level that maybe you want to respond at. Now, transform variable is a variable that contains location, rotation, and scale data. In fact, if you look over in the right-hand panel, in the Details panel for any actor that you have selected within your level, you can see some transform information about it. In fact, if I select my player start actor here, you can see the location specified, the rotation of it, and the scale. So this essentially is a variable that consists of nine float values, three each in the location, rotation and scale nine total. Now, in the interest of time, I set up a bunch of stuff prior to shooting this video. So let me show you what I've done and I'll walk you through this step-by-step. For starters here I have my player start actor located right there. As with many other videos, I have a trigger box added to my level. And as long as you've got your player, your place actors panel available, which you can bring on right there. You can grab a Trigger box right there. And then I also have three target point actors, 12.3. And you can find these guys if you search in the place actors panel and just search for target, you will find a target point actor. These are essentially excellent for specifying a point in space. These icons will not show up while you're playing. However, when you select them, you can see their location. Use their location or their rotation data as well. And I like to use them for those purposes. Now, jumping into our Level Blueprint, let me show you the script that I've put together here. So let's check under our Level Blueprint, starting with our setting a random spawn points. So this whole video, we are going to be making use of a transformed variable. So what you wanna do here is over in the My Blueprint panel under the variables section, click on the plus button and create a brand new variable. It should be of the transform variety right there, and I call it respond point. Now if you compile it, you're going to find that your default values are zeros, zeros, zeros, and the scale is 111, essentially the true default values. Now what we're gonna be doing here is upon beginning play, upon our play starting, you can find this by right-clicking and doing a search for Event Begin Play. We want to set our Respond point, that is to populate it with some data because we don't want to keep the location and the rotation, all this kinda stuff at zeros, zeros, zero. So what are we going to set this value to that again, variables, the contents of it can be changed, they can be set. So what I did here, I grabbed a reference to all three target points. Now I name these target points, target 0.0, target 0.1, and target point to. And then what you can bring in references to these is back in your level. You can select it and then one-by-one with it selected, you can hold down the R key and left-click, like so. Fun trickier. If I was to select all three of these target points there, they're all selected and then hit the RT and left-click, I can bring in references to all three of them right away. Nice trick. I like that one a lot. Then what I did is I dragged on each of these. And I said, give me that actors transform. I'm saying, give me, give me this data right over here for each one of these given target points. Then what I did is I drove out of here and I typed in make array. So essentially I'm creating a list of different transforms, different transform data from target 0.0, target point, and target 0.2. So I have a list of three possible transforms. What I then did is I drug out of here and I typed in gets and I wanted to get a reference, that guy right there. And then I drag out of this backwards and I typed in random integer in range, I am saying give me one of these transforms from this list and make it 0-2. You may need to adjust these numbers depending on how many different target points you have plugged into this array. So I'm saying give me either 01 or two, That's my range, zero to two. And the output of this, I am going to set as my respond point. So it's going to be changing upon beginning play. We're going to update our respond points to a given location. One of these three, it's going to pick at random. Now that's just setting this respond points, this transform variable, but we haven't actually gotten and made use of this respond Point Transform. So down below, I have an additional script. And it should be as follows. What I did here is on beginning overlapping that trigger box and once again, with that trigger box selected back in your Level Blueprint, you can right-click at an event for that and do in an actor begin overlap. We can drag out here and then do a casting to our ThirdPersonCharacter. We want to do something when our ThirdPersonCharacter is overlapping that trigger box. And what we're doing here is we're doing a couple of things and that's where a sequence node comes in, where they sequenced the other. We can say do this, then do this. And we can actually add additional things if we click this plus button down here. But it's essentially a nice, tidy way of saying do this, then this, then anything that comes after it. So the first thing we wanna do after our ThirdPersonCharacter overlaps Is Trigger box is we want to destroy our current player character, our current ThirdPersonCharacter. We wanted to destroy him. Then what we're going to be doing immediately afterward is spawning an actor from class. Now, note that this is a spawn actor from class node. However, once you populate the class to our ThirdPersonCharacter, it's going to update the name here, but this is a spawn actor from class node. Now what you need to do here is you need to specify a spawn transform. And this is where we're making use of our transform variable that we created and we're populating, we're back here when we begin play. Without this. If you compile, it will throw an error and let me just actually do this. I'm going to break this, holding down the Alt key and left clicking. So if I was to compile, it's going to say, Hey, you need to have a spawn transform plugged in so we can go ahead and plug that in. And then what we're doing out of here is we right-click in some empty space type in get player controller. And out of this, and it must be out of this. If you drag out of this because the target is a controller, you can search for this possess node. By possessing, by dragging out of there and grabbing a possess node, you can choose a pawn to possess. Here we're spawning a new ThirdPersonCharacter. Here we're saying, Hey, we want to spawn or we want to possess that ThirdPersonCharacter with our player controller. We'll talk more about player controller's later on in the course. Let's go ahead and compile here. And this is our script for destroying the player and then responding another, end possessing it. So that's all framed up here. If you want to pause the video here and take a good look at that, there you go. Okay, let's go ahead and play again. And let's see this in action. This is gonna be a little bit small here. But hopefully you can see some of these wires firing off. Let's go ahead and play. And we've already set a respond point. Let me go ahead and set my debug object there to my level. Now, once I overlap that trigger box, you're going to see us destroying the actor. And then immediately after spawning a new ThirdPersonCharacter and possessing it. Here we go. And it shows that point beyond behind the level. And it's currently choosing that same one again, again, because only upon beginning play are we setting our transform variable to one of these three target points. However, if you were to do something like this, drag out of here, drag right back up here. Every time I overlap that trigger box and I am resetting, I'm choosing at random one of these three target points that I want to set my response variable to be. So let's try that. So overlapping. I spawn behind it. Let's run into it again. Off to the left, that time behind. Again, this is choosing it at random. There's something else I want to show off here with. The transform variable is you can actually extract that unique location, rotation, and scale data. Now, this transform variable contains all of this data. But if you wanted to extract just a portion of that data, you could. And the way you could do that is by dragging out of this pin right here and typing in splits. Let me just break this wire here. Rather right-clicking on it and things split the Struct Pin. Sorry about that. Here we can break our respondent points transformed down into the location, the rotation, and the scale data. And as you can see, a transformed variable essentially consists of vector data, rotator data, and vector data. Likewise, out of this spawn transform here in our spawn actor from class node, I could right-click on this and split this pin is well into the location, rotation and scale data. If you don't like this level of granularity, you could right-click on a these pins and recombine that back into just one singular transform. Recombined, struck pin is what that's called. So just thought I would throw that out there as well. So there you have it. A transform, a variable grade for something like specifying a respond point. That'll do to offer this one guys, see you in the next one. 51. Actor (Object): Welcome. In this video, our goal is to learn what an actor, a variable is, how to create one, and how it can be utilized when blueprint scripting. Now full disclosure here, this video is very much going to be a review of our class BP runtime object references video that we did earlier in the course. Now if I jump in and play here, this is going to serve as a little bit of reminder. When we press the arrow key, this is what we scripted in that video. When we press a zero key, we were sending out a line trace into the world like that. And when a hidden object in the upper left, it's showed the name of that thing that we are hitting. And once we set that actor a variable, we can then press the nine key to make it disappear. Now in doing so, while we were doing is setting an actor variable anytime our line trace detected a hit. Now let's jump back to our bp ThirdPersonCharacter located in our third-person Blueprints folder and see the scripts that we put together there. So what we're doing here is upon pressing some input key, I was using the arrow key. We were sending out a line trace starting at our actors location and ending at our line trace endpoint, which was a variable that we had created over in our components section here. It's in our viewport right over here. This is an error component that also is listed as a variable under your components line trace endpoint. That's what we named that arrow component. So you're starting a line trace at our actors location. We're ending it at that arrow. And we're sending that, that line trace out into the world along the Visibility channel. We also have this Draw Debug type set to four duration. So we can see that line trace. And if we detected that we hit something, if this indeed did hit something, that return value turns out to be true. We're going to play a sound. And then we're also going to break out the hits here. That's what this is all doing. We dragged out of here and we're breaking out the hits. And we were finding out what it is we hit. And we're setting that inside of an actor variable type. Now, we could create this by either right-clicking on here and choosing promotes two-variable in that right-click menu. Or the way you can create an actor variable is over in the variable section, you could click the plus button and just type in actor var. And then here it's setting it to actor right away because that's the last variable I said. But you could do a search for actor. And in the object types you'd want to choose actor object reference. Now let's talk about what are valid object references. Well, example objects could include lights, it could include static meshes, cameras, sound cues, or other blueprint actors. Here we are just detecting what we hit and setting that as our actor. It doesn't really matter if it is a static mesh chair versus whatever this thing is. Whatever that mesh is, it doesn't really matter. Whatever our line trace is colliding with. It's going to set that as our actor variable. Then we're just printing out the name of that to the screen. Now, the reason we were storing this inside of an actor variables because once our line trace hits something and it sets us, we want it to be able to destroy it. And that's what this script was doing down here. Upon pressing the nine key, we were then finding out, hey, what's the contents of this Hit Actor variable, this actor variable? If that is valid, meaning there is something in it. If that is valid, we want to destroy him. So the contents of this Hit Actor could change. Let me just go and demonstrate that I'm clicking play here. And again I'm going to press the, let me just set my debug object. Here's my b, my ThirdPersonCharacter. Bring on my character once again. So I'm going to send that line trace out into the world by pressing V zero key. And then in the upper left here you're going to see the name of the thing that I'm hitting. Zero key. I'm not close enough. Gotta get a little bit closer. There we go. Stat, preview, mesh, whatever that is. So if I hit the Nike, that's obviously going to disappear. But if I said to replay that scenario and kinda do the same thing, I'm going to start off hitting the zero key here is setting that. However, I can reset the contents there by coming to this chair pressing the zero key. So now if that is what is set as my hit actor here. So now if I press the Nike, it's not going to destroy this. It's going to destroy my chair because that was the most recently set Hit Actor. Here's the Nike, boom By Chair. Now, just to show off that this actor variable does not have to be a static mesh. It could be something like a light. I'm going to set this from another blueprint. And also just to show off that you can set this from another Blueprint. So I'm gonna go back to my level here, and I'm going to place a light in my level. You could place when in your place, actors panel. Here's where you can find the lights. Or alternatively you can come under here and then the lights flower. You can add a light by this means point light will do. Let's just drag and drop one of these in our level. I'm just going to make this sum of noxious colors like pink. And then what I'm gonna do is I'm going to jump into my Level Blueprint, open Level Blueprint. And we're going to say that when I press some key inside of here, and let's see what kinda keys have got available here. I've only used the one key near, so let's use the two key, right? I'm in my event graph right here, we're going to Right-click type in the two key. Let's go do a search for keyboard. That's how you can find these keyboard events really easily. Hit the two key. And upon doing that, we're going to right-click gets player character. Then if we drag out of this, we can pass to our ThirdPersonCharacter. Again. Once you have access to your ThirdPersonCharacter. And yes, I do realize I have a character reference stored over here on the left. I could use that as well. But once I have that, I can drag out of here and I can find this Hit Actor variables so long as that has been created and I have compiled. So again, we're trying to extract this actor or a variable and set it from our Level Blueprint. Let's drag out of here, type in hits actor. We're going to set the Hit Actor. And what do we want to set the Hit Actor to? Well, if I hold down the R key and left-click, I can set it to be my point light. Let's understand what I've got going on here. Let me compile this quickly, make sure that scripts good to go. So from the Level Blueprint, I'm reaching over to my Character Blueprint whenever I'm pressing the two key, and I'm going to set the actor variable inside of my ThirdPersonCharacter to be the point light. And then inside of my ThirdPersonCharacter Blueprint, I'm going to then press the nine key in order to destroy the contents of that Hit Actor variable, which in this case it would be populated with that point light. So let's go ahead and give us a play. I don't really have a good means of showing off both, actually, I can show off both of these. Never mind. I'm gonna play here. So we're starting in our level test map right here. I'm going to set my debug option to be the test map. Okay, So let's find out light. You can't see the light icon, but you can see that light on the floor so you know it's there. I'm going to press the two key. So that's going to populate this actor variable with the point light. Alright, that's now been set. Now let me jump to my ThirdPersonCharacter. And once again, I've got to bring this window back on. Whoops, see, there we go. So now when I press the nine key, Watch this light disappear, and there it goes. So in this video, you have learned how to create an actor variable and how it could be set and manipulated in some way. And we even did some cross Blueprint communication as well. What could you use something like that for? Well, imagine like a crafting system in a game where maybe you need to interact with some harvestable items out in your world. And your object, your harvestable object could be whatever your character is closest to a flower, a piece of wood, that kind of thing can always be set as your harvestable actors that you're trying to interact with. Alright guys, that's gonna do it all for this video, we will see you in the next one. 52. Variable Things to Know (Part #1): Alright, welcome back. In this video, our goal is to learn some important things to know when working with variables in unreal. Now these aren't really Tips and Tricks per se. They're more an explanation of some key concepts in variable options, you should know about things like how to initialize a variable, how to set a variable to public or private, and even what that means. And how to expose the variable to cinematics or when spawned. First of all, we're going to be talking about variable initialization. And to demonstrate this, I'm going to be working inside of my ThirdPersonCharacter blueprints. If you forgot where that guy is, I access it in our third-person Blueprints folder, there is your BP, third-person character. So what does it mean to initialize a variable? Well, that means to give it an initial value in some way. Now oftentimes we give a variable a default value when we create the variable, but not always, we can initialize and otherwise empty variable when an event occurs, this could be an overlap event, it could be an input event, something of that nature. Consider this example that I've set up prior to this video in my ThirdPersonCharacter. So first of all, I created in the My Blueprint panel a variable called warp to locale. And it is of the vector variable type. Now what I'm doing here is I took event begin play. Remember you can only have one event begin play in a graph here. I added that. And what I'm doing is as soon as we are starting play, that's when this character is spawned in my level at my player start locale right there. When it's spawns in, we are just simply getting our actors location. In this case, our ThirdPersonCharacter. And we're setting this location as the coordinates inside of this vector variable. So by default here, my values for this warp to locale variable are 00.0. However, once I begin play, the contents of this are initialized. They are swapped out to my actors location where my third-person character is spawning in. Then over here, I'm simply adding a bit of script to make use of this now initialized variable, this populated variable. Once I press the number key on my keyboard, I'm going to set my actor location. That is this blueprint, that's the target actor self to this given location, the warp to locale location. So check this out back in my map here. I placed this chair right near where I am spawning in. Because remember, we are a character spawned in right at this location. Upon beginning play where our character responds in, we're going to set our actors location as the place we want to warp to our new actors location or, well, our third-person character is accurate location. So essentially what's at play here. Now, this variable has already been initialized even before I set my debug object here, so that already occurred. And now once I get this back in place, you're going to see, I'm going to move off this point. But this warp to locale has been set at the spot that I've spawned in. And so whenever I press the number key, the a plus number of key on my keyboard, the plus symbol. It's gonna go right back to that spot because that's the initialize location. Plus button, doesn't matter. Plus button. Very habit that is initializing a variable to assign it an initial value. Next, let's talk about public versus private variables and what that even means. And for this example, I'm gonna be using my BP example pickup. I have one of these placing my level and then I've double-clicked on it to open it up, up here. So if you remember from an earlier video, we created a health to add float variable. And over on the right hand side over here where we've got this close eyeball for some of these other variables for the health to add, we simply click this to show that eyeball icon. And in doing that, that made this instance editable field have that checkbox. So this checkbox equals unexposed eyeball over here. So it doesn't matter if I click this to close. It's going to set this instance editable checkbox to be false. And if I click this, it's going to set that to be on. It doesn't matter which of these you toggle, you're toggling the same property. Now with this on. And you can see from the tool tip here, it's saying that this is a publicly editable variable. What does this even mean? So once you have set that, you compile this, you come back to your level editor. For any instance, that is for any copy of this, this blueprint added to your level. That variable that you've set to be publicly editable is now accessible once you have that object selected over in your details panel, check it out. This healthy add variable can now be modified for each instance of this blueprint. If I was to hold down Alt, left-click and drag, I now have a second instance of this blueprint, MI level. So for this instance of the blueprint, I could change my health to add to be 0.5. While on this instance of the blueprint, I could set it to be point to that being 20%, this healing 50%. That's how we had that setup. So that is a public variable. It is equal to this instance editable field right here. Now, down a little ways from this instance, editable field is this private option. If we check this box on a given variable, what we've done is we've made it so that this variable cannot be modified from external blueprints. So what I'm gonna do here is I'm going to compile this. I'm going to save, then I'm gonna go into my Level Blueprint here. Notice I've got my BP example pickup, one of these selected, it's fine. Either one of these will do. I've got number two selected here, but either of these will do. I'm going to jump into my level blueprint. I'm going to hold down the R key and left-click to bring in a reference to that example, pick it up. And now I'm gonna do a search for that variable called Health to add. And here we go. I'm going to drag out of this and type in health to add. And you can see, I can't even find it here. It doesn't show up because it's set to private, meaning I cannot modify or access that variable at all from an external blueprint like the Level Blueprint. However, if I was to go back into my BP example pickup here, I'm going to uncheck this. I'm going to compile, save, and go back into my Level Blueprint. I'm going to drag out of here and type in health to add and there I can get or set it. So the weird thing is here is you can have a variable that is set to be public. That is, you can access and edited from the editor. You can also set it to be a private. Those are not one or the other. You can have it set to both. That confuses a lot of people, but it could be set to be public, meaning you can edit it from the editor. And it can also be set to private, meaning that once it's set to private and you tried to drag out of it saved from another blueprints. You cannot find or access that variable. Why would you want to do that? Well, it could just be a fail-safe to ensure that you don't modify something that you didn't mean to. Next, let's explore this exposed on spawn option that you find on variables. What does that do? For this? I'm gonna be using our bp rotating door. We created this actor class blueprint when we were exploring the rotator variable type. And if you forgot where that is, this is inside of our actors a BPS folder. We moved it all. We moved all of these after class blueprints from our overview folder to our actor BP's folder. Inside of here, go ahead and select your end rotation rotator variable. And in the Details panel, we want to set this to be exposed on spawn. Now, when you go to compile this, it's going to yell at you. And when it does, it's gonna say, hey, that's great. You marked it as exposed on spawn. But for this, we also need to mark this as instance editable. So go ahead and do that as well. Both of these need to be checked to show off are exposed on spawn feature here. So once both of those are checked, compile it again. And then what we're gonna do is we're gonna jump on over to our Level Blueprint. So if you don't already have that open, Come here, open Level Blueprint. And we're gonna set up a simple script. I'm going to right-click in some empty space. Any input event will do. I'll just bring in F h because that seems like a fine input of m. We're going to drag off of here and do spawn actor from class. Now remember with these nodes you do need to feed it a spawn transform. So I'm just going to grab the transform. Let's grab the transform of our players start actor here I have that selected in my level. So with that selected, going back to my Level Blueprint holding down the left clicking to get a reference to that. Dragged out of this yet actor transform. We'll plug that in. And what do we want to spawn at that location? Well, we're going to spawn one of our bp rotating Doris. I'm going to scroll on down here. Where does that rotating door there it is BP rotating door. Now, the moment I did that, I set that as the class that I wanted to spawn in. Check this out. My end rotation variable has been exposed upon this spawn function. So here we can set the rotation to be something other than the default value. Now I had set so that the door would open 90 degrees. Meaning it would open. A door normally opens, but I can open it even more here. So let's go ahead and try that. And I'll set that to be 135. Now if I was to go ahead and play this, going to click Play up here. And I'm not even going to set my debug option here to show this script firing off, just trust that it well, I'm going to move off of this player star right here. So removing off of this, I'm going to press F8. Boom, that Doris bonding, albeit a little bit higher than being placed perfectly on the ground with that's perfectly fine that it's floating in mid air. I'm going to overlap that trigger volume. Remember there's a trigger volume is going to detect when my characters overlapping and when I overlap it, it opens more than 90 degrees, it opens 135 degrees. So there you have it. Expose on spawn, you've got to have that checked as well as instance editable checked in order for that to appear. When you spawn actor from class. 53. Variable Things to Know (Part #2): And lastly, I wanted to show off this exposed to cinematic checkbox that you find on some variables, not all of them. And I'll explain which ones you can and cannot find it on later on in this video. So for this example, I'm once again inside of my BP example pickup. In the My Blueprint panel, I have created a new vector variable. I've named it scale. And after I've compiled, I've set my scale to be 11.1. Let's go ahead and check this exposed to cinematics checkbox as well. Then go ahead and compile. Now to show off what we want to show off your exposing this variable to a cinematic. We need to add a cinematic to our level. Not to do that, we're going to jump back to our level right up here along the toolbar, you've got this little clipboard icon. Go ahead and click on this, and we want to add a level sequence that is a cinematic. Let's go ahead and do this. And once we click on this, it's going to say, where would we like to save this asset? Let's put it inside of a new folder. I've got scripting selected here. I'm going to right-click. I'm going to create a new folder, call it sequence. Actually, I'll call it cinematics, like so. And I'll leave it at new level sequence, that'll be my name shore. And once I do this, I'm clicking Save. I've now added a new actor to my level. It's called new level sequence. It is of the type of a level sequence actor. And also next to my content browser here I've exposed a new window called sequencer. Now what this whole window enables you to do to modify something over time to create a cinematic of sorts. So in order to do that, we need to add a track. So if I click this track button down here, I want to add an actor to my sequencer here in, in the little flower menu, I can choose an actor in my level. Notice that all of the actors here also exists in my outliner and the far upper right here, I want to add my BP example pickup. I've whittled it down to just one in my level currently. So I'm going to add that. And now I can click this Plus button right here to drill down further inside of my BP example pickup and look at the bottom. I have a scale property that has now been exposed to a cinematic. This sequencer is a cinematic. Now on this little fly out, I see that it is a vector and I can modify it. I can choose x, y, or z. It doesn't matter which one of these you pick. I'm going to choose x here. It's going to now expose that variable to this timeline, to this cinematic. And if I click this little drop-down, you can see I can now modify the x, y, or z of that vector variable over time. Now this scale currently is showing in frames per second. That's what this 30 FPS means. We can modify this either frames or what I like to do is click on this. And I like to change this as a time instead. So Showtime as seconds, like so. And now to me this is a little bit more sensical. I can change things from 0 s currently up to 5 s. I can expand this out as well, but we're not going to create one. That's quite that long. Alright, so what do I wanna do here? I want to modify one of these scale properties over 5 s. So I'm going to modify just the z scale. I could modify all of them, but I'm going to add a keyframe at 0.0 s here by clicking this plus button. So we're saying I want the scale value for that vector variable to be one in the z at 0 s. Then I'm going to move my timeline slider all the way out to 5 s. And then I'm going to click the plus button again. Only this time I'm going to say at this point in the timeline, I added another keyframe. That's what that red dot means. I'm going to say at this point, I want the Z scale to be five, so we're going 1-5. And if I move this slider, notice that the value of the Z scale changes over time. This is all well and good except for we're not actually making use of this variable it all inside of our bp example pickup, we've exposed it, we've exposes scale vector variable to our cinematic here. And we are going to be adjusting it over this cinematic here. But we don't have any script yet that's actually going to take advantage of this. So let's do that next. And so for this, we're going to add a trigger box to our level. And I'm gonna do this relatively quickly here. I'm going to scale it up in size is going to change the box extent to 200 again by 200, 200 over in the Details panel. Going to change the line thickness to ten once again, like so. This level sequencer, actor, actor right there, it doesn't matter where you place that in the level, by the way. And then I'm going to make this so that we can see it. The rendering actor hidden game to false. And then with this actor selected, I'm going to jump on over to my Level Blueprint, going to right-click. I'm going to do something when we begin overlapping it. First thing we're gonna do is we're going to drag out of here cast to a third person. We're gonna do something with our ThirdPersonCharacter overlaps at. What we wanna do is then grab a reference to our level sequence here. So go ahead and click on that back in your Level Blueprint. Going to hold down the R key, left-click to bring any reference to that. And then I'm going to drag out of this and type in the word play. We want to play our sequence player. That's the option we're looking for. We're essentially saying, Hey, play this cinematic, so it should be hooked up like so. That'll play the cinematic. So it will actually modify that property. But it's going to modify this scale property over 5 s. But we aren't actually creating any script yet to actually show that growth happening. So for that to occur, this is a very convoluted set up here. I'm going to right-click, bring in an event tick. Every frame. We want to. Select your example, pick up there in the level. In back at our level blueprint, we're going to hold down the archae left-click to bring in a reference to that. We're going to drag out of here. We're going to set a world scale three D for the sphere collision. Because our sphere collision, everything is attached to that. And move it like so. And then we're also going to drag out of our example pickup and find that scale variable. I got to scroll way down to the bottom to get our scale. Like so. So notice that our scale is by default 11.1. So every frame, it's going to read that in. It's going to set our sphere collision here, which is the most roots component in everything's attached to that 2111. However, once I overlap that trigger box, we're going to tell that sequence or to play that's going to act as a timeline to modify the value of this variable, 1-5 over 5 s. That's our cinematic. So you can pause the video here, check this out if you want to play along at home, I'm gonna compile this. Let's go ahead and give this a play. Move this off to the side here just a little bit. So you can see our example pickup there in the back. The scale is remaining constant. Let me set my debug object right there so you can see event tick firing off every frame. Bring it on my play window once again. So once I overlapped is over 5 s, you should see this increasing in size. Here we go. Pretty sweet. And indeed that did happen. So that is a very long-winded way of showing off what exactly the heck this exposed to cinematic option does. So just to bring this back around that exposed to cinematics checkbox, you can find that on Boolean, integer, float, string, vector transform, an actor variables. You will not find that for name, texts or rotator variables. Alright guys, that's gonna do to offer this video, we will see you in the next one. 54. Variable Tips and Tricks: Welcome. In this video we're going to be reviewing essential tips and tricks you absolutely should know about in order to work with variables in the most efficient way possible. We're going to talk about the different ways of getting and setting variables. We're going to review how to promote a variable. We're going to talk about how to categorize variables and give them tooltips. And lastly, we're going to talk about how to change variable types. Let's start out in our bp ThirdPersonCharacter Blueprint to help aid in this discussion. So if you don't have that open, you can find that in third person blueprints. That's where you can find the ThirdPersonCharacter. And once inside of here, Let's explore how to get and set variables three different ways we're going to talk about here. Firstly, let's explore the three different ways to get a variable that is to find out what contents exists inside of that variable. And for that, we're going to get rid of this health GET array here because we're gonna be exploring that. So the first way is we can left-click and drag. And then in our little dialog box here, when we release our left-click, we could get the health. That's way number one. Way number two, I can hold down the Control key, left-click, drag, release, left-click, that can get a getter of that as well. And the third way, less common, but super effective, is to simply left-click and drag this on an input pin for a given node. So once we drag and drop it on top of there, it's going to get the contents of that variable quite handy indeed. Alright, let's talk about setting a variable. So right up here we've got a center in place. I'll leave it there for the time being. But what we're gonna do here is left-click drag when number one here is to simply choose Set Health from that menu. If you left-click, drag, release, left-click. The second way is to hold down the Alt key. Left-click, drag, release, left-click. That's the second way of getting a center of that. And the third way to set the contents of a variable. So I'm just going to delete this guy out for the time being, is to simply drag and drop on the output pin of a, of a given node, and that'll bring in a center as well. So setting once again, allows you to alter the contents of that variable. Next, let's talk about promoting to a variable you already know you can create variables by clicking here, adding variable, or by coming under here variable and clicking the plus button. However, promoting variable is the third way of creating a variable and it is quite handy for a couple of reasons here. One, it can give you the variable type that you need right from the get-go. So using this node as an example here. So say we've got our health variable and we want to add some amount to it. Well, we can simply right-click on this pin and that's gonna give us the variable type that we already need, in this case a float so it can right-click, promote and I click, I can call this health to add. The second benefit of promoting to a variable is if we compile this, we can see that it automatically grabs the value that was inside of that node. If you had already placed a value inside of there and you've promoted that to a variable, and you then compile it, it's going to automatically populate that variable with the value that was inside of it. So that's super handy. It's worth pointing out here that you can promote a variable on any node, not only from the input side, but also from the output side as well. So output side of this health center, I could right-click on this, promote this to variable, and call this my health again variable. Don't know why you'd want to set your, set a new variable after this, but maybe you'd want to do something like that. So promoting a variable super handy way to get the variable type that you are in fact looking for, as well as setting it to the contents that were already hard set in there. Now, what I really like about promoting to a variable, let me just jump over to my BP example pickup is, we've talked about some very common variable types here, but there are some more obscure ones as well. E.g. I've got this play sound 2D node here am IBP example pickup. And I've got something called concurrency settings. You may be wondering, I have no idea what that even is, but I want to fiddle around with this and see what I can change. Well, you could right-click on this pin. You could promote that to a variable, compile it. And then in the Details panel you can see what things about this variable you can set. And you might not be able to see anything, might not make sense to you. But that's a great way to learn what these different pin types all are, what these different variables all are on the input side of a node or the output side of the pin. Great way to learn those things. Alright, Next, let's talk about creating categories for your variables to live in. Now, as you get more complicated with your scripts, you might have more and more variables over on the left-hand side and you want to have some way of categorizing them. Well, you can create categories for them to live in. Let me just select by health to add right over here. And over in the Details panel, we've got a category and currently all of these are in my default category from pick-up sound to concurrency settings. I could create one by simply selecting this category field right here. Overriding it, I'm going to call this my health category. Alright, so now you see over in the My Blueprint panel, I've created a health category and my health to add exists inside of that. Now I can add other variables to this category. I could say, Hey, scale, I want you to live in that category as well by simply selecting it. And now if I click this drop-down, I'm gonna, I'm gonna be able to find health within that dropped down. So you can create a new category by simply overriding this and typing in a new category name. However, once you've created a category, you can choose to set a variable inside of that category by either choosing this here. Or I can simply drag a variable up into this category. So five is to try to drag this pick-up sound and place it right here on top of the scale. Watch it's going to happen here. It's going to reorder that it automatically place it inside of this health category. Now, this is also useful for creating these categories. Because let's check this out right here. My health to add. It has this little eyeball checked, making this instance editable. Any variable set to be instance editable. Once again, compiling this here just to make sure I've got that, jump back to my test map. I've got one of these BP example pickups here in my level over in the Details panel with that selected, I can see my different categories that I can change about this. Now, one of the categories I can change is my health to add and check this out. It's not listed in a category called default anymore. It's now listed in a category called Health to add. Let's go ahead and try to create one more category here inside of our bp example pickup. Let me change my scale. I mean, it doesn't really make sense to have that in a health category per se. Two, let's change it to a category called scale. And I'll set this to be instance editable. We must compile after we set this to be instance editable in order for us to then find this variable exposed in our editor. So with this selected, I'm now have a health category with health to add inside of it. And scale category with a scale variable inside of it. Now, what would you want to create these categories for? Well, in something like your BP ThirdPersonCharacter, you might have some variables that are all related to the name of your character, first name, last name, middle name. It could be some character attributes that you all want to categorize. That would be a common thing. Could be things related to health or damage. You could create a health and damage category, that sort of thing. Next, let's explore adding tooltips, two variables. Then I'm going to jump back to my BP example pickup. So for any of my variables, I can add a description, a tooltip. Notice that when I mouse over my variables currently, it says my health to add is simply a float by pick-up sound that is the base description scale simply says that's a vector variable, but you can change the contents of that, the tooltip texts if you will. With my health to add selected over in the Details panel, my description field. I can change this to be this is the amount of health to add Enter. And now if I mouse over this health to add variable in no longer says float double-precision or whatever it's said before, used to say float double-precision. It now says this is the amount of health to add the texts that I put in right over there. And lastly, I just wanted to point out that if you really want to change variable types, you can, and you know, you can change the variable type either right here by clicking on this, choosing a new one from the pop-up box here, or in the Details panel, you can change it right here as well. However, if you do, there are some things you need to know about. So with my health to add float variable selected over in the, My Blueprint panel, I'm going to change the variable type to be an integer. Now once you do this, you're gonna get a little pop-up box saying, Hey, you could break some connections here. Are you really sure you want to do it? So let's go ahead and change that variable type. But you'll notice that when you do, you're gonna get this saying, alright, we have found this right here in the graph. Your BP example pickup add your health to add. There it was. Now I'm going to exit out of here. And you're going to see this right here being like, Well it was a float, it is now an integer. So what do you do here? Well, you can fix this up by right-clicking on this node, refreshing it. It now recognizes that, hey, you change that to an integer. But now you've got some work to do here. We broke this link and I could plug this into here as well. And in this case it's going to bring in a, it's just going to convert that in real nicely. But other cases that's not going to play so nicely. So you really gotta be careful about breaking your connections whenever you change your variables. Now, we only had this one instance of this variable added right here. However, if you wanted to find every place where this could possibly exist into fix up all of these references of that variable. You can right-click on this, find references. And in doing so, you can find where this variable exists anywhere in this graph. And you can find even beyond this graph, if you were using this variable, you are calling this variable from another Blueprint. You can click on this little button over here to find where that variable was being gotten or set in any other Blueprint. So that's really handy to know about right-clicking, finding references. You'll bring up this little pop-up. You can double-click on this to jump right to it. And then also if you want to find where this variable is referencing other blueprints, you can click right here in order to do that. Alright guys. That's going to wrap it up for this video. That's gonna do it all for variables. We will see you in the next one. 55. Functions Overview: All right, welcome back everyone. In this section of the course, we are going to be officially changing our focus to the topic of functions. And although you've seen me use a bunch of functions in our discussions of other things related to Blueprint scripting. Here's where we break them down in full, talking about all the nuances of functions. So our goal in this video is to quickly cover what functions are. Give some examples of how they're utilized in Unreal. And lastly, talk about where you can find them. So first of all, what is a function? Well, to help facilitate this discussion, I'm inside of my Level Blueprint and I have placed down some function nodes. A function is a blueprint node that's simply does something, it performs a specific operation. So what kind of things do I have placed before you hear, well, you could spawn and actor. That is to spawn some object in your game that could be useful to you. You can spawn a particle effect. This is the old VFX system, the cascade visual effects system, or a newer particle system known as Niagara. You could create a widget that is to show a Widget Blueprint, which is oftentimes used in Endgame HUD, or menus. You can play a sound. You could change an actor's location, all kinds of things that can be done with functions. Now functions can take inputs and return Albert's. Just as a reminder, inputs are found on the left side of a node. Outputs are found on the right side of the node. Unreal comes with a whole host of functions already, if I was to right-click and some empty space and drill down in any of these categories, you see all these fancy looking S Here. They are either in blue or green. These are all kind of ready-made function nodes that you have access to. Now you can create your own functions in a blueprint and call them when desired. We'll talk about that in a few videos time here. Now a few things worth noting in this generalized overview of functions is that as you're working with functions in Unreal, you'll notice that they come in two different flavors. You've got blue, which are known as impure functions, and they have this blue header to them. And if I go over to the right here, you've got green functions and these are known as pure functions. Now, the key difference between these is that these green and pure functions do not have execution pins on the input or output side, whereas the blue impure functions do. Now we have a whole video dedicated to impure versus pure functions. So we'll talk about those more later on, but just wanted to point that out while we're here. Another difference that I wanted to point out between different function nodes is that sometimes the header for them is a little bit more descriptive than others. And well, what do I mean by that? If we look at some of our function nodes down here as they are spawn system that location, that's all this function node says is spawn system at location. Now contrast that with this node right up here, set actor location. And then right below it says target is actor. This one is asking for a target that we want to change the location of. This one does not have any subheadings sub descriptor beneath it. Now notice that this one does as well set material target is a primitive component. I can supply a mesh that we want to change the material of. If I jump over to my ThirdPersonCharacter Blueprint, I place some function nodes down here as well. These all say target is character, target is character, target is character, et cetera. So different functions have different targets. In this case, all of these function nodes are specific to a character class. Whereas in our level test map, some of these function nodes are not specific to any given class or any given component. Functions may have different targets. It could have a component target, it could have an actor target, a character target, things of that nature. And we'll get to that more in a little bit. And finally, I wanted to talk about where you can find functions within a graph. Well, a couple of different ways you could do this. The most common way is to right-click in some empty space. In here. If I click on my actor drop-down here, Here's where you can find lots of different functions. Again, they come in the blue flavor impure functions, or the green flavor, that is pure functions. And these are available within any given category. You're going to find a whole ton of these that are already pre-built for you. Now you can search for a given function as well. Again, spawn actor from class is a common one. So if you know what you're looking for, you can simply type it in there, spawn actor from class. Something else I want to point out here is that functions can be context-sensitive or non context-sensitive. And that's this checkbox right up here. It is checked by default. And let me just show you how this can change the results here. So I've got this spawn actor from Class Blueprint, and I've already placed a BP example pickup in the class here. If I was to drag out of this, now look at my context-sensitive checkbox is checked and at the very top actor is my topmost category. That's with context-sensitive checked. An actor is the topmost category. Now let me come over to this Create Widget function right over here. Let me drag out of here. Notice context-sensitive is checked. However, I don't even see that actor category across the top here because these are going to return two different types of things. This one's going to return a widget object. This one is going to return my BP example pickup because that's the class that I have slotted in here. Now, if you in this right-click menu, hover over this context sensitive checkbox here. And you click on this little fly out menu. You can decide in which contexts it is going to find given available functions. This blueprint as a tool tip says it's going to include functions and variables that belong to this blueprint. If components is checked, it's going to include functions that belong to components of this blueprint and, or other target classes. And then libraries that is to include any other functions that are globally accessible. And once again, we have a whole video dedicated to function libraries in a little bit time down the road. Now, if you have some specific functionality that you want to have built, you can create your own functions in the My Blueprint panel under the functions category, you can create your own functions right here. You can call them what you want. You can create the functionality that lives inside of that function node. And then it's as simple as dragging and dropping that function node from your my blueprints tab over here into your graph. But we will talk more about that down the road as well. Alright guys, there is an overview of functions within Unreal Engine blueprints. We will see you in the next video. 56. Actor Functions: Welcome. In this video, our goal is to learn what actor functions are, explore how to find them, and to demonstrate a few. Now we left off in the last video just taking a general overview of functions inside of our Level Blueprint. And I was talking about how some functions had this subheading beneath them, including this one for set actor location that says target is actor. So that's what we're talking about in this video. We're talking about actor function. So what is an actor function? Well, it's simply a function that targets, that is to affect a specific actor that you supply it. Now the target could be itself, but in the case of a Level Blueprint, self is not very helpful. We need to actually say, Hey, what's the thing that we're trying to effect? And in this case, what new location will we be trying to give him? Now, I'm gonna go back to my level here, and I have added a static mesh to my level. If you want to play along at home. This is in my content started content prompts folder. I place one of these guys into my level. And with that done, I also changed the mobility here to be movable. And that's gonna be important for function that we're going to be trying to set upon this. So with that done, make sure that you have this Static Mesh actors selected in your level. And I'm gonna jump inside of my Level Blueprint already have it open up here. But once again, that's how you can access your Level Blueprint. Now it doesn't matter what graph you're in. I've got two graphs here, my node types graph and my Event Graph. My Event Graph is a little bit cleaner, so I'm gonna go inside of there. I already have a reference to this in my graph. Now, the way you can get a reference to that is to simply hold down the R key and left-click or in your right-click menu. If you do have it selected, you should be able to find and create a reference to it by right-clicking and choosing right there. Either option will do for you. So this is the actor that we want to target. So if we drag out of here and we release, we have context-sensitive checked here, meaning that if we drill down into any of these categories, we can find functions that are specific that will work for this given actor, including something like Destroy Actor. Note it says target is actor. I could bring in an input event and upon pressing that input event, we could destroy the actor that is our target. We're talking actor functions. So let's try a few out here. We've seen that Destroy Actor one plenty of time. So let's bring in a few more. So I'm going to drag out of here. And I'm going to type in set actor location. And I can see that this is in the transformation category. So that's how you can see where it is. Now, this one is the reason that we had to set our mesh here to be movable. Because if we don't actually set this to be movable, we're gonna get some complaining. When we compile. I will set my new location. Instead of plugging in a variable, I'm just going to hard set it here to, let's say 1,000. And it'll just move it somewhere up into the air. Let's drag onto here again, we can do multiple things. I'm going to do set actor rotation, that's also in the transformation category. Okay? So we're gonna go like this and note that we're using the same reference as the target for multiple actor functions that's entirely acceptable to do. I'm going to drag out of this and let's do a set actors scale 3D. This is also in the transformation category. And then lastly, I'm going to drag out of this one more time and we will set lifespan. This is in the actor category, so different functions can live in different categories, but if you know the name of it, you can simply type it in up above. Now, I currently don't have any input out here, so let's right-click, zoom, empty space in. Let's, let's do what key haven't I use yet the seven key. Let's do the seven key. Sure, that'll do just fine. So when we press the seven key, we're going to want to set our actors location to be somewhere up in the air. The 001000 location in the world. Then we're going to keep the flow of execution going and set our actors rotation. I did not set a rotation here, so let's set that to be 45.45 just to angle it a little bit so we can see something different than what it currently is. Then we're going to keep the flow of execution go in here. We want to set a new scale for it. Let's do 44.4, something kinda big. And then let's draw on here the lifespan. So this is how long that this is going to live before it is destroyed less than our lifespan to be. Let's go 5 s. Alright, so notice that all of these functions take in, in an actor target. We can use the same reference and plug it into the target input note of all of these. So I'm going to compile here, going to move this off to the left. We're going to play, let me set my debug object to be my test map. And there is my actor. As soon as I press the seven key, you're going to see bang, bang, bang, bang. Here we go. Seven. Somewhere up in the air. It is rotated, it is big. And after 5 s boom, it does go bye-bye. So you can see that it did call that function on this given actor. And it did all of these things changes the location, change the rotation, set the scale, and set the lifespan. So there you have it. Actor functions. You can find them by dragging out of a given actor, doing a search for it, or simply searching in here to see what kind of functions are available to you. Alright, that's gonna do it all for this one guys, we will see you in the next one. 57. Class Functions: Alright, welcome back. In this video, our goal is to learn what class functions are, explore how to find them, and then demonstrate a few. So firstly, what is a class function? Well, it's simply a function that can only be used by a specific type that is a specific class. Now, what are we talking about here? Well, if we jump back to our Content Browser, and he saw me right-click earlier in the course in some empty space in my content browser, if I come under Blueprint class, these are the different classes that we're talking about, the different blueprint classes. Now, we have functions that are specific to each class. And this is gonna be most obvious to demonstrate when talking about our character class, because pretty much every game that you're gonna be creating is going to have a character or maybe even upon class, but let's demonstrate a character. So go ahead and open up your BP ThirdPersonCharacter. That's where I started this video with him. And notice in my graph here I have several function nodes. And notice that right below the header here, the sub-header here says target is character, the jump function target is character, the launch character function, target is character, the crouch in and crouch functions. Target is character. These functions are specific to this class, this character class. And I can find these by right-clicking in some empty space. And then if I look for that parent class name, we're looking for the character right up here. Let's scroll on down. And if we find C H character there it is, right down here. You can find these events. We've got crouch, we've got jumped launch character on crouch, et cetera. So these are very specific to this given class of Blueprint. Now, let's demonstrate these. And I want to point out here before we do if you want to find and make use of these crouch in and crouch functions, you need to select your character movement component and over in the Details panel under the nav movement category, makes sure that you check can crouch. It is not checked by default. Alright, so let's go ahead and try these out. I'm going to click play here, going to set my debug object to be by third-person character. And I'll minimize these a little bit like so. You can see obviously if I press my space bar, that is going to make my character jump releasing, it makes them stop jumping. If I press the L key, I've got this launch character function which have hard set the launch velocity to be 2000s and z, which is kinda like a super jump, if you will. However, you can still do this while you are airborne. So that's kinda fun. And then I've got the C input set for crouching and crouching when I released the CQI. Now when I do this, you're going to notice something. I press the C key and whoops, let me do that. Once again. I press the C key and the camera goes down and it rises back up. When I crouch, my character does not go into a crouching animation. I would need to do some more work to get that hooked up. But we're not gonna go into statements, cheese and changing our animations, all that kind of stuff. But you'll notice that this is actually under the hood, crouching my character, meaning that it is lowering my camera, it is slowing down my players movement speed. And then when I crouch, I returned back to normal camera height, normal movement speed. Now, a couple of things worth pointing out here for all of these functions, the target is character, and we don't have anything plugged into this target. The target is simply set to self, which is valid in this situation because This is, our self is a character class so we don't have to plug anything into it. Self is a perfectly valid thing to have said here. The target is ourself, which is a ThirdPersonCharacter. Now it's also worth pointing out that you can find access, make use of these functions within another Blueprint. So let me demonstrate that quickly by hopping on into my Level Blueprint. You'll note here is some empty space. If I simply right-click and I do a search for launch, we had that launch function inside of our ThirdPersonCharacter. I can't find it. I can find some other functions with the word launch it, but not my launch character. Context sensitive is checked here. This is not a character class blueprint. You will not find it. Now if I uncheck this, I can now see that we're not searching via context sensitivity. And now under our character, we can find our launch character function. This belongs under the character class of functions. Let's go ahead and add this to our graph. And it's saying, okay, you want to call this function That's great. The target is cell, so supply me a target. Now, if I was to simply have a cube existing in my level like I've placed ahead of time here. Note that that is selected. Let me bring in a reference to that by holding down the Archean left clicking. If I try to plug this in as a target, It's going to say, Nope, that's not a valid target. You can't do it. The target we're looking for is a character. So we could get a reference to our ThirdPersonCharacter and plug it into it. And then this would work. Now, to do this, we need to get a reference to our character. I've got this character reference variable that I created earlier in the course. But if I right-click on this and find references, I must have destroyed the contents of this variable, so this is currently set to nothing. Okay? We can still get a reference to our third-person character in another means. And you've seen me do this before. Right-click debt player character. We've got this pure function that will return a player character. But it doesn't know what character we want to be searching for here. So let's do a ThirdPersonCharacter Cast to ThirdPersonCharacter. Going to say, okay, your player character, is that a third-person character? And if it is, we can Call some functions that are related to that character. And the ThirdPersonCharacter can make use of this launch character function because the third-person character is a character class that is a valid target. I just need to simply supply in input here, Let's right-click to search for the eight key. I don't think we're making use of the eight key and either of our grass here only in our event graph here. Okay, Let's go ahead and plug this in. Compile, Let's save it. And now if I was to play, Let's set our debug object to be that so we can see this fiery off. And so now if I press the key, woops, it is actually trying to call it, but I did not sit a launch velocity, so that would be a problem. That's it or launch velocity to be 2000. Yeah, that's kind of an important detail right there. And pressing the Alt key, we can now call that launch function. So once again, so long as you have a reference to that given class, you can call functions specific to that class. Alright guys, that's gonna do it all for this video, we will see you in the next one. 58. Component Functions: Alright, so in the last couple of videos, we have explored actor of functions and class functions. In this video, we're going to be exploring component functions. We're going to explore how to find them and demonstrate a few. Now, this begs the question, well, what the heck is a component function? Well, it's simply a function that targets that is to affect a specific component within a blueprint. Now to show this off, we're gonna be using our bp ThirdPersonCharacter Blueprint. That's where you can find it. So double-click on that to open it up. Before I shot this video, I went ahead and created some scripts just to make this a little bit more brief time-wise. And over the event graph, what I have in place is I've placed the three different components into my graph. Now, these are respectively my quote unquote sword component, that is a static mesh component. Next component that we're gonna be working with here is our Mesh Component. And that is jumping back to the viewport here. This Skeletal Mesh that represents our character, this mannequin woman, if you will. And then the last component we have is our follow camera. And just jumping back to the viewport or follow camera is this component right there, that camera. So how do we add these to our graph? Well, as you know from variables, you can simply drag and drop to add these into your graph. Then you get a reference to that given component. And if you drag out of these, you can find functions specific to that component that are context sensitive and work with that component. So what I have here is out of my sword, I simply drug out and I did a search for set static mesh. But if you are wondering where this exists, if you go to set a static mesh, you can see that it is in the components static image category. And I list that right up above your components static mesh. So if we were to simply exit this out and come under components and come under a static mesh. You can see we've got that function that we can add or we can add the pure function get local bounds. But this one's a lot more visual. Now down below here, for this mesh components, I simply did a search under the components, components, components skinned mesh category. You can see we've got a lot of different functions in here for this. But for this one I just wanted to simply change out the Skeletal Mesh associated with that. And by that, what I'm talking about here is with our mesh components selected, we're gonna be swapping out the Skeletal Mesh associated with that. It's very visual. So you can see the target here is skinned mesh component that is talking about this right here. Lastly, we've got the follow camera. So we have some functions that are specific to a camera component. And you can find these under the right-click menu under the camera category. So a lot of functions in here to play around with as well. This one is very visual, the setting, the field of view. So once again, the subheading under this shows what specific component may be targeted. Alright, so playing this super visual here, Let's set our debug option so you can see this firing off. So when I press the F key, we're going to change out our, our sword there to that ball. That's the new mesh that I slotted in there when I press the G key, our mesh here, that mannequin woman rather than Aaron's gonna be swapped too. That's right, Just a cube. And this skeletal cube right here is in the engine content that's skeletal cube. Lastly, notice the, the field of view here when I press the age, he is going to shift a little bit. Alright, so here we go, Press and the H key kind of zooms it out a little bit like that. And so there you have it. You can add all kinds of components up here in the Components panel. There are tons of them. And so just note that for any component that you can add, there may be functions associated with that particular component, specific to that component. Explore them, play around with it, learn by doing, alright, that's gonna do it all for this video, we will see you in the next one. 59. Creating Functions: Alright, welcome back everyone. Over the last few videos we showed how to find various functions that already exists in Unreal. In this video, our goal is to show how we can go about creating our own functions. Now, this is an extremely powerful concept within blueprint scripting. In it essentially allows you to create any functionality that you want. Now for the bulk of this video, we're gonna be doing some work inside of our bp third-person character. So I suggest that you open that guy up. I've also got my Level Blueprint opened along the top as well. Firstly, it's important to note that functions can be created within a class blueprint or a level blueprint. So just to show off, starting with my level blueprint or in the My Blueprint panel. You got a section for functions. So functions can be created in here inside of a Level Blueprint. Additionally inside of a Class Blueprint like our ThirdPersonCharacter, you'll find that same functions section so you can create one in here as well. Alright, now let's talk about different ways to create functions. Well, we've got this Add button right up here. You can click on that, create a function that way. Another way is with the function header right here, you can click on this button that will create a function. And the third and less obvious way is on any of these headers, graphs, functions, macros, variables, etc. You can simply right-click, and let me just right-click on this graph header here. And it will bring up this same menu that you got when you click right here. So you can add a function here. And if I create when this way, it's going to add it to my functions category. I'm gonna give this a name right away and call this modify health because I'm going to create a function that modifies our player health. And note that when we clicked to add a function, whether here, here or here function, what we've done is we've also opened up a new tab right up at the very top. So what you have before you is simply an entry node, in entry node to your function. And here in the rest of the graph, you get to create what functionality you want this function to have an at the very end, you need to add a return notes I'm going to right-click and some empty space and add a return node right away, just right-clicking and typing in return at the very bottom, you can add a return node. Now, again, here's where we're going to be building out what this function node actually does. But while I'm building this out, I think it would be helpful if in the event graph, I simply dragged and dropped this function node into my graph. So here we go, dragging and dropping it. Now it is blue. It seeing the target is a third-person character because we are building it here inside of our ThirdPersonCharacter. So that's gonna be the default target. And note that all we have here is an execution in pen and execution out pin and a target. But we can add more pins, more data pins on the input side or the output side. And we're going to show off that a little bit here in this video. So this is what the function node currently looks like. And throughout this video we're gonna be modifying it a little bit. Let's jump back into our modify health function and build out some functionality. So the first thing that I want to add to this function is an input. I want to be able to have the ability to input how much health or damage that our character is going to be receiving. So in order to do this, I need to select my entry node here, my Modify health, and over in the Details panel where it says inputs, Let's click this plus button to add an input. Now it's going to allow us to name it right away. By default, it should show as a Boolean. However, you can change the type. It's shown as a float for me because I was doing some prep work before this video. So change it to a float. And again, you can do that by clicking here. And let's change the name of this input to be heal or damage amount. Now, note that if I jump back to my event graph here, where we place our modify health function, I now see on the input side of our function the ability to input a float variable, a health heal or damage amount. So it's a little misleading when you're building out your functions here. You select this entry node here, and then you add an input. And the reason it's a little misleading is you think of inputs being on the left side of a no-no. But here on this entry note, it's showing it on the right side of the node. So first time I was learning all this, I've felt that rather confusing. However, in the final resulting function that we can see in our event graph, when you drag and drop this function into the graph itself, it does appear as an input on the left side of a node. So you can input a float value of health or damage that is going to be received. Alright, let's carry on. What I wanna do is I want to drag out of our health or damaged amount that we're gonna be incurring. I'll bring in a greater than sign. We wanna do something if our health or damage amount is greater than zero, or we're gonna do is drag off of here, bring in a branch node. We got to keep this flow of execution going through here. So we're going to evaluate, is the healing or damaged mountain greater than zero. And if it is, we're going to drag out of here and we're going to play sound to D. In fact, I'm going to hit Control C and Control V to copy this because we want to play a sound, whether this is true or false. Now if it's true, the sound that I want to play is going to be called the laser push. If it's false, the sound that I want to play is called laser poll. Now, in simply hovering over this laser pole, you can see that the path for this is in the engine content folders. So if you're playing along at home, you don't see laser pushing laser pool. Right here. You've got this gear icon. Make sure you've got show engine content checked off, then you'll have access to these two. Alright, so laser poll for this. So depending on if the incoming amount is greater than zero, we're going to play one sound. If it is not greater than zero, we're going to play another sound. Those are kind of like more positive or negative type effects. Okay, then what we also wanna do here is dragged out of this amount that we're going to be inputting. And I'm gonna hit the Plus symbol. We're going to add something to it. We want to add to this is going to be our health right here. So we're going to drag and drop our health right on top of this. That'll give us a getter right away. So we're going to add that, the amount coming in to our health. And then we're going to set that so we can simply drag and drop our health on the output to bring in a center. Now what I wanna do is I want to bring this way over here so I can wear this in like this. And like this when I'm essentially saying here, is that no matter what, whether the amount coming in is greater than zero or not, I want to add that to my current health. I'm going to play a sound regardless if it's greater than zero or not, a positive or a negative sound, then we're going to set that as our new health value. Then I'm going to plug this into our return. But last but not least, I can drag and drop this onto the returned node to add a pin to our return. To note that once I do this, just drag and drop it on there. It's going to add an output right up here. But we probably want to give us a better name than just output gets. So I'm going to name this current health. Like so. Now something else I want to do here is I want to be able to clamp this health because let's just say we are already at full health and the incoming amount is going to add to our health than we could technically have more than 1.0 health. We can have more than 100% health. So the way that you can ensure that this is clamped to a given values to bring in a clamp node. So I could drag out of here. Typing in clamp. We want to clamp our float and we want to make sure that it is 0-1. That's kinda nice. So I'm just going to wire this in like that to ensure that even if we're receiving a healthy amount that is going to add to our health and make it above 1.0. That no matter what it's going to stay at 1.0 cannot go above that, so make sure that you do that as well. Now, take a look. This is our, this is our function right here. This is a functionality that we're adding in our vent graph with his modify health function added to our graph, we've got this input healer damage amount, and on the output side, we can output our current health. Now some important details before we wrap this video up over in the Details panel with your functions selected, take a look at our inputs here. We've got this heel or damage them out. And we've got this little drop-down arrow. If you click on this, you can set a default value for this. So currently it's 0.0, which you can see reflected on the function node itself. If I was to change this to 0.5, you can see that once I hit Enter, it's going to hard. Set that in there. Okay. I don't actually want that for now, but I just thought I'd point that out that you can set a default value there. Let me set that back to zero. And also you've got this pass by reference option. What does that even mean? Well, it passed by a ref or passed by reference option allows you to tell the function that whatever variable that you are plugging into this, that's the variable you want to change. It essentially allows you to get and set a variable at the same time. Now we're gonna go into this a little bit more in the next video. But I just want to point out here that if I was to check this box, note that this pin is going to change from this sort of a circular shape, too. Little bit more of this diamond shape. Alright, I'm going to uncheck it for now. And once again, we'll show that off a little bit more in the next video. A few more things that you need to know here is that if I was to double-click on this function note I'm in my Event Graph. Watch what happens. Double-click. I've jumped from my event graph into my function graph. So here, That's a quick and easy way of seeing what is this function doing. And that'll jump you right to your function graph. Really handy tip. A couple of other notes about functions that you create. You cannot have latent nodes like a delay node or a timeline within your function. That is a limitation of functions. And something else to note about functions. With functions you only get one execution in and one execution out pin, that is one execution in, one execution out. If you have a need for more, macros, are the way to go now, in the future, we will add some videos talking about macros. But guys, that's gonna do offer this one follow up in the next video where we're going to talk about calling functions. See you there. 60. Calling Functions: All right, In the last video, we finished creating a function inside of our bp ThirdPersonCharacter. And thus we made it the target wherever you create your function that will be the target. In this video, we're going to learn how we can go about calling this function from both a Class Blueprint right here inside of our ThirdPersonCharacter, as well as a Level Blueprint. So hop right back into your ThirdPersonCharacter Blueprint. And if you forgot where that was, you've been living under a rock somewhere. Here is the pathway for that double-click on that guy to open it up. Now, I've added this to my graph in the last video. Let me just delete this out and do a refresh here how we can add that to our graph here, I'm going to right-click and some empty space. So in search for an event node, because we want to start off with an event F3. F3, I don't know because I figured it wasn't in use. Now a couple of ways we can go about adding this function to our graph. One way is we can right-click and some empty space here and do a search for it. Modify health, that's one way we could add it. The other way, let me just delete that out is to simply drag and drop it from our functions section over here. Drag. And if you drop it on the execution pane right here, it's going to hook it up right away. Then we're going to simply drag out of this and bring in a print string node. Right? And let's hook this in our current health into the string just as a refresher if you double-click on your function node here. Well, we're doing is we're taking in a health or damage amount. We're gonna be adding that to our current health. We're gonna be clamping it between these two numbers and we're gonna be setting that as our new health value. And then we're going to be passing that through out the other side of our function here. In this case, we're going to be passing it out of this node. Notice current health, that is the output pin of our function here. And we're going to simply print that out to the screen. Also, we need to hard-code in a healing or damage amounts. So we're gonna be starting with how much health? Well, inside of our modify health, right here, our health variable. This is what we're going to be starting with 1.0 health. That's the same as what we see over in the My Blueprint panel with that health variable selected 1.0. So what do we want to modify this with? Again, we can heal or damaged. So what I'm gonna do is set this to a damaging amounts. So let's go 0.5. And because we want this to do damage, Let's do negative 0.5. So negative numbers are going to damage. In this case, positive numbers are going to heal. Alright, let's compile, make sure our script is looking good. Play. Let me set my debug to my ThirdPersonCharacter here. If I press F3 here, you can see it reduces our health in half. And you also saw 0.5 in the upper left-hand corner here. Remember, our health variable is bound to our health meter here as well. So if I press this one more time, you're going to see 0.0 and now our health meters gone. Now if I press F3 again, it's going to continue to show 0.0 health. And that is because in or modify health function, we're clamping this modification of our health between these values. Alright, now just to show off that this function can heal as well as deal damage, Let's modify our original healthier. Let's modify original Health value to be, we'll say points to. So we're going to start off with only 20% health. And then in our event graph we're going to change our healing or damage MT. Let's just say every time we call this, we're going to heal by 10%, 0.1. Alright, so this can work both ways. The way we have this setup, you're clicking Play. So we can see we're starting off with 20% health. I press F 3.3, 40%, 50%, 6070809100. And of course, if I tried to go over that, I cannot because double-clicking on our modify health function here, it's going to jump me to that graph. We're clamping our health value 0-1. Alright, so we've proven that you can call this function from within the blueprint it was created within. But can you call it from another blueprint? And of course the answer to that is yes, you can. So long as you have a reference to your ThirdPersonCharacter in another blueprint, you can call this function. And to prove this, we're going to use our Level Blueprint. Jumped back to your level here. And I have a little bit of a setup that you can try replicating. Once again, I have a trigger box placed within my level. And as you've seen in other videos, I set the box extent to be 200, 200, 200, the line thickness to ten. And I simply turned the actor hidden and game off. Within the rendering section so that I can see this trigger volume. And then I simply place a fire particle. This is found in my started contents, started context. Where is it particles folder, right there. A place that in the middle just to make that whole zone look dangerous? And then I simply scaled it up ten times. So this is going to be my danger zone. And the idea here is that when my character overlaps this, they are damaged. So let's go ahead select your trigger box and jump into your Level Blueprint. So the first thing we wanna do is have something happened when we overlapped this. So let's right-click Add Event when we overlap this. And of course we do need to get a reference to our third-person character. If you right-click and do a get player character, and you try dragging out of here and try finding that modify health function. You're gonna be like, why can't I find it? If you uncheck context-sensitive, you'll be like, oh, there it is. Under class BP, ThirdPersonCharacter. Oh, there it is. But the problem is you cannot simply hookup, get player character into here. So that's a problem. The way that you can get this modify health function, let me delete out of here is through casting. Or if our character reference variable right here. If this was actually populated, if we had initializes with our third-person character inside, we could find the Modify health function by dragging out of there as well. However, we're going to use the concept of casting here. That's a way of checking to see if in this case the other actor was the thing that was overlapping this Trigger box. So let's drag out a here, cast two-third person character. And if we do this, if we check to see if the other actor was the object that was overlapping the Trigger box, then we can pull out of here and find that modify health function. And if you check context-sensitive like I did there, and suddenly it disappears, simply clear out the search dragged out again, type in Modify health, and you will find it. Once again. Once you have a reference to your ThirdPersonCharacter, you can call any functions that live inside of there. You can reference any variables that live inside of there, get them or set them. You can even modify any of the components in any of their properties that live inside of that ThirdPersonCharacter. So getting a reference to something is huge. Alright, this case, do we want to heal or damage our character? I'd say it was damaged them. So let's go negative 0.1. And that should be good enough because we're going to see our health meter decrease. Let's compile this. Let me go back in my ThirdPersonCharacter. Make sure that I set my health back to a value of 11.0, 100%. And let's play. I'm going to set my debug object here to be the map. Ringing my character back on. So we're starting off at 100% health. I overlap that they're trigger volume here, a little audio there as well. Every time. One more thing before we wrap up this video. In the last video, we talked about a pass by reference option inside of our function. And I need to get back to that. So in order to jump back into our function, here I am in my Level Blueprint. I can jump back into this function by double-clicking on this. And notice that once I do, I'm going to transition from our Level Blueprint. Double-click into our ThirdPersonCharacter Blueprint where this modify health function resides. And it has opened up the Modify health function tab for us. Go ahead and either select your modify health function over on the left-hand side, or you can click on the Modify health entry node as well. And over in the Details panel you can see that we added a heel or damage MT input. And that equates to this input that you see on the function node itself, you're am and my Event Graph jumping back to the function tab itself. Now, this pass by reference that we started talking about in the last video, what the heck does this do? Well, visually speaking, what you're going to see happen here is once I checked this box, this circular shape pin is now going to be replaced by a diamond shape pins. So here we go. It's now a diamond shape pin. Also, the default value went bye-bye. Now if I compile this Blueprint, you'll also notice something else compile, we get an error and it's going to say that this is invalid, that we should have an input wired into it. So what is talking about here? Let me jump back to my Event Graph is talking about this area right here saying, hey, you need something wired into this. Now if I was in my modify, how function I'm like Why I have no idea what this is talking about. This is a link. You can simply click on it. And it'll jump you right to it. So it's saying, Hey, plug a variable into this. So to show this off, what the heck does pass by reference. Does, I need to modify our modify health function just a little bit. And by doing this, I'm going to change our value. Instead of going 0-1 scale, I'm going to temporarily break our health meter, if you will. I'm going to say we're going to start off with a health of ten. Let's pretend that we have a health scale going from 0.02, 100.0. Alright, then what I'm gonna do is I'm going to add some health. And again, I'm gonna go with a zero to 100 scale instead of 01. Let's just say our health to add, we're going to change to be, let's add one health. Alright, let me go ahead and plug this into here. Now I'll fly. I'm kind of following along with our modified help function. Let me double-click on this. Once again, we're essentially saying, Hey, we're plugging one into here. Then we're going to add that to our existing health, which is ten and clapping this between zero and let's clamp it to 100. We could then have 11. And if we press F3 again, we would expect it to go to 12, et cetera. But we're going to modify one more thing here inside of our modify health function. What we're gonna do is we're going to add in increments node to this, drag out of here and type in increments. We're going to increment this float. And I'm going to rewire things just a little bit here, holding down Control, left-click and drag where things like so. We're going to take the result of this and plug it into there. And plug this into there. Whoops, I missed there, like cell. And so now our function looks like this. So if I compile here, what do we have going on? Well, essentially, what we have going on is something whereby we're going to add one health. This is being plugged into our function. In adding one health, we are incrementing that number right here. And if we hover over this, it says it's going to add one to that specified value, and then it's going to set it. So instead of next time AS incrementing our health, it being one, it's then going to be two. And then the next time it's going to be three, and so on and so forth. Jumping back to our event graph, we should see this reflected in our print string. Once again, that meter is going to be of no value. So let's go ahead and player in it saying we have this air also in our Level Blueprint. Go ahead and click on this level test map. What is talking about if you click on that is because we have not plugged anything into here, I'm going to temporarily break that. Yes. Anywhere you have that it's going to yell at you and say, Hey, you need something plugged into that input. Alright, let's play this. So pressing the F3 key, we now have 12 health, 15, health, 19, health, 24, health. And you can see it keeps adding one to the amount that it adds every time. Now the reason this started off at 12, let me just go play one more time. Again. We're starting off at ten health than adding one or we think we're adding one except we go 10-12. And the reason for that is because right in here, we're taking this value one and we're incrementing it right away. And in doing so, because this is a pass by reference, we are incrementing that variable as well. Remember in the last video I said in doing this passed by reference, wherever you have plugged into this pass by reference. And you're not only getting this value, you are setting it right away as well. So even though it starts off as one, every time you pass through here, it's going to increment one. So 234, et cetera, et cetera. A little bit of nuance that I spent way too much time upon. Alright, there you have it, guys. That is calling functions. You can call them from within the blueprint that you created them within, or you can call them from other blueprints. So long as you have a reference to the blueprint that they were created in. Guys, I'll do offer this one. See you in the next one. 61. Collapse to Function: Alright, welcome back everyone. In this video we're going to learn how to turn an existing network of nodes inside of any blueprint into a function. This is called collapsing to a function. Now this is a super handy trick. Anytime you find yourself duplicating a selection of nodes in different parts of your graph. So instead of doing that, we could just turn those notes into a function and then call that function whenever and wherever you like. So currently I am inside of my BP example pickup. And let's just say e.g. I'm going to left-click and drag that. We're duplicating this bit of script again and again in various parts of our graph for whatever reason. Instead of copying and pasting these nodes, we can highlight them all just like I did here. And then you can right-click on any of your highlighted nodes, and then you right-click menu, you could collapsed to function. That's what this video is all about. I'm going to demonstrate this briefly here, even though this isn't where I'm intending on going with this video. So I'm going to collapse this to a function. Note that when I do, I've crunched all of these nodes down into a single function. In over on the right-hand side it says, what do you want to name this function? I'm just gonna leave it as that name temporarily. So I'm going to hit enter here. And if I dive inside of this function, there are all of the nodes that created a function out of all those nodes. And the benefit of this is we could then simply drag and drop this in other parts of our graph and use it just like we would if we copied and pasted all of these nodes. So that's the advantage of that. Now once again, this isn't exactly where I intended to do this. So let me do control Z here a bunch of times and get that back to its original state. Going to compile and say that once again. And let's go about creating a brand new Blueprint Class here. To demonstrate this, I'm going to right-click and some empty space here inside of a Blueprints folder. I rename this folder between videos from actor BP's to blueprints because this is not going to be an actor blueprint. Let's right-click Blueprint class. And the Blueprint class we're going to create here is a camera shake search under the all classes section under camera shake. And we're looking for camera shake base. And then we're going to click select down here in order to create this, Let's give this a name. I'll call this BP underscore, camera shake. Alright, then let's double-click on this to open it up. So long story short, what this camera shake base parent class allows us to do is it allows us to specify some camera shake parameters. I realize there's a my blueprint graph over here. There is an event graph and all this kind of jazz is consistent with other blueprints. But the hearts of a camera shake parent class is that you can specify some cameras shake parameters, and then we can play those camera shake parameter. So what we're going to do over here in the Details panel is under root, shake, param, click this little drop-down, and we want to set this to wave oscillator camera shake pattern. Once we do, we can click this as a drop-down. And I do have some parameters set up ahead of time for the interests of time. Come underneath this F0 v field of view settings. Open that up a couple of times. We want to set our amplitude to five and our frequency of five. And the initial offset type is going to be set to random. Later on, you can play around with these parameters, but I suggest you just play around or you just play along at home. So you can see how much this does. And then later on you can go back and play around with it and see how much different values shake things up. Under the timing category, we're going to set a duration of 0.5 half a second. Aaron are blend time in and blend time out. We're going to set to be 0.2, 5.0, 0.25. Great. Go ahead, save this out, and we are going to next jump into our third person character. So let's head on back to our Content Browser. Thirdpersoncharacter blueprints. Double-click on your ThirdPersonCharacter to open it up. Now we're going to jump over to our event graph. So we don't need this modify health function anymore. And in our event graphlets find some empty space. We need an event input here. So an input events, Let's do F. Well, sure, F2 seems like a good random input event. And offer this, we're going to drag out and type in a function node called play world camera shake. Here with this function node, look at that. It's a blue noted it is a function node. We can specify a class. And this is where our B P camera shake comes in because if we Click on this drop-down. We can slot in the camera shake parameters that we just set up in our camera shake blueprint, pretty handy. Now we do need to specify an epicenter. That is, where do we want to base this camera shake off of like, what is the epicenter? You know how earthquakes have an epicenter? Well, camera shakes need an epicenter defined for them as well. For this, we're going to say, Hey, let's basis upon the capsule components. That is, this capsule components surrounding our character. Let's base it around the center of that, right? So we've got a capsule components. Let's drag and drop this into the graph, will get a reference to them. Let's drag out of this in typing yet world location. This will return x, y, and z coordinate value. So we'll say that is our epicenter essentially right in the middle of our capital component. Now, we do need to specify an outer radius here, essentially from the epicenter, how far reaching is his camera shake into play? Let's sit. 500 is our outer radius. Just so long as our camera is going to be inside of that radius, which if you left your camera settings, by default, that should be it. But you can play with this, you can expand that out if you want to a little bit further. Then what we're gonna do is drag off of this. And I'm going to bring in a node called spawn sound attach. Now we could just spawn a sound here, but just to show off some different functionality, we're going to spawn a sound and then attach it. Attach it where? Well, we're going to attach it to our capsule component here. Once again, I know we don't have to do this. We could just play a sound, but let's just go ahead and spawn and attach that sound. What sound we want here? Let's go with an explosion, type in explosion a to the explosion Q. Although any of these will really do just fine. And zooming out just a little bit here. Let's drag off of this and do a spawn emitter at location. This is the old particle system. If you want to use a Niagara particle system, you could do a spawn system at location. The reason I'm doing spawn emitter is because I know I've got the explosion particle effect right in here. But once again, you can use in Niagara particle system as well. And actually I didn't want to do spawn emitter at location my bad, let's do a spawn emitter attached. Once again, just to show spawning mid or attach that we can use different function nodes here. Slot in that explosion. There it is. Where do we want to attach this explosion? Well, I can extend this out from my capsule component like so. Double-click on that wire to bring in a reroute node. And that should just about do it. Now, these three function nodes are something I would turn into its own function. I would collapse these into a function. Yes, you can have functions make up another function. And the reason I would say these three are valid to crunch down into its own function. Because there are a bunch of effects right there. Essentially kind of like a player damage effects. You're going to play a camera shake. You're going to have an explosion sound and you're going to play an explosion particle effects. So they all go together. It makes sense to crunch these down into a single node. Now when we collapses down into a function, I'm going to be leaving out these two and you'll see why in just a little bit here. So I'm going to left-click drag highlight just these three nodes. Then I'm going to right-click on any one of them and I'm going to collapse to function. So that's going to bring in a function node like this as new function. And let's give this a new name. So over in the functions area where it created that for us, Let's hit F2 on this, and I will call this simply player damage. Player damaged f x. That seems pretty good. Now you can see over on the right-hand side it is already created our inputs for this function node, but we've got a couple here that are redundant. So I can actually simplify this a little bit. So let me just expand out my details panel here a little bit. I've got attached to component and attached a component too. But they're attaching to the same components. So I can actually eliminate one of these. That'll do just fine. Now, you're gonna get this red wire and that's going to look hideous. So simply right-click on this, refresh the node, it'll get rid of that. We can get rid of this guy right here. If you wanted to, you could rename your inputs but epicenter and attached to component or just fine, I could delete this out, you know, simplify this a little bit more, make this look a little bit cleaner. Something like this. If I dive into this a function node, notice what we've got going on. I've got my capsule components. The world location of the Catholic component and plugging that into the input side of my function. Inside of my function. These are getting passed along as the epicenter and the attached two component for that sound and the emitter. Now it did actually get rid of because I deleted out that bottom input, the attached two component actually do need to wire this backup. But again, the same attached to component works for both of these. So you can bring in some reroute nodes here to kinda clean this up, like so. And actually, I'm going to go like this, hold down Alt, left-click. This is a valid setup like that. Alright, compile and save this. Coming back to my event graph, that looks nice and clean, Let's jump in and play and see how this looks. So I can be running around right here. Actually let me set my debug option to my character there so you can see this firing off. Alright, so pressing F2, boom, you saw the camera shake just a little bit, kind of a little bit of a zooming effect there. So I can move around and press F2. And now what you could do is if you wanted to, you can jump back into your function that you just created here. You could change out your sound, you could change out your explosion. Let's just go with flame for the time being, Right? Flame, flame thrower. Actually not flame thrower. I want to go fire fires. The one I want to go with something like a fire instead of explosion clicking play here. When you press F2. The reason I chose fires, because remember what we were doing with that particular function node is we responding that emitter and we were attaching it. So that is the difference between just spawning a sound and spawning a sound and attaching it. I wanted to show that off just to show a little something extra. Alright, back in our event graph here, what you could do if you didn't want and did not want to keep these all collapsed to a function. You can right-click on this and you could expand the node like this. And then it'll get you back to where you had things. You wanted to see what it's all inside of there. I'm just going to hit Control Z to undo it because I like it all collapsed to a function. Now, just a couple of things I wanted to mention before we wrap this video up, let me just dive back into my player damaged function here. I'm going to select these nodes, control C and control V. You cannot, you cannot have a latent node into a collapsing of the function. What will happen is unreal, will yell at you. So if i so bringing a delay node, holding down the left clicking. So let's just say I wanted to collapse all four of these into a function. I'm going to highlight them right-click, Collapse to function. It's going to yell at me and say, We cannot do it. Show the message log. Let's show the message long and it says, Hey, delay cannot be placed in the function graph. Likewise, if I get rid of the delay, let's bring in an event node. Let's do F eight. Sure. Try bringing in input event or any event into your function like this right-click, Collapse to function. You're also going to get another message saying, Hey, you can't have an event node in there either. So just FYI, when you are trying to collapse to function. So guys, there you have it. Collapsing to function, highly recommended if it is a collection of nodes that goes together and it's just some script that you repeat again and again in various parts of your graph because that'll do to offer this one, we will see you in the next one. 62. Pure and Impure Functions: Hello and welcome back. In this video, our goal is to spot and understand differences between pure and impure functions. We'll also show how you can designate that is to make a function either pure or impure. Now to facilitate this discussion, I'm gonna be working inside of my third-person character. So if you want to play along at home, this is where I suggest you had. And once again, you can get inside of your ThirdPersonCharacter by coming underneath this directory and double-clicking on your third-person character. Alright, let's talk some differences between our pure and impure functions. Well, for starters, Let's talk about the pure functions. These are the green colored functions and here are some examples right over here. These are generally used as getter functions that just output some data. So that's one of the keys with pure functions. They do not have any execution in or out pins. So if you notice our debt times seconds, we'll just output our time in seconds are get actual location will just output sum x, y, and z coordinates. There's no execution in or out pins needed to get the value of, in this case, our actual location or time in seconds. Now, when do these run? Since we don't have execution pins that flow through these on the input side or the output side. When do they run? Well, they run when the return value is used. So just to demonstrate this, I've gotten event tick that's going to take off every frame. We got this hooked into a print string impure function node. Let's plug this into here. A float value into a string. It's going to convert that float into a string. And what will happen here is every frame, it's going to fire off until this print string to print something out to the screen. When it does, it's going to reach back through here to get our time in seconds. This executes, it runs when its return value is called upon. So let me just go ahead and play here. You can see how this is returning our game time in seconds and it's counting up from when we began play. Now something else to note about pure functions is that they promise not to modify the state or the members of a target class in any way. In our example here is going to be our get actor location. The target here is an actor. And because we're inside of our third-person character blueprint, the targeted here being self, would be our ThirdPersonCharacter. What you would notice with this pure function node is it's not going to change the state of this actor at all. It's simply going to return the location of our ThirdPersonCharacter. Contrast this with our set actor location impure function. No, this blue one. This one can change the state of our target, our actor, or third-person character here. And it can change the state by changing the location of it. So that's one of the key differences as well. So with a pure function, you ask a question, what's an actor's location, e.g. and you get an answer and XYZ location in this case. Now, just to show off some of these pure functions outputting some data that is requested. You've already seen the users get time in seconds. Let me simply plug in this, get actual location. Again, this is going to be firing off every frame. And because I'm going to be moving around, you're going to see this updating. Getting my actors location, the ThirdPersonCharacter. These are the coordinates where the ThirdPersonCharacter currently stands within the world. Then I could simply output the display name of our player controller. Like so. Once again, our player controller is kind of like the puppet strings controlling our mannequin right here. The player controller, just as a refresher here, is set up in your project settings. This is a little bit of a tangent under maps and modes. So the player controller that we have set up in our maps and modes and the project settings is that bp player controller. So it was just outputting that name. Once again with a pure function, you ask a question. What's an actor is location, e.g. and you get an answer. And now we turn our attention to the impure functions, that is the blue colored functions. One thing you'll note about them is they do have execution in pins and pins. And that means because they have an execution in pin, you must explicitly execute it by connecting some wire into it. Whether or not you have something coming out the other side, that's completely optional. But in order for this to ever do anything, you have to have some wire flowing into it. Another difference between an impure function versus the pure function. And I just hit upon this a moment ago, is that an impure function can but does not have to modify the state of a class. So in the case of our set actor location here, this could modify the state. Of our target, our self here are ThirdPersonCharacter, and it would modify our state by giving it a new location. Again, this function is impure because it changes the state that is the location of the class. In this case, our third-person character within the world. So now the question becomes with are created functions, how do you make them pure or impure? How do you designate that? Well, with the function, select it over here and I'm going to select our player damage fx function. If you select it over in the Details panel, you do have a checkbox specifying whether this is going to be an impure function or a pure function by default, if I drag and drop this in, you can see it as blue in color. It is an impure function. However, if I was to check this box, I could turn it into a pure function. So this is the impure version. Let me duplicate this quickly so I'm going to right-click on this player. Damage affects function. I'm going to duplicate it. Control D is the hotkey for that. And I'm going to call this player damaged FX. And I'm going to put a space here and just call this pure. Okay, and you can see it opened up a brand new tab here. What I'm gonna do is with this function selected, I'm going to select the pure option right over here. Okay? So now appears nothing has happened here in our function graph itself. Could close this out, but I'm going to come back to our event graph here and drag and drop this guy down into the graph. Once again, pure functions are green versus our impure functions are blue. Note that this one does not have execution pins on either side, whereas the impure function does. Now, this function up here is of no use to us the way we've designed it because we have no way of calling this. And it does not output any kind of data. So this is not a great function to turn into a pure function. One serves no purpose in this forum. So I'm gonna delete this out. In fact, I'm going to delete out this function, don't need it. And I'm going to try to bring about an example where this could make sense. In order for this to demonstrate, be demonstrated, I'm going to duplicate our modify health function right here. The reason we're going to modify our health function here is because you remember inside of here, let me just double-click on this. We were returning a value. So this could be a candidate where perhaps we would want to turn this into a pure function. But I'm not going to destroy this one. I'm simply going to right-click on this. And we're going to duplicate this and I'll call this my Modify health fewer. And what I'm then gonna do here is over in the Details panel, check that box to make it pure. I'm also going to modify a few things about this as well. Now, I have this setup to pass this by reference in the previous video. I'm going to uncheck that and I'm just going to simplify this graph here a little bit. So I'm gonna get rid of this increment node like that. I'm going to plug this into our branch. We're going to take our heel or damaged mountain, plug that into here. That's all looking good. Right here. We're going to plug this into here and we're kinda setting us back the way we had it originally. So that's gonna be our pure function. Looking good compiled at that. Let's go back to our event graph. And let's, let's bring in, I've got my F2 key right here. I'm just going to steal this event node right here. What I'm gonna do is I'm going to bring in our modify health pure, pure function like that. And notice there's no input pins, execution in or execution out pins. And I'm going to print a string. So I'm going to steal this print string node. It's already here. When I press F2, I'm going to print something to the screen. I'm going to plug this in, is going to convert my current health into a string. And it's going to modify some health. I need to feed this some health or damage amount we want to modify it by. So let's go help to add. This is currently set to one. What's our health currently at? It's at ten. So that's fine. Let me take my health to add. I'm going to plug it into their compile. Whoops, si didn't mean to do that. Let's go ahead and play here. And I'm not carrying about the meter at all right now I don't really care about that at all. So I'm carrying about is the print out that we're going to see on the screen. So pressing F2, look right about where my mouse cursor is, 11121314. Again, this is set up to simply output our current health. We don't have to wire in execution in or out of it. So it simplifies our graph somewhat. And in fact, that's one of the reasons that you'd want to use a pure function. It simply makes a graph easier and cleaner to read. You got less execution wires to hookup. Also, they always return the same predictable results so long as any inputs, in this case, our health to add, are the same, you're gonna get the same predictable result. But the biggest reason to use a pure function over an impure. The biggest reason you would want to convert one into a pure function is Compiler benefits ensuring more optimized code behind the scenes. I won't bore you with the details, but you can look that up online if you want the juicy, boring details. Alright guys, that's gonna do to offer this one, the difference is between pure and impure functions. See you in the next video. 63. Function Library: Hello and welcome back everyone. Well, up to this point in our discussion of functions, we've learned how to create some functions inside of a blueprint. And that's all well and good if you have a reference to that blueprint in which the function was created. However, what do you do if you want to create a function and have it accessible in all of your blueprints. What can you do then? You don't want to have a specific reference to a blueprint. You just want to make it general use function that's available anywhere. Well, in that case, you want to create something known as a function library. Our goal in this one is to learn how to do that in what a function library even is. Function library is a place to store functions that can be accessible from any other blueprint. Alright, back here in our content browser, Let's go ahead and create our function library. And I think a Blueprints folder under the scripting category would make sense for us. So let's right-click it some empty space. In the blueprints category, we've got this fly-out in, in the flyout menu. It says blueprint function library. That's the one we want to go ahead and click on that. Let's give this a name. I'm gonna call this my underscore functions and I'm going to all caps it just to make it very obnoxious. And then I'm going to double-click on this to open it up. Now, once we do that, it's going to prompt us to create a function right away. And it has a tab of that matching name right away. For us, I'm going to call this function we're about to create change mesh material. And this function is going to do exactly like the name suggests. Now, I'm going to add a couple of inputs to our entry node here so we can select that or selecting the function itself will allow you to do them. So the first input I'm going to add is going to be called actor. And we're going to change the input type here to be simply an actor. So under object types, I just simply did a search for actor. Under object types, actor, we want an actor object reference. And then our second input that we want here, creating another one is going to be called material. And we're going to change this type to be simply type in material. And under the object types material in the flyout menu, we're going to change it to an object reference. Alright, so those are gonna be our two inputs. We're going to have one output here. So I'm going to click this plus button. In doing so, we add a return node right away. Let's call this output successful change question mark. And then we're going to give this a type of Boolean. So we're going to output on the other end of this function node whether or not we successfully change the material of our mesh. So create a little bit of space here we're going to be adding some nodes in-between. The first thing we're gonna do is we can go ahead and break this wire here. I'm going to hold down the Alt key and left-click. We're going to drag out of our actor input and we're going to find out if our actor is a static mesh actors. So we're going to cast to Static Mesh actor. So essentially asking the question, hey actor that we're plugging into this function node, are you a static mesh actor? And if so, we want to do something and if not, we want to do something else. Now the thing we want to do firstly, is we want to toggle a variable whether or not it's going to be true or false based on if this cast fails or is true that it is a static mesh actor. So we need to create a variable here. We've got a section called local variables. Now, we're going to be talking about what a local variable is more in the next video, a lot more in the next video. So just play along right now and then we'll get to the differences between local and class variables. In the next video, we're gonna be creating a variable here, a local variable. This one's going to be called success. Ful, change question mark. And I hit the wrong key there. So let me try that again. Success. I'll just call it success change question mark, that's good enough. And I'm going to drag and drop this on top of that, I'll put execution pin, drag and drop on the cast failed. We want it twice. So if it in fact is a static mesh actor, it'll shoot out of this exhibition execution wire. And we're going to say, yes, the success, we did successfully changed it. And if it failed, we're going to say no, we did not successfully change it. So that's gonna be set to false. Next we're going to simply drag out of here and type in play sound 2D. We're going to play a sound confirmation sound effect or a fail sound effect. For up here, if it is successful in changing, we're going to call the sound compile success. That is one we're looking for. That one is in the engine folders. So if you don't see that you're playing along, you can click on that little gear there, turn on your engine content. So we'll play that sound going to hit Control C, Control V to paste that down here. If this casting fails, we're going to do failed, compile failed. Either of these will do just fine. Then we need to do a little bit of work down here. So what we wanna do out here is grab out of our Static Mesh actor and we're looking for the static mesh components. So Static Mesh actors consists of a static mesh component. That's what makes him a static mesh. And out of this, we're going to drag out and type in set material. There is a node we're looking for. And the material we want to change it to is going to be whatever we input into this function. So we're going to drag right here, I'm going to plug it into here, but I'm going to double-click on this wire to bring in a re, route node. Okay, we're almost finished here, we're almost finished. So what we're gonna do here next is we're going to take this output. We're going to plug this into our set material because if we have determined that it is a static mesh actor, we want to play this out and indeed change the material. We're going to plug this backup here at the cast fails. It is not a static mesh actor. We're going to come right through here and we're just gonna go right back to the returned node. We do not want to change the material in this case. Now for this successful change Boolean variable, well, we can just plug in the result of this. We're setting it either here or here. The result of this, we can get it and simply plug it into there. So that is going to be our function, our loan function that is going to exist and are my functions library. Let me go ahead and compile this and save right away. Next, let's head on over to our ThirdPersonCharacter Blueprint because we've got some work to do inside of there in order to show off this function. So if you forgot where that is, contents third-person blueprints double-click on that to open it up inside of our ThirdPersonCharacter. Once you come on down to the Event Graph, Right-click in some empty space in simply type in my functions. And you can see as we start typing it in, it shows our function library under the class section. So under the class, my functions, function library, we now have access to that function that we created. It's available inside of this blueprint and any other blueprint. Fossa, click on this, we can see what our function currently looks like. It takes in an execution wire on the input side, it can output one. It can take an actor, it can take a material, and it can output whether or not we successfully change the material on an input actor will come back to this in just a little bit. But for now, delete that out. We're going to head on over to our viewport tab, and we're going to add a new component over here. So let's go ahead and select our Capsule Component. And under this we're going to add a component. And we're going to add a sphere collider, sphere collision. Now this is going to act as a sort of invisible hand, if you will. So I'm gonna give this a name and call it simulated hand. And I'm going to place it out in front of our character here a little bit. So I'm going to change the x location to be, we'll say 60. And I'm going to change the scale universally in X, Y, and Z 2.5, something a little bit smaller because it is attached to our Catholic component. When we rotate our character around, this is going to be rotating around as well. What we're gonna be doing is we are going to be checking to see if this is overlapping something and then we're going to change whatever it is overlapping that's gonna be, if it's overlapping, a chair, we're going to change that static mesh into a gold share. We're going to change the material of that Static Mesh. One more property that I do want to set up here is under the rendering section, I want to uncheck hidden in games so that we can see where this is out into the world. Alright, so with that all set up, we can save this, jump back to your level here. We're going to place some static meshes in our level. Now I've got some specific ones in mind there in the stirrer content folder. Really any static measures gonna do. But under the Props folder, I'm going to place a chair is around a little bit. I'm going to place one of these guys wheel that around a little bit and I'll place, how about a basic cylinder C. We can find one of those under here, or the place actors tab, but I'm going to come right under here shapes. Let's do a cylinder. And I'm just going to scale it up a little bit like so. With all three of these selected, I'm gonna hold down the Control key and click left-click. So all three of them are selected. I want to set something in each of them and that is to ensure that they generate overlap events so that we can detect that we are overlapping them with our quote, unquote simulated hand. So with all those selected, I can simply type in the search bar here. Burlap. What I'm looking for is generate overlap events. So go ahead and check that again, make sure you've got all three selected. And then what we're gonna do is jump inside of our third person Character Blueprint. So head on back there. Thirdpersoncharacter, head on over to the Event Graph. And we want to do something, but our simulated hand is overlap, so find some empty space. And with your simulated hand selected here you can right-click on this. We're going to add an event for when we begin overlapping that component. Going to head into our graph way down here because it wants to, that's fine. So what we're gonna do is out of our other actor, we're going to drag out and we're going to change the mesh material. And I can simply just type in change or begin to type in change. And it is smart enough to know that, hey, are you trying to find that change mesh material function that lives inside of your function library. Yes, it does. Now note that this can output, this simulated hand was something overlaps that it can output and other actor. And in this case it's going to output an actor object reference. This actor input on the change mesh material is looking to take in an actor object reference. Isn't that convenient. So we're going to detect if it is overlapping some other actor. And then we're going to change the material. I'm going to change the material to simply be gold. Gold lives in R star content. And what we'll do here is we'll bring in a branch node. I'm going to type in branch. Alternatively, if you delete that out and drag out of here, this is a Boolean output. If I type in branch here, it'll hook up both wires at one. It's pretty handy. Then let's simply print string. I'll bring in a couple of these Control C, Control V. And this is going to be our scripts. So up here, if this is successful, we're going to print out cold in. Here. We're going to type in no change. All right, go ahead and compile and save that. Let's give this a playwright away. So clicking R plus button, I will set our debug object to be our ThirdPersonCharacter that has spawned in and expanding this out just ever so slightly. Alright, if I look in front of my character, there's that red sphere, that's my simulated hand. You can see it pivots around, rotates along with my character. So when I overlap the chair, you see that it did change the material pretty sweet. Changed the material there, and our cylinder changes it there as well. That is a good global function, if you will. We can use it inside of our ThirdPersonCharacter here. But let's also show how you could use this inside of your Level Blueprint. Because after all, what's the point of creating a function library if you can't access the functions inside of it from anywhere. Heading back to our level tests map tab right over here. Let's open up the Level Blueprint and I'm just going to bring in and input key. Any input key will do so. I'm right-clicking in some empty space. Let's try the seven key. And it'll think I'm using the seven key for anything else here am I know? By the way, if you click under your grass here and expanded grass out, it'll show you what different events you've got in there. So for the seven key, I'm going to drag out of here, do a search for change mesh material. And once again, because this function exists in our created a function library and we can find it in the Level Blueprint. Sure. And I need to supply an actor here. So let's choose one of our actors. I'm going to make sure that I've got my cylinder here selected. Jumping back into my Level Blueprint, holding down the left clicking. Let's plug that in there. And I'll change the material here. Let's go cobblestone. Something cobblestone. Alright, compile, save. Let's play. Set our debug object to our level. Bring on back our map. And of course, I can touch these two. They're still going to change the gold. Now if I touch the cylinder here, that would turn to gold because that's all that's set up in my Character Blueprint. But if I press the seven key here, we can see that we'll turn it to cobblestones. So a great global function that we've created there. Alright, let's finish out this video talking about the pros and cons of functions in a function library. Well, the pros would include you can access that function from inside of any blueprint. It's a great time-saver. If it's a function you can use in many places, you know, you don't have to write the same script in multiple places, multiple times, that sort of thing. Now the cons, the cons would include having a harder time referencing blueprint specific data, e.g. my third person Character Blueprint. If I add some function like say maybe a modify health function that was very dependent on some variables and lived inside of here. Well, that type of function will be better off inside of that specific blueprint. Or if I had some function that was very dependent on some of the components inside of a given blueprint. That function would be better off in a Blueprint class itself as opposed to a function library. Alright guys, that is going to do it all for this one in this discussion of a function libraries. See you all in the next video. 64. Local Variables: Welcome. In this video, our goal is to familiarize yourself with the concept of local variables. Now, in this video, we'll break down what local variables are, how they differ from class variables, how we can create and use them, and what kinds of things you need to know about regarding their accessibility within blueprints. Now the last video we use a local variable, one called Success change, a Boolean local variable. And I mentioned that we would come back to it in a future video, that is this future video. Now, note something about local variables. We can only create local variables here inside of functions, inside of the function library, the blueprint function library. We cannot create class variables. We only have a local variable section. So what the heck are we talking here? Class variables versus local variables? Well, to help facilitate this discussion, I've got my ThirdPersonCharacter Blueprint open. Jump on over to here. And if we look over in our ThirdPersonCharacter Blueprint panel, we have a variables section. These are variables that belong to our character class, so we can call these class variables. But you'll notice something here in the My Blueprint panel. We do not see local variables here in the function library, we see a category called local variables. Where is it in a Class Blueprint, we only see a variable section. Well, in order to see local variables, you have to have a function selected or your construction script as well. So if I select my Modify health function right here, Let's double-click on that to open it up. You may have noticed that as soon as I did this, I now have access to a local variable section right down here. If I jump on out of here, go back to my Event Graph. Note that the local variables will disappear. It's not there anymore. Alright, so let's dive back into our modify health function. Alright, now let's talk some of the differences between class variables and local variables. Well, for starters, when you're creating a variable right here in the My Blueprint panel, you are creating a class variable, one that belongs to this parent class. Now, any variable you might want to get or set from another blueprint should be a class variable. Now, just to give an example of that, let's say in your Level Blueprint, you had a reference to your ThirdPersonCharacter and you wanted to modify your third-person character's health variable. Maybe there's a zone within the level that does damage or maybe heals the ThirdPersonCharacter. Well in that case, in order to access our ThirdPersonCharacter is health variable from inside of the Level Blueprint. You'd want to make sure that this health variable existed as a class variable. Now as for local variables, they can be created inside of a function graph. Local variables are only visible to the function that they were created within and not other functions or the event graph. Now let's go ahead and create one here inside of our modify a health function. Now I could create one by clicking this plus button right over here under the local variables category. However, I'm going to create one by right-clicking on a pin. So long as you're trying to promote to a variable inside of a function, you have the option to promote to a local variable. So I'm going to right-click right here under my clamp float Tmax. And right-clicking, we are going to promote to a local variable that's going to create this variable right over here. So let's call this my max health. And what you'll notice now is that this local variable does not exist in any other function graph here, if I go into my player damaged fx function, double-clicking on this, that local variable cannot be found. Likewise, if I was to right-click inside of this player damaged function and I search for max health. It's not available on here. If I go over to my event graph and I searched for it, I don't see any local variables down here and either right-click, max, health is not here as well. In fact, if I uncheck context-sensitive, it doesn't show up. This max health variable inside of Maya modify health function is local only to this function. And if you don't see it here anymore, you can click this little drop-down arrow and it will show you where it is. Once again. Now at this point you may be wondering, what's the point of local variables. Why do I even need them? Why can I create all class variables and use those local variables do help reduce the clutter for things that are only relevant within the context of a function. You don't want to populate a huge list of class variables here when some may in fact only be needed within a given function. So for that reason, organizational reasons, it's a good idea to simply create a local variable helps keep things neat and clean. Secondly, it also helps guard against your own mistakes. I've got two variables here. I've got health and max health that are very similar. Now maybe I want to ensure that, hey, I can never modify my max health. It's only going to be accessible from within this function. Well, that's a good candidate to turn that into a local variable to ensure that I don't accidentally modify this variable from within another blueprint. Alright, let's show this off a little bit further by creating a brand new function for starters here inside of our ThirdPersonCharacter. So under the functions category, we're going to add a new function. I will call this turbo run, which is going to do exactly what you think it's gonna do. Now inside of here, what we're gonna do is bring any reference to our Character Movement Component. Inside of our Character Movement Component, we have access to a parameter called max walk speed. We want to do something with our max walk speed. So it's drying out up here and bring in a reference to our max walk speed. We're going to get that value, which by default here starts at 500. Then what we're gonna do is we're going to drag out a here, hit the plus button, we're going to add something to it. Then we're going to set our max walk speed. So dragging out of our character movement once again, set max walk speed. We're going to go like this and like this. So now we want to add a local variable in order to determine how much of a speed boost we want to give our character when we terrible run. So this is what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna add the value right here, 2000s. And then I'm going to right-click on this pin. We're going to turn this into a local variable, so we're going to promote that. And we're going to see that populated down here. Let's give it a name called turbo speed boost. And now you can see because we promoted it with that value already set in there, it's going to set that value right in there as well. So that's a handy little trick that I like a lot. Alright, let's compile that. Make sure that that's looking all Skippy. Then let's jump into our event graph. And I'm going to find some empty space here. And we're going to bring in an input events. Let's see what we've got available here. Now we've gotten access to a lot of different things. I'm going to right-click. We'll do the two key. Sure. Let's do input or actually type in keyboard to right there. Bringing a two key. Off of this, we're going to drag and drop our terminal run. And if we release the key, what we wanna do is we want to bring in our Character Movement Component like that. And then we're going to drag off of here, do another set, max, walk speed. Remember the default value was 500, so let's set it back to 500 as soon as we release the two key. So this is gonna be our Turbo run script. So notice are terrible run function right here. It has that local variable inside of it. We can double-click on that, that'll jump into that function. We got this turbo speed, boost, local variable. Alright, now let's go ahead and give this a play. I'm going to compile here, save and play, set our debug. Object to our ThirdPersonCharacter. We can run around just fine looking good. However, when I press the two key, we zoom just fine. We're terrible running and I release it and I slow back down. To summarize here, you can search for and find local variables from within the graph that they were created are terrible run here we could search for and find this local variable. You cannot search for and find a local variables within the event graph of the blueprint they were created inside. So in the event graph right here, we cannot find that local variable. You also cannot search for and find this local variable are turbo run local variable here. You cannot find that if you search for it within another loop, another blueprint, even if you have a reference to our ThirdPersonCharacter here you cannot find a reference to this. Now, one last note about class variables. This is worth noting that if you click this class defaults button inside of any Blueprint. Any Blueprint class, you have access, sorry, not Class Settings, class default. You have access to all of your various class variables. Here they are right over in the My Blueprint panel. Health can jump, et cetera. Over in our Details panel, we can find them all right here as well. Note that if you were to change it here, say we were to change our health from ten to say 100, Enter. And now I was to select my health variable here. It is going to update that default value. So it doesn't matter where you change it. You can change your variable values from here or the class defaults section thought I would point that out as well, right? That'll do it all for this video. See you in the next one. 65. Functions Things to Know: Welcome back. In this video, our goal is to cover some really good things to know about working with functions. Now, these are things that didn't necessarily warrant a full video, but should certainly be touched upon when discussing the topic of functions. For this video, I'm going to be opening up a variety of blueprints, ThirdPersonCharacter level blueprint the likes. So I'm gonna be starting off in my ThirdPersonCharacter Blueprint content, third-person blueprints. The first thing we are going to be touching upon here is how to debug a function. Now, this is gonna be something that later on in the course I'm going to be dedicating a whole module towards, but it is worth mentioning here as well. So here I have a very simple script. When I press the two key, I'm going to make my character terrible run. And when I release it, I'm going to return back to my normal movement speed. Now you can see I've added a comment on this node by right-clicking and adding a node comment that if I press F9, F9 acts as a toggle here and you can see how it changes that tool tip. I can add what is known as a breakpoint that's going to allow the code to stop right here at this point, as soon as we reached this point in the execution chain. So you can imagine if you had a whole bunch of nodes wired together, it would freeze the game up as soon as you hit this point. Now why would you ever want to do that? Well, sometimes you may have some unexpected consequences going on in your scripts. Something is happening that you weren't intending on happening, whatever. And you need to freeze the game, to step through the code, step through your script to find out what's happening. That is the use of a breakpoint. And I'm just going to briefly show off how this can freeze your game. So I'm going to press the play button here. Notice that I do have my breakpoints that here. You can also right-click and remove a breakpoint, disable breakpoint, or toggle that breakpoint, turn it on or off. Here we go. Planet. I'm going to set my debug object to be my ThirdPersonCharacter and bring them on my play window again. So as soon as I press the two key, It's gonna jump immediately to that script and freeze the game right here. Now from here, with this node selected and you can see that giant red arrow being like, yep, that's the guy that we're trying to select. You have a series of buttons up here that allow you to decide what you'd like to do. From here, you can locate the currently active node, which it currently is. We can step into this node and what that's gonna do is gonna jump me inside of the function itself. Let me just go back to my event graph. I could step over, meaning if I had some more nodes over here, it could stop me on over to the next one. And then this one right here is to step out of this node to be executed in the parent graph. So again, I have a whole section of videos upcoming that we'll talk about this, but breakpoints, you can add them to any node. I'm going to stop this year by simply clicking on the node and toggling on and off with the F9 key. Alright, next up for any of your functions that you have created in the Details panel, you have the ability to add some keywords. And what this enables you to do is when you right-click in some empty space here, if you search for any of your keywords here, it will find that function that you're looking for. So we could do something wacky here. I'm going to add keywords here such as purple. And I'm going to separate them with a comma monkey comma dishwasher. And if you get that joke and where it came from, my hat is off to you. Compile save. And now if you do a search for right-clicking purple, it finds function terrible run. Monkey, find that function as well as dishwasher. And I just type in dish and it already finds it. Now note that this works not only within the blueprint that that function was created, but if I go over to my level test map level blueprint, as long as you have a reference to that blueprint in here, I can talk to my ThirdPersonCharacter Blueprint. I can drag out of here. Type in purple, finds that function monkey or dishwasher. So there you go. Keywords. That's how you can find a function using any key word or words of your choosing. And next, let's explore this compact node title field that you have available to you for any of the functions that you have created. What this allows you to do is to simplify your Node a little bit. I don't use this a whole lot, but maybe some of you will like to work this way. So I'm going to change my node title here to be something other than player damaged effects. I'll simplify it and just simply put in player FX. And as soon as I hit enter, this title is going to go bye-bye, as well as all of these pin label. So here we go, pressing Enter. You can see now I've crunched this node down into a simplified version. Player effects is now the compact node title of this node. And all those pin labels have gone away. Now you can still see what kinda datatypes these pins are looking for by simply mousing over to them. That's gonna be looking for an object, a vector, as well as a sink components respectively. Maybe some of you will prefer working this way. I however, do not, but I thought it would throw it out there anyways. Next, I want to talk about what this access specifier field does for a function that we have created. However, in order to do this, I need to create a child class of our ThirdPersonCharacter here in order to really do this justice. Now, class inheritance is a topic I will be talking about later on in the course. However, again, in order to show off this access specifier, I need to do this now. So back here in my content browser, I'm going to right-click on my ThirdPersonCharacter and I'm going to create a Child Blueprint class. And I'll leave this name going to just hit Enter. And what I'm then going to do is go back into my ThirdPersonCharacter and talk about this access specifier. So we've got three different settings here, public, protected, and private. So this determines which blueprints can gain access to a function. In this case, our modified health function, public is a default setting. Any other object can call this function so long as we have a reference to it, meaning I can use this modify health function here within this blueprint that we've created with him. I could also access it from our Level Blueprint again, so long as you have a reference to your ThirdPersonCharacter, I can find my God, if phi health there it is. Jumping back to my ThirdPersonCharacter. Let's now change r, modify health from a public, too protected. Now, this means the function can only be called by the current blueprint, meaning our ThirdPersonCharacter Blueprint, as well as any blueprints that derive from the current blueprint. So can I find it here? Yes, I can drag and drop. I can access it there. Make use of it there. If I jump to my child ThirdPersonCharacter, and I jump over to the Event Graph, and I right-click and I do a search for modify health. There's that function. I can find it here as well. This shows that our parent class here is our bp ThirdPersonCharacter. So yes, you can use it within the original blueprint that you've created. You created it in or the child class. Lastly, let's jump back to our bp ThirdPersonCharacter. Select our modify health. And let's change this from protected to private. Now, this means the function can only be called from within the current blueprint. So yes, I could drag and drop this in here. I could call this function. However, if I was to go to my level test map, dragged out of here, do a search for MOD if phi health, I can only find that pure function. Because if I look back in my ThirdPersonCharacter, remember I currently have two versions of the Modify health function. The Modify health pure is currently set to access specifier public, meaning I can find it within the Level Blueprint. However, modify health is currently labeled as private, meaning that I cannot find it here. Modify health? Nope. Now if I go to my child blueprint, you can see that this is still out here and that's because it was still out here prior to me changing this access specifier to private. However, if I was to go back into my child, delete this out, Right-click, do a search for modify health. I can no longer find it. So just a little bit of a table there as well. So the access specifier, you've got public, protected and private. Now next up, I'm going to show off what this call in editor checkbox does. But in order to do this, I'm going to create a brand new function over here. I'm going to click this Plus button. And I'm going to call this my Super jump. Inside of this function that I am creating. I'm just going to drag off type In launch character. And the only thing I'm gonna do here is change our z velocity to be 2000. Now you'll notice that our function here is identical to just this launch character function itself. But in order to show off this call in editor checkbox, I wanted to do something super simple. So with this function created, go ahead and select that and click on this call in editor checkbox, what this allows us to do, Compile and Save here as well. Let's jump back to our level editor. I'm going to make sure with my three dots selected here. I'm going to play in selected a viewport. I'm going to click Play. Now with me playing in my selected viewport. I'm going to select my ThirdPersonCharacter. And I could do a search for Super jump. And we can see under the default category, I've got this super jump button. If I click on this, it will simply call that function. Now you'll notice that in the BP ThirdPersonCharacter itself, I only created that function. I have no input key to actually call that function, but this is a great way to simply test out the functionality without any input keys or anything of that sort. You can simply test to see what it does straight away. Now there is a little gotcha here that you should know about and that is. Note that my Super jump, let me stop playing here. Note that my function here does not have any inputs or outputs. If I was to select something like player damaged effects, you can see that I've got some inputs here. I don't have any outputs on this one, but I could return something. Let's click on this and do return. And we could return the spawn emitter attached. We're going to drag and drop that there like that. Now if I was to take my player damage affects function, I'm going to click on this call in, editor checkbox compile, save. Let's jump back in here and play. Going to select my ThirdPersonCharacter, scroll on down. I'm going to find those buttons once again, there we go. Under the default category, I can find my Super jump call Editor button. However, I don't find that same button for the player damage effects even though I have that box checked. Now why is this? Well, I don't know the exact answer to that, but I suppose because it would be pretty difficult to manually call a function that is reliant on some data that needs to be input into the function itself in order to work properly. Now next I want to point out that for any of your created functions within the My Blueprint panel, if you right-click on them, you have the option to convert function to event. What the heck does that even mean? Well, let's dive inside of our terrible run, a function here. And I can do that by simply double-clicking on it. It'll open up that function graph. And notice that this function is simply taking my characters max walk speed, That's how fast they're moving. It's going to add a little bit of a booster there and add that together to create our new Walk Speed, our new movement speed. So notice this setup right here. I'm going to jump back to my event graph. And what I'm gonna do is I'm going to right-click on my terminal, run a function. We're going to convert this to an event. And when I do, it is basically going to break out all of that code that was inside of that function that modified my characters, max, walk, speed, and in all places it in the event graph itself. Now notice that our terrible run function no longer exists here in our function area. Instead, we see a custom event called turbo run, that same name. Now this needs to be called in order for this script to run. So something to point out here, you cannot do this if the function has outputs. And by that I mean let's double-click on our modify health function right here. This function does have an output. So if I try right-clicking on this, in converting this function to an event, you're gonna get a warning saying you cannot do that. So I thought I would point that out while we are here as well. Now, why would you ever do something like this? Why would you ever convert one of your functions to an event? Well, perhaps it's easier for you to read your script in this sort of broken out manner. Or perhaps you decided this is better off as a one-off script instead of a function that you could see yourself wanting to use multiple places. Now a couple more things here. Before we wrap this video up. Remember, you must compile that is to press this button right up here. You must compile to access new functions from other blueprints. If you added a new function here, you created a new one and you wanted to access it from say, your Level Blueprint. You need to compile first before you can do that. Another thing that's worth mentioning here is you can have functions inside of other functions that you create. So I showed that off here by having a function that I created called Super jump and having that function inside of that function. And last but not least, for functions, you can't have latent nodes inside of here. And by that, I mean, I'm talking about delay nodes right-clicking. And I'm just going to do a search for delay here. Can't seem to even added here. However, in the Event Graph, you right-click delay. You can find delay or retrievable delay. You also cannot add a node known as a timeline node. So important things to remember there for functions, right guys, that's gonna do it all for this video. Good things to know. We will see you in the next one. 66. Macros Overview: Alright, over the next few videos here we are going to be shifting our attention to the topic of macros. And specifically in this video, our goals are to learn what macros are, discuss how they are similar or different to functions. We're also going to explore a couple of common pre-existing macros and how they're constructed. And lastly, we're going to talk about where we can find macros within blueprints. So first of all, what is a macro? Well, a macro is essentially a collection of nodes that does something it's similar to a function in this regard. And I have a couple of macros right here in front of me, inside of my Level Blueprint. Now, unreal does come with a whole host of ready-made macros that you can use. It's from the standard macros in the engine content, which I will show you in just a little bit here, you can create your own macros inside of a Blueprint Class, a level blueprint or a blueprint macro library. And again, over the next few videos, we'll show how to do all that. So first of all, let's explore some common macros. And as you see before, you have a couple of macro nodes. One is the compare float macro, the other one is in, is valid macro. Just a moment ago I made, I mentioned that a macro is essentially a collection of nodes that does something similar to a function. And we can see this by double-clicking on either of our macros here. And I'll just double-click on compare float here. In doing so, I'm gonna be opening up a new tab called standard Macros. This is a macro library that consists of a bunch of macros that already exists here in Unreal. And note that we also opened up a compare Float tab within this macro library. And this shows off all the nodes wired together to create this compare float macro. Over on the right-hand side, we can see that if we select our input here, we can see that this particular macro compare float belongs to the math float category. So if I was to drill down here in our collection of macros, math float, we can see there is our compare float macro. Now you can expand all of these out to see all of the different macros that exist within this macro library. Now the reason I'm pointing this out is because if I was to jump back to my level blueprint or any other blueprint here. And simply right-click and some empty space and I'm gonna do a search now for compare float. We can see that is the category where this particular macro is found, the math float category as specified right here. Math float. Now let's quickly hit upon some macro and function similarities and differences here. So starting with the similarities, both macros in functions are time-saver as they can store a commonly used sequences of nodes complete with inputs and outputs for both execution and data transfer. So instead of say, placing this sequence of nodes in multiple places throughout your graph, you can just create a single macro or a function can do similarly. And that'll save you time because you're condensing these nodes down into one another similarities. You can edit the functionality of a macro or function in a central place, a graph. Right here we have our own compare float graph. You can edit the functionality here and it'll propagate that change to any other macro that you've placed in any other blueprint. Another similarity is that they are reusable. You can reuse this macro in plenty of other blueprints. You can have it in multiple blueprints. You can use the same macro within the same blueprint. Also, macros and functions both allow local variables and we have a whole video talking about local variables. But essentially a local variable is a variable that is just referenced and used by that individual function, or in this case a macro. Now the difference is macros can have multiple input and output execution pins. And we can see that here in our compare float macro. If I select this entry node right here, Check this out. We have one execution input, but we've got three execution output pins. And if that's not clear enough here from our input and outputs, Let's look back at the final node, back in our Level Blueprint, check it out. We've got one execution input and three outputs. Now you get to name these by the way. So if I go back to our standard macros here, you get to input what that name is does not have to be exact. You can put it as a symbol, symbols and letters, whatever you want to put there. One other difference, and this is key, this is very much qi Macros can have latent nodes in them while functions cannot. So when I'm talking about here, once again, jumping back to my Level Blueprint, let me just scroll on over to the right here. I'm just in my Event Graph, so I'm not within any macro or function graph itself. These types of nodes right here, latent nodes, ones with this little clock icon. If I mouse over this node, this delay function, it even says in the tool tip at the very top that is a latent node. That's what this clock icon means. That is a time sensitive node. Any late node like that, or a timeline node. Anything with dealing with time, you cannot place those in functions. However, macros, it's okay. Lastly, macros cannot be called from other blueprints. Like a function can. Just to quickly demonstrate this. If I was to go into my third-person character here, I'm just going to create a quick temporary macro. I'm going to call this my temp. I'll call it macro temp. How about that macro temp? I'm going to compile this. And then in my Level Blueprint, if I find, I've got my four key, if I was to drag out of this and I do a search now for macro, I cannot find it. I cannot find that, whereas I could find something like my super jump function. Super jump. There it is. So you can't call macros that live in another blueprints from another blueprint. Alright, so where can you all find macros within unreal? Well, there is an existing macro library here. We've got our standard macros. Well, where does this exist in our content browser? If I jump back to our level tab here, you have to make sure that you have your show engine content checked here. And I just went under Settings show engine content. And here is the pathway at the all engine Content Editor blueprint resources folder right there. And here is your standard macros. And you can see from the tool tip there the blueprint type is a macro library. By double-click on this, it's just going to jump back into that tab. Here's a whole bunch of different macros that are available from any blueprint. Where else can you find some macros? Well, I have some available here in my Level Blueprint. If I jump on over to my node types graph in eyes zoom in on my flow control nodes here. All these are flow control nodes. We're going to have a whole section of the course dedicated to flow control loans, but these are all macros. So you're gonna notice that macros have this gray header. That's an easy way to identify a macro. It's got this gray header. And just to prove that these are macros, if I double-click on any of these, let me just double-click on my gate here. What do you know? It jumps me back to my standard macros. That is a macro indeed. What else can we find macros? Well, you can create your own macros, and I can show that off by here in our ThirdPersonCharacter. We did create a temp macro. Of course this is empty right now, but it has a section for macros are Level Blueprint. It's got a section for macros so you can create them here. Any other blueprint, you can create macros within which we're gonna do actually next video. So guys, that is going to do it all for this one on our overview of macros, we'll see you in the next video. 67. Creating Macros: Welcome. Our goal in this video is to learn where and how to create a macro and to help better drive home those differences between functions and macros. We're going to create our macro in such a way that it would be impossible for a function to duplicate because we're going to include some late nodes inside of our macro, as well as having a multiple execution output pins, which again, a function cannot do. We're gonna be doing some work here inside of our bp ThirdPersonCharacter. So there's the pathway to find that, as well as our Level Blueprint. So have those two handy. We're going to start inside of our ThirdPersonCharacter. Now, inside of here, simply come down to the My Blueprint panel and in the macro section, click the Plus button. And we're going to create a macro called on fire. What a great name that's gonna get you excited for what's to come. Alright, now select your input node here. Create a little space between the two here. And with either be selected, I'm going to add some inputs to this coming under the Details panel clicking the plus button. Now I'm going to add a series of pins. The first one, I'm going to simply call in and press Enter. Now we can set the type of pin that we want for an input. If we click right here, we've got a bunch of variables that we can choose from, as well as an execution pen. You did not have this option inside of a function. We're going to add a few more here. So click this plus button again. We're going to call this one effect, one delay. And this is going to be a float. And clicking this plus button again, this is gonna be effect to delay. And then plus button again, and we're going to call this effect three delay. Those are gonna be floats. Then we're going to add some outputs here. We're going to add three of them. The first one is going to be called spawn effect one, and this is going to be an execution out pin execution output in that. Finally took that we're going to add two more. They're both going to be execution now pins as well. And they're gonna be called Control C, Control V, spawn effect too. And spawn effect three. Right? Now with that taken care of, Let's put in the nodes that are gonna go in between here, we really don't need that much space. So out of our pin right here, we're going to drag out and bring in a sequence node. This node is going to fire out of these pins sequentially. We can add multiple pins right here. I just need to add a third. So as soon as we come into this, we're going to fire first, second, and third in such rapid succession that is going to seem instantaneous. We're also going to add three delay node. So if you hold down the D key and left-click, you can bring in delay at nodes holding down d and left clicking. And we're going to hook them in like This, 12.3. And the amount of delay as good to come from outside of our macro here. Whatever is gonna be plugged into our delay or we can hard set it within the node itself. So we're gonna go like that. And then out of these completions, we're going to plug these into our outputs like this. So a very simple macro, we're just take it in a few delays. We're going to then sequentially go 12.3 out of these delays and then we're going to output. So just to show what this particular macro is going to look like back in the Event Graph. Let's place one of these out here, drag and drop our macro. That's the final look. So this right here translates into a macro node, a, a gray headed node that looks like this. We've got our three output pins. Are for input pins three floats in one execution in pen. Now, it's worth pointing out here that because our macro has some latency nodes inside of it, that is our delay nodes. We see that little clock icon, that latent icon right here on the macro itself. Thought I'd point that out. Alright, let's build out our script here, making use of our macro. So I'm going to start off with a custom event. So right-click. We're going to bring in a custom events to search for custom, add a custom event I'm going to name this player, catches fire exclamation points. And I'm going to plug this directly into our on fire macro. And now I could plug in some float variables to this. I liked the flexibility of this macro in that way. However, in the interests of time, I'm just going to input some numbers. I'm going to hard-code that if you will. So 0.2 is gonna be our effect delay one. Our next effect is going to be 4 s. In our next one is going to be 6 s. So I was just clicking tab will just jump you to the next field there. Next what we're gonna do is off of each of these we are going to spawn and effects. So drag off of this and type in spawn actor from class. Now we're actually going to use three of these nodes. So let me just bring these all down here a little bit. So spawn actor from class node Control C, Control V, and Control V. To frame this up for you all here. And the first actor we're going to spawn in is going to be some smoke. That's blueprint effect smoke. We can find that in the starter content pack. Again, you can use whatever you want here, but I'm just going smoke first. The second one, I'm going to add sparks, which is also in that Starter Content Pack. And the last one is going to be fire. So yes, smoke, sparks and then fire. Now we do need to input a spawn transform. So I'm going to grab our capsule component and just jumping to our viewport here, our capsule component is a thing surrounding our character, so it's going to spawn it right in the middle here. So let's jump back to our event graph. I'm going to bring in a reference to art Capsule Component drag out of this. We want to get the world transform. And we can plug this into all three spawn actor from class notes. Alright, we're gonna have a little bit of some crisscross the wire, but hope not to make it too bad for you. Now, this is not enough because we're spawning these, but we want to attach these to something. So I'm going to drag off of our spawn actor from class. Note here the return value and I'm going to say attach To actor, sorry, attached two components. The one I'm looking for here, attached to components. Alright. Now the parent here is going to be our capsule component. So I'm going to try to go with a set-up like this. I'm going to drag this way over here, but I'm going to double-click on this wire to go like this. Now are the rules here. I do want to set these to snap to targets like that, like that, and like that. Alright, and I'm going to Control C and Control V, these three nodes like this. So why are this guy and this guy in like this, whoops. This into the target, the parents into there. This goes to there, this goes to there. And we can take this, the capsule component and sneak it down right there. So essentially what this whole script is meant to do is upon these given upon this custom event firing off. We're going to come in here and we're gonna delay by these amounts in once again, double-clicking on this macro. We're going to do each of these when they're delay calls for us to then spawn the given effect. So we're going to spawn in the smoke than the sparks, than the fire, and we're going to attach it ultimately to our character. Let's compile this and save. Alright, that's the bulk of the work, but we've got a little bit more work to do. So let's jump back to our level here. And we're going to place a couple of things down to make it look like a dangerous zone. So I'm going to place a sphere triggers. So I've got my place actors panel. You can find this by coming right under here, place actors panel that so you can place this panel. And our idea here under the basic category. I'm going to place a trigger sphere into my level. Like so. I'm going to set the sphere radius over in my details panel to be 200 like that, something a little bit big. And then in the starter content folder here I'm going to come under particles. And I'm just going to drag and drop my P fire right on top of the triggers fear here in my outliner so that it is attached to, well, it's actually not going to attach it there, but I can drag and drop it here. And then I can drag and drop it on top of my triggers fear there to attach it. And the reason this is good to attach it. This is just an FYI. If I move the sphere, the fire comes along with it, but I can move the fire independently so that it is right over the top. I'm just looking for something that looks a little dangerous here. Let's set the scale of our fire here to be I don't know, three times as big something. Five times this bay. Yeah. Something kinda dangerous looking. All right. Go back and select your trigger sphere because we're going to make use of this inside of our Level Blueprint. I've got my Level Blueprint tab right here. I'm going to right-click with that sphere at trigger selected. We're going to do something when we begin overlapping that. You've seen me do this several times. So what we're gonna do is we're going to drag out of the other actor. We're going to find out who that is. So we're going to drag out of this scene, do Cast to ThirdPersonCharacter. We're basically asking the question here. When something overlaps this triggers sphere, we're going to say, Hey, let's find out what the other actor is. If it is a ThirdPersonCharacter, then let's do something. Well, what we wanna do here is call. We want to call this custom event player catches fire. Now, the reason we have this setup, the way that we do is because we cannot call this macro from our Level Blueprint, even though this is compiled and we have our macro living here inside of our ThirdPersonCharacter. I cannot just call on fire. It does a search for player catches fire. This is our custom events, but we cannot call that macro directly from another Blueprint. So that's one of the differences between macros and functions. So here's our call over to that custom events. I'm going to compile this. It looks good. So this is going to tell in our ThirdPersonCharacter, this to fire off. Alright, let's give this a play, moment of truth. Clicking play. I'm just going to try to minimize this a little bit so you can see these scripts firing off here. We'll make our ThirdPersonCharacter just spawn in, and that's gonna be our debug object there. Once we overlap this cuts smoke, it's attached to us. We are now sparking the crotch area and now we are on fire. So indeed, that did work is designed. So it's worth pointing out here that we created a macro. We could not call this macro or directly from our level blueprint. Inside of this macro, however, we were able to make use of delay node, some latent nodes, those are available for you to use within a macro. Also, what made this macro different and special from a function is we could have multiple execution output out pins. You could have multiple execution in pens as well. In this case, we just had multiple execution out pins, but you can have them on either end of the macro. Alright guys, that's it for creating a macro will see you all in the next video. 68. Collapse to Macro: Welcome back. In this video, our goal is to learn how to make our lives better by collapsing a collection of nodes down into a single macro node. Now this is one of those quality of life type actions you can take to make a certain bit of script happened by using one node. Not many. Now let's show this off. We have before you created some script meant to simulate a coin flip, meaning we'll have two possible outcomes, heads or tails. And then we're going to collapse that functionality down into a macro that can be used anywhere inside of our ThirdPersonCharacter? Yes, once again, I am inside of my ThirdPersonCharacter Blueprint. I have prepared some script ahead of time, and this is my quote, unquote coin flips script. Essentially what I'm doing is I'm launching my character to simulate a coin flip. We're going to launch our character into the air just as if we would flip a coin up into the air. We're just launching them 850 into the z direction. Then we're going to play a sound just to coincide with that launching of our character. This sound effect can be found in your engine content. By the way, if you don't know how to turn on your engine content, make those folders available to you. Back here in the Content Browser under the Settings section, you can just make sure that show engine content is turned on. You should be able to find that sound effect. Then we're gonna delay by 2 s. That's gonna be the duration of our coin flip here. Then we brought in a branch node. And what we are doing here is setting a condition, or condition is we're going to have a random integer, either one or two, that's our range. And if it's equal to one, then it's going to equal true. And we're going to play the success sound if it ends up being a two. And again, this can only be one or two, then these are not equal because two would not be equal to one, then it would be false. And we would play the compile failed sound, that would be our failed S of x. And both of these sound effects can be found in that same content folders. Alright, so we want to convert this into a macro, collapse it into a macro. Now one thing you should know is when you try doing this, we only want to get these nodes right here so you can left-click and drag if you accidentally try to bring in your input events like I've got right here, let me just show you what happens. Left-click and drag. And now if I right-click on any of my selected nodes here, we have the option to Collapse to Macro. So in trying to do this width, that event key in here, we're going to get a warning saying Collapse to Macro fail than if we show the message log, it's going to say you cannot place that five input in here, so we'll get rid of it This time. We're going to left-click and drag around these nodes, leaving the five input out of it. Right-click. We're going to collapse to a macro. And we can see over in the macro section, we now have the ability to give this macro a name. So I'm going to flip my page and we're going to call this coin flip. Yep, following along with my notes, coin flip. You can see that this is hooked up, but we need to do little bit of work inside of our macro so we can double-click on it right here. And what our macro currently looks like. But we want to do a little bit more work here. So we simplified our life a little bit by condensing these nodes down into one node back in our event graph here. But I still want to modify some things. So firstly, I'm going to select my input node here. And I want to set my input name here instead of executes to simply be n. Then I, my output node, I'm going to add a couple of outputs. Plus I'm going to call this one heads. And we're going to set this to be an execution out pin. Then we're going to click the Plus button one more time. We're going to call this one tails. And that's also going to be in execution PIM. And again, if this results in a true, That's essentially going to be our heads. So we're going to connect this into our heads. And if this ends up being false, we get a two here, it's not equal to one. This is going to be our tails. So if we go back to our event graph now, we can see that our coin flip macro has been updated. Note that we have one execution in pin and two out. Also. We have this latent icon on here to indicate that inside of this macro. And once again, you can double-click on this to open up your macro. We have a latent node inside of here, yes, LinkedIn nodes such as delays, can exist inside of a macro. They cannot exist inside of a function. All right, Let's head back to our Event Graph tab here. And I want to extend our script out of each of these pins here. We're going to say if our coin flip here ends up being heads, what we're gonna do is we're going to set our character's health to be full. Before this video shots, I took our health variable here and remember this is hooked up to our hood or health meter. And I set it to 0.1, meaning that we're going to start off with 10% health. I'm going to hold down the Alt key, left-click and drag to bring in a setter. And I'm going to set this to 1.0. We're going to go full health if we get a heads results. And what we're gonna do off of the tails, We're going to kill her character because that sounds like fun. So we're going to bring in our mesh, a reference to our mesh. So grab your mesh component here. Off of this we're going to drag out in, we have an option called set simulate physics. The target for this is going to be our primitive component, meaning our mesh right here. And all we need to do here is set this to true. And I'll leave you in suspense as to what this is going to do. Alright, go ahead and compile here and Save. And we are going to give this a play. So playing, let me set my debug object to be our character, bringing our character back on. So you can see I'm starting with 10% healthier. If I press the five key, once again, it's going to run into our macro and determine if we get a heads or a tails results. So here we go, five key. I got full health. It made me jump right away, then sent me to full health. Because the jump, if you will, the launching of our character, that is our coin flip the beginning of it. Let me try it again. Five key, jump right away to seconds later we got full health once again, let's keep going until we get the tails result here. So jump 2 s later, we're going to find out the result and simulate physics. He went through the floor, Leaving is sword behind. And so there you have it. If you have a collection of nodes that you want to condense down into a single node. And perhaps it has a late didn't note in it. Or you need to have some multiple execution input or output pins. Consider converting it into a macro, collapsing it down into a macro. You might need to do a little bit of fix-up work like we had to do here with our input name and adding a couple of outputs here. But that's a really handy way of simplifying your graphs, guys, that's gonna do it all for this video. See you in the next one. 69. Macro Library: Hello. In this video, our goal is to show how we can create an add macros inside of our own created macro library. So what is a macro library? Well, it's similar to a function library that we created in the last section of videos, in that it is a centralized place to store created macros that we make. Now, what are the big differences though, between a function library and a macro libraries that macros can only be accessed from blueprints that share the same parent class, a macro library. Now, that seems a little bit confusing here. Just stay with me as we go about creating our macro library. Alright, so here I am inside of my scripting Blueprints folder down on my content browser. I'm going to create my macro library right here. So let's go ahead and right-click. And we're going to come up to blueprints in, in the little flyer menu. We've got the blueprint macro library. So we're gonna go ahead and pick this. And now we're going to see is it's going to ask us to pick a parent class. So we're going to choose a character parent class that is going to be similar to our third-person character. Our ThirdPersonCharacter is of the character class. Alright, so we're going to click on this. And it's going to ask us to name this and I'll call this my underscore character. I'll do all caps. Why not character underscore macros? And then let's go ahead and double-click on this to open it up. And now something you'll note here is that inside of our macro library here again, our parent class is character. We have the ability to access and use any variables that are native to this class and they're listed all write down under here. So under character, we've gotten meshed, character movement, et cetera, a lot of different categories. Now let's compare this with our third-person character, which is the parent class of character over in the My Blueprint panel. If we come under variables, make sure that if you click on this gear icon you have show inherited variables. Check this out. Under the character category you have mesh, character movement, et cetera. These are all the same variables that are native to this class, the character class. So you can find them here inside of our ThirdPersonCharacter and here in our macro library, our character macro library, we have access to them as well. Okay, let's go ahead and create our macro here inside of our character macro library. Now, once we opened this macro library, it had a macro created for us here. You can see the tab right over here. Let's go ahead and give this a new name. So I'm just going to click on this, press F2, and I'm going to call this change max speed. And that's exactly what this macro is going to do, is we're going to alter our characters maximum movement speeds. So I'm going to create a little space here between our input and our output node here. So let's go ahead and create some inputs and outputs for this macro, I'm going to create one input here, clicking on this plus button right down here. And the first one is simply going to be called in. This is going to be an execution in pen. And then I'm going to create one more. And this one is going to be called new speed. We're going to feed this a new speed value, and this one is going to be a float. And for our outputs, I got a few in mind here. We're going to click this once, and we're going to call this one walking. This is going to be in execution out pen. And then we're going to get create two more plus, plus. The next one is going to be running, and the next one is going to be named sprinting. And those are all execution out pins. Alright, so what we're going to do here is we're going to drag in our Character Movement Component again, one of the benefits of us creating, in this case, a character macro library is we have access to all of the native character variables, including our Character Movement Component. We're going to drag this in our graph. We're going to get that. Now you'll notice something here when I drag this out here. And I just released, we can only get variables here inside of our macro library. And this goes for any of them. If I was to do this, was jumping and try to drag this in. We cannot set any variables here inside of our macro library. An important thing to note with a macro library, you can only get these variables, you cannot set them. But that's okay. Well, we're gonna be doing here is reaching inside of our Character Movement Component. And we're going to type in set max, walk, speed. Now, this variable lives inside of our Character Movement Component. And just to drive this home a little bit, I've got my ThirdPersonCharacter right here. If I select my character movement component, I have a max walk speed variable that lives inside of that Character Movement Component. Okay, so we're going to feed this a new speed. Like so. Then out of this I'm going to drag out and bring in a branch node. And then I'm going to drag out of here. And I have several comparison nodes that I want to bring in. So I'm gonna do a less than or equals to one. I'm going to drag out a here again, and I'm going to do a greater than, just greater than. Then I'm going to drag out one more time and I'm going to do a less than or equal to little loops less than or equal to or just less equal as it's called. For the values for these, I'm going to plug in 200 for this not plugin, I'm just going to hard code it. 200 for that. We're gonna do greater than 200 for this and 1,200 for this. And we are going to read, I'm going to read this all to you in just a moment. How we're going to be interpreting all this. In just a moment. I'm going to bring in another branch node holding down the B key left clicking. And I'm going to plug this true into our walking, the false I'm going to drag and so you hear the term, I'm going to drag them here and the false I'm going to drag into here. And again, I will interpret this all for you here in just a moment out of here. And I'm going to drag out here and bring it in and node, it's going to be an AND Boolean. And boolean right there. Plugging this into here. We're plugging this into here and this into here. Alright, Mr. Laundry, you went through that rather quickly. What does this all translate into? Alright, so this is how it's gonna work. We're gonna feed a new speed into this macro. So we can alter, set our characters max movement speed. If it is less than or equal to 200, if that is true, we're going to output walking. So we're going to continue to extend out of our macro and do something when we detect that we are walking. Now, if we detect that we are going at a speed greater than 200 and less than or equal to this value right here, 1,200. If that is true, then we're going to be considered to be running. However, if this turns out to be false, then we're going to be considered sprinting, meaning we're going some speed greater than 1,200. Now let's go ahead and make use of this macro inside of our ThirdPersonCharacter Blueprint. A quick note here, there's no need to compile here. You don't need to compile inside of a macro library. In fact, it's grayed out, but we can go ahead and save this. And over in our bp ThirdPersonCharacter, we can go ahead and right-click on this. And we can do a search for change max speed. And there it is. There's our macro that we just created inside of our macro library. And let's create our scripts to make use of this. So we're going to add an input key at the very front of this. I've been using the five key and I've been deleting it between videos. It looks like I don't have it anywhere in my graph right now, let's do the five Kishore five input. So what we're gonna do here is upon pressing the five key, we're going to change our characters max, movement, speed. What do we want to change it to? Well, let's right-click in some empty space and I'm going to do random float in range. So we can plug this guy into our new speed. So every time we press the five key, we can choose a value, and I'm going to choose a value, 1-2 thousand. So every time you press the five key is gonna give us some value within that range. When we release this key, we're going to want to set our character's movement speed back to what it normally is. So if we drag and drop our Character Movement Component into our graph and we see our characters max walk speed right now it's 500. So if we drag out here, we can do set max walk speed. So when we release this, we're going to set our max walk speed back to 500. So pressing is going to set it to that new value releasing it's going to set it back. And all we're gonna do out of each of these, we could do something further. I mean, I could play a particle effect or whatever. I'm just going to print a string out to the screen. So we're going to do several prints. Strings is first of all, it's just going to say walking and hitting Control C, Control V. Control V. You can guess what I'm going to plug into each of these fields. This is going to say running. And this one is going to say sprinting. Sprint, sprint ing. Not that it matters all that much. Let's compile this. Let's save, and let's go ahead and play this setting, our debug object, huge or third-person character, so that we can see this script firing off over on the left-hand side here. Alright, So I'm just walking, walking, walking. As I press the five key, look in the upper left below the word Superhero. So five, running. Sending it back to five. Running doesn't seem all that much faster. Five, sprinting. Five sprinting. Now running does have the greatest range, 200-1200. I wanted to get it walking, so they're sprinting, pressing F5 again and running. Again. Running could be pretty close to sprinting. Sprinting, get some running now it's gotta be barely above 200. Running, running. Let's get a walking in here. I'm going to keep going until I get to walking. There we go walking. So we can see that that macro is indeed working. Alright, now it is important to note here that we were able to find and use this macro here inside of our third-person character because both are ThirdPersonCharacter and our macro library share the same parent class. If obviously go to our Level Blueprint. Let's open up our Level Blueprint here. And even if I do have some reference to our character here, let's just do an event begin play for sure. Even begin play. And we were to get player character. And then, you know, Cast to ThirdPersonCharacter, something like this. And we were to try to find that change max speed dragged out of here, changed Max. You cannot find that macro here inside of your Level Blueprint. You cannot just right-click in some empty space and find change max speed because this doesn't have any parent class, because this is a Level Blueprint, but even inside of another class, but a blueprint like our example pickup, this has the parent class of actors. So if I was to right-click in here and do change max speed, I cannot find it inside of here either. So that's an important thing to note because this macro was created inside of a macro library with the parent class of character. We can only find and use this in any other blueprints that share that same parent class. So given that nuance behind a macro library, needing to define a parent class, what would be the benefits of using a macro library? Well, consider maybe you have a fighting game and you have a whole host of characters that you can play as maybe you would want to have some macros that all characters could share and use. Something like picking between a random tante or maybe an outfit change, that kind of thing. I mean, right here, all I'm doing is I'm picking a random float in range, and then I'm deciding if I'm walking, running, or sprinting. Maybe we could feed this a random integer in based on the integer that is picked. We could play a random taught something of that nature. Now, if you want to get around that limitation of the macro library, there is a little bit of a hack here that you can do to make sure that your macros are available anywhere. And that is to ensure that your parent class for your macro library is of the object class. Now to drive home that point, let me just right-click it some empty space here and I'm going to bring in, say, a gate node. And the reason I'm doing this is so that I can double-click on this and quickly take me to our standard macros library. Just browsing to this, we can find where this is in our content browser. It is in the engine Content Editor blueprint resources folder. Once again, to see this, you can make sure that you have show engine content on. And if we go to our standard macros library, we can see that our parent class here is object. Now, going back to our content browser here, if I was to right-click it some empty spaces, if we were going to create a new macro library, blueprints, blueprint macro library. Check this out right down here in the all classes section. You can see that every other class inherits from object. So if you were to make a standard macro library that has the parent class of object, any other class is going to be able to use it. Hence, why you can find nodes like gate node in any other blueprint. Alright guys, is going to do it all for this one. We will see you in the next video. 70. Array: Welcome back everyone. In this section of the course, we're going to be returning to the topic of variables because up until this point in the course, we've only talked about a single variable container. And in particular, what we're talking about here is with a variable type selected, you have over on the right-hand side here the ability to choose the container type. We've only created single variables. We have not talked about arrays, Sets, or maps. So that's what this section of the course is all about, talking about these different variable container types. In particular, for this course, we're gonna be learning what an array is. We're going to show how to create a few and then give an example of how they can be used. So firstly, what is an array? An array is a variable container that can store a collection of values of some data type. Now more practical terms in array is a list of similar things. It could be an array of float values, it could be an array of texts, of sounds, of objects, etc. Now, each entry into the list has an associated integer index or what is known as a key associated with it. Meaning we can look up a given entry in the list if we want or need to. Alright, here I am inside of my ThirdPersonCharacter Blueprint. So let's create our very first array. And we're going to start off by coming down to the My Blueprint panel. We're going to create a new variable, clicking this plus button, I'm going to call this one catch phrases. And the type here is going to be a text variable. And then over in the Details panel we can set the container type, which I'm going to click this drop-down and choose an array. Now I need to compile my blueprint. And when I do, it's going to allow me to add X number of items to my list. Remember, at array is essentially a list and you get to determine how many items exists in that list. I'm going to click this Plus button right down here, three times 12.3. And my first catch phrase is gonna be, hey, hey. My second one is going to be high diddley bow. And my next one is going to be released the hounds. Now note that array variables or container types rather are designated by this three-by-three colored grids show that they are not standard single variables. And you can see that represented not only over here but down in your My Blueprint panel under the variable section, you see that three-by-three waffle icon that indicates that that variable is an array, an array of texts variables. Now, something worth mentioning here is you can reorder your values within this array by clicking right about here and dragging one above, or dragging down below, like so. Also over on the right-hand side here you have the option if you click on this little drop-down arrow, insert, delete, or duplicate an entry. So I'm going to insert just to show that off and then let's quickly delete that. Alright, now let's go ahead and make use of this array. So I'm going to bring in an event key here. Right-click. I'm going to do the five key. And then what I'm gonna do is I'm going to bring in my catchphrases. So I want to get to, so I'm going to hold down the Control key, left-click and drag. That'll give me a getter. And then out of this, I want to drag out here and type in gets, I want to get a reference here. Sorry, rather, I want to get a copy. And what do I want to get out of this? Well, I get to choose which entry in this array, 01 or two. And again, this is a zero-based list. It's going to start off counting at zero which one of these entries I would like to return. So whatever number I type in here that will correspond with the entry that I want to return. And I'm going to choose something at random here. So I'm going to drag backwards off of this and type in random integer in a range. And I'll say 0-2, because that is my range, 0-2. If we were to go above to say we put it in a range 0-3 and we return the number three, we would just get a null result and no arrow would be thrown. We just get a null result. I'm going to drag out here, type in print text. And we're going to plug this in here. So let's quickly give this a play. Let me compile this, make sure it's looking all good. And I click on my play options here. I don't want to simulate, I'm on a plane and new editor window. I'm going to set this as my debug objects so that we can see this script firing off. And not to OBS. Here we go. When I press the five key. Hi diddly. Hello. Hi diddly Hill, really sounds. You can see as I'm spam the five key, I'm getting one of those different options at random. Now check this out. We currently have three catchphrases in our array. However, again, this is a variable. We don't have to keep these three elements right here. We could swap them out. Let's try something like this. I'm going to bring in a four key. For inputs. We do for keyboard, There's my four key. What I'm gonna do this is I'm going to set my catchphrase. I'm going to hold down the Alt key, left-click and drag. We're going to put this on this pin to bring in a setter. And what I'm going to do off of this is dragged backwards and type in make array. So this node, I'm going to add three pins. What I'm going to do is I'm going to hard set what are the three elements going to be in this race? I'm going to put in dough. And in my second entry here I'm going to put it in Smithers. And the third one is gonna be the Nelson months. Haha. So check out what we've got going on here. Let me just kinda shrink this a little bit, tuck it up here. Clicking play setting, this might do already have that as my debug object. That's all well and good. So if I start off pressing the five key and I'll just spam it, you'll see the original entries in my array. Now I'm going to press the F4 key and it's going to overwrite those entries. So I'm just going to press it one time. Watch this fire off, booms. That did fire off. So now when I press the five key, the entries, the elements in this array have been changed out. So it will read as thus the new entries that I've just put in over here, I swapped out, I change the contents of that array. Alright, let's try creating a couple other arrays. So let's create one more here in the My Blueprint panel under variables, clicking this plus button, I'll call this my sound array. Now I'm going to change out the variable type here to be sound wave files, sound wave. So under object types sound wave, we want to choose object reference. It is already of the array variable container types. So that's all well and good. And I'm going to create one more variable here, clicking the plus button. And this one is going to be my actor array. And I'm going to change the type right here to be of the actor variety under object types, actor the object reference. Okay, now I'm going to compile both of these. And for my sound array, I'm going to hard input three of these, so 12.3. And here I can slot in some sounds. I'll go with any three. I've got double window close any three we will do this is all just e.g. sake. Var underscore close enough for my third one, I'm simply going to go floating UI close. So you can imagine, say I had an array of car horn noises. You want to awesome key on your keyboard is gonna make your car horn go off. These can be three different variations to that sound. Maybe you just want to pick one at random. Okay, So that's all well and good enough for my actual array. I'm going to do 12.3. However, I am going to leave these as empty right now. I'm going to compile this and save one more thing. I forgot to check this box instance editable, so make sure you check this as well. Go ahead and compile and save one more time. What I'm gonna do is once I play this game, I'm going to set which objects are going to be a part of this actor array. So note that this array currently this list is empty. So what I'm gonna do is go back to my level here. I'm going to add three objects. Doesn't really matter. I'll just do a cube, a sphere, and a cylinder. Like so. Okay, got those three set in here. Let's go back to our third-person character. I'm just going to swap out our arrays here, just kinda modify our scripts here a little bit. So here under catchphrases, we're gonna get rid of these four or five key. I'm going to bring in my sound array holding down Control, left-click and drag. We're going to drag out a here type in, gets, we want to get a copy, plug these in. So actually I don't want to print text here. I want to play a sound. Play sound. Sorry, rather, let's drag out of here and type in play sound 2D, like so. And when I press my four key, delete these out right here, I'm going to grab my actor, raise a holding down Control key. Left-click in bringing a reference to that end, I'm going to drag out of this type in gets, we're going to get a reference. Copy, rather not a reference. I always screw those up. I will do a random integer in range for this. So Control C, control V. Now what I'm gonna do here is we're going to drag off this and we're just going to destroy an actor. So when I press the four key, I'm going to destroy one of these now again, this is currently an empty array. So let's compile this. That script is going to be looking good here. I'm going to go ahead and jump into my level. We're not gonna get to see these scripts firing off. But if you need to come back here and reference these, that's all well and good. Okay, here we go. Alright, now with my character in my level, I can see him populated here in the outliner. I'm going to go ahead and select my ThirdPersonCharacter. And now I need to set the three elements of my actor array. So I'm gonna do a search for it here with my ThirdPersonCharacter selected. Do a search for actor array. And note that I've gotten nothing set in here yet. So I'm going to click these drop-down arrows, and I'm going to set them to be the cube, cylinder and sphere respectively. So cube cylinder for the next one. Sphere is somewhere in here. There is a sphere. Okay? And let me bring up my play window once again. Alright, so pressing that five key firstly, we're going to hear some sounds. All well and good. Alright, and now my four key watches, these disappear when they are selected. Squares are cylinders gone? I press the F4 key again, nothing disappear too, must have selected that element again. Sphere gone, and finally, square is gone. So you can see those various arrays working. Now the reason I'm getting this error is because it was trying to destroy a few actors. There is I was pressing my four key here. It was trying to pick a random integer and range, just trying to pick one of these three. Now the first one is destroyed was the cylinder, which I believe was elements too. I could be wrong on that. Once that's destroyed and it picks that same number again, it's going to throw that error when I stopped playing saying like, Hey, I'm trying to destroy you actor, but you've already been destroyed. But again, this is all for academic purposes. Alright, just a little bit more here to go. Before we wrap this up, I wanted to point out that for any array, and let's bring in our catchphrases here. Any of these will have the same options available to you if you drank out of this and come under the utilities section, utilities array, you have a bevy of different options that you can use to modify to edit your array. You can add to it. You can drag out of this and type in clear. You can clear your array. So we could add another element to our array here. This one would clear the array entirely. You can append the array that is to take one array of catchphrases. Maybe you have a second ray of catchphrases and you could combine them. You could, I began at random. You could pick out a random entry from your array and also return the index. So that would pick out a random entry that would return the index. So with any array you have a bevy of options that you can play around with to modify that array in some way, shape, or form. And again, you can find those under here, utilities array. You've got a lot more of them available to you as well. Alright, thanks to know before we wrap this up, values within an array, once again, they are zero-based index values, meaning that the first index is zero, not one. Arrays are a great way to store a list of these same type of data. Where would you use this? Well, I had an array of fruits that I spawn into a Pac-Man style game that I created in Unreal while back. Another thing to note about arrays is you can grab a specific entry from a list by getting a copy, like we're doing here. Or you can get air or random entry like we're doing here. So if you want to get a specific copy, you can just break this wire and say, Hey, I want element zero. The random approach would do something like that. Now later when we talk about flow control, nodes will show how to look through every entry in the array using a for or a while loop in order to do something to every entry in the list or to drive some logic based upon while given, while a given entry in the list is found. Right guys, that is going to do it all for this one. We will see you in the next video. 71. Set: Welcome. In this video, our goal is to learn what a set variable container is. Show how to create one, and then give an example of how they can be used. So first of all, let's define what a set even is. Well, a set is like an array in that it is a variable container that can store a collection of values of the same datatype. Over here in my variable types. Over to the right, I've got different container types, single array set or map. So we're talking set in this video, e.g. we could have a set of hidden treasures you're asked to find in a level collection of hidden treasures. Now, one of the unique things about a set is all entries within a set container must be unique, no duplicates. We'll get to some more of the differences between arrays and sets in just a little bit here, I'm going to be creating a couple of variables here within my Level Blueprint. But for this example, you could do this in your ThirdPersonCharacter as well. You forgot how to open up your Level Blueprint right there. Open Level Blueprint. And let's come under our My Blueprint panel and create a couple of variables. Clicking this plus button. Once, I'm going to create one called hidden treasures, all, I'm going to change the type here to be a name. We're going to punch in some names for some hidden treasures. And then over in the Details panel, I'm going to change the container type here from single to set. Next, I'm going to right-click on this and I'm going to duplicate it. You can see the hotkey for that control plus D. And this is gonna be called hidden treasures. Found. And then once I compile, I can add some entries here, some different set elements. So let's start with hidden treasures all. I'm going to click this plus button once. And if you tried to click on it a second time, it's going to say you can't add another one until you add some, an entry here. So I'm going to call this gold statue. Going to click the plus button again, I will call this one necklace. The reason you can't add another one when it says none is because it would try to create a duplicate entry that would also say none. So remember, sets cannot have duplicates. Clicking this plus button again. We'll call this ancient pottery. Pottery. Pottery. Sure. Ancient pottery. Clicking the plus button again, we're going to call this one scroll of wisdom. And clicking the plus button again, we're going to call this one warrior crest. Alright, so now I'm going to set some hidden treasures found here. And actually you know what? I want to actually have some duplicate entries here. So I'm gonna delete this one out. And I'll tell you why we're going to delete this out to ensure that we have our names spelled exactly the same. So I'm going to right-click on this. We're going to duplicate this. Once again. I call this found, and I'm going to compile this in. Once I compile it, I can see all those same entries. Let's just delete a few of mine here, so I'll delete the necklace by clicking right here. Delete will keep gold statue. Let's keep scroll of wisdom as well. It doesn't, doesn't really matter which ones we keep, but just keep a couple of them right there. Now, note, certain variable types cannot use sets. If I was to select my, say, Boolean variable here and come over to the container types. I can't set a set for this. I can also do it for a text variable tech, or a rotator or a transform. All the other ones you can set as a set container type. Just thought I would throw that in here as well. Now, if I drag out a reference to one of my sets here and then get it dragged out of it, releases some empty space underneath the utilities set section. You see that I have a whole bunch of different functions available to me to manipulate the data in some way, shape, or form a lot of functions specific to sets. What I'm gonna do here is fast-forward the video quickly after I add these, and just quickly talk about some of the different options available to you. Alright, and here's a bunch of those functions that I was just talking about that are specific to set. You can add an element to it. You can remove an element to it. You have some comparisons between two different sets, that sort of thing. Now one thing that's worth noting here, if you were just to right-click and some empty space like I did with this node right here doing a search for a union node. It has these great input and output pins. These are wildcard inputs and outputs, meaning that whatever datatype gets hooked up to an input or output first, that's the datatype, the rest of the input or output take on. And just to demonstrate this, these are gray right now if I was to plug in this to say this top one, you can see they all turn purple to represent the name variable type. There. To delete that out and put one on the output side, it's going to change the input side to that same color, that same type as well. Alright, here to my Level Blueprint, I have started creating a script showing off a practical example of how sets can be used in a game. So when I press the three key, what I'm gonna be doing is finding out the difference between two different sets. My top set is going to contain all the treasures say that I need to find in a given level. My bottom set is going to give me the treasures that I've found so far. What this difference note is going to do is it's going to output all of the ones. I have not found the difference between one set and another. So I can't just drag out of here and type in print string. So I can't, this is not going to print out the names of all of the set items that are currently not found. So what I need to do here is dragged out of here. This will give me the resulting treasure is not found. And I'm going to type into two array. What this will allow me to do is output an array of all these different set items. The difference between these two. And with this, I can drag out of here and bring in a for each loop. Now we have not talked yet about flow control nodes that's going to become in the next section. But what this flow control node is going to allow me to do is look through each item in this array, each item in this list, and then output those to the screen here. And it's going to be outputting those to the screen of via a print string. So for each item in that array, we're going to take that and convert that name to a string so that we can output. Let's compile here, make sure our script looks good. Save it. We're going to play. You can set your debug object to your test map there if you haven't already done so. And now if I press that three key, you can see those are the three items I have yet to find. I'm just spamming with three key. That's the difference between my all set and my found sets. Alright, so now let's try something else here. I'm going to bring in keyboard VY, the V key, I don't know. And with this, I'm going to bring in a reference to my hidden treasures found. I'm going to drag off of here and I'm going to type in AD. Make sure you choose the add function under these set category here. And we're going to add necklace. We're going to say we've found the necklace now. So we're going to add that to our list of bound treasurer. So essentially this would be gold, statue, scroll of wisdom and then necklace. So Compile, Save. Now when I play, when I press the three key, it's going to say, hey, you're missing those three, but now I'm going to press the V key. We're going to say, yep, we found the necklace now, V key. Okay, So that's been added to my list of thousand. Now when I press the three key, it's going to say those are your two missing. We have found the necklace. Alright, let's finish off this video talking about some of the similarities and differences between arrays and sets, starting with some similarities. Well, both arrays and sets store a collection of values of the same type. Both allow you to add and remove elements, and you've seen me do that over the course of the last two videos. As for differences, the order of elements is difference in arrays you have a ordered list. Sets are considered to be unordered. Now, as for uniqueness of elements, arrays can have duplicate items. Sets cannot have duplicates, and that is one of the key differences between arrays and sets. Sets cannot have duplicates. Arrays can, as for functional differences, arrays can look up and get an individual element via an index lookup because they are ordered. And just to show that off quickly, I've got an array of pickup actors here. If I drag and drop that and get that, I can drag out of here and gets, I can get an individual item within that array, any number here, again, starting with the zero list, I currently have nothing in this array. But yeah, you can get a given elements specified by an index. Now as for sets, they cannot look up or get an individual element. However, sets are great at running comparisons between lists, like you just saw me do with these hidden treasures, all lists and my hidden treasures, boundless set or an array, what should you go with? Well, I would go with a set if the order is not at all important. Uniqueness of elements is a requirement. On the other hand, go with an array if the order is important, but duplicate elements, not a big deal there possible within that. Now sets also have the benefit of their little bit more performance than arrays. So that may be something to keep in mind as well. But again, arrays are great for if you need to look up in individual item within that list. Sets are great if you need to compare one set versus another set, that kind of thing. Alright guys, that's gonna do, offer this video. See you in the next one. 72. Map: Welcome. In this video, our goal is to explore what map variable containers are, how to create them, and how we can use one in a gaming project. Now, seeing is going to be believing this one is going to be easier demonstrated than talked about. So we're going to jump right into creating one. Now, we're gonna be creating this map variable container inside our bp player controller. This is an asset that we created during our event. Begin cursor over video. If you want to go back and review that when you can. If you don't know how to create a player controller, I'm gonna give you a quick primer, a quick refresher here. You do so by right-clicking, going under Blueprint class, you want to create a player controller. And then you would name it thusly something like bp player controller. But then after you do that, you have to associate that as you're active player controller for the project that you are working within. And you can do that in your settings. Project Settings under maps and modes. Right here is where you can slot in that player controller class. Now, we're going to have some videos later on the course where we talked specifically about these blueprints known as Framework blueprints. But there's a specific reason why I want to show off this map variable container using a bp player controller, my player controller blueprint right here. And that is because a player controller blueprint is associated with, in our case, are ThirdPersonCharacter. Now, in a real game, your character could die and when they get respond, all the variables inside of that player character blueprint would be reset back to their default values. Now, something like in inventory variable, where it holds the name of an item and how many you have of that item would be better off stored in a player controller blueprint because if your character dies, your character dies in those variables get reset in a player controller that stays alive, so to speak, it stays persistent throughout your gameplay session. Thus, if your character did die, those values would not get wiped out inside of your player controller. Alright, so with their player controller created and set inside of your project settings under maps and modes. Player controller class. Let's dive inside of here. And if you get this little window that says, Hey, this is only a data, only blueprint. We can click right here to open the full blueprint editor and see what we want to see. Alright, first thing to do here is to create a variable. Now, actually before I do that, I want to clear out all these inherited variables just to simplify this section of the My Blueprint panel, these are all inherited from our parent class of the player controller variety. So I can Hi these out by clicking on this gear icon. Unchecking show inherited variables and that'll just simplify that a little bit. So let's go ahead and add our desired variable here. I'm going to name this inventory because that is a good thing to store within a player controller blueprint. Once again, a player character can die and respond and die and response variables within a player controller will persist throughout your entire play session, the player controller does not die. Think of it as like the puppet strings controlling the puppet that can get knocked off the string again and again. Alright, with this selected over in the Details panel, we're going to change our variable type here, boolean to string, and then our variable container from a single to a map. Now that enables me to add a secondary datatype here. So I want to have a string for the names of my inventory items. And then I'm going to have an integer to tell how many of that given item I have. So I could have things like health potion, three of those, man a potion three of those leather helmet, one wouldn't shield one, et cetera, et cetera. Now to add elements to this variable type, I'm going to click Compile here. And we can see over in our Details panel, we can add elements. I'm going to click this plus button once. If I try clicking it again, it's going to tell me, nope, you can't do that. Now with a map variable. It is a container that stores a collection of key value pairs whereby the keys and values can be of different datatypes. Once again, in this case, my key is going to be the string. The name of my inventory item keys must be unique. So for my first one here, I'm going to call this health potion. And I'll say. I've got three of these by default. So health potion is going to be my key, and over here is going to be my value represented by an integer. These do not have to be unique. These can be the same, and I'll represent that here by adding another element here. So the keys, in my case, the strings, needs to be unique. I'm going to have this be man, a potion. And I'll set three is a default value for that. And let's just add a couple more here just for the fun of it. I'll add sure. Leather helmets. We've got one of those. And clicking plus here, I've got a wooden shield and I've got one of those. Alright, now I've got my collection of key value pairs all within this map container. Now, maps are great because they support efficient lookups and retrieval of these values with the use of these associated keys. Alright, now I want to create one more variable here, and this will come into play a little bit down the road. So I'm going to click this Plus button and I'm going to name this item to use. And I want to have this be of the string variable type. Before I actually set this as a string variable type, I'm going to temporarily set this to a Boolean. Now something to note here is that you cannot have certain variables as maps. So if I was to try to say, Hey, variable type Boolean, I want to have you within a map. You can't do it. So certain variable types cannot use maps. They include Boolean, texts, rotator, and transform variables. So I thought I would throw that out there right now. Those cannot be, cannot use the map variable container. Alright, now I actually do want to change this datatype here from boolean to a string. And we're going to compile this so we can set a default value. And this is going to be manna ocean. So as the name suggests, this is going to be our item to use a man of potion that will come into play down the road here. Right next, we want to create a new actor class blueprints. So come on back to your content browser. I'm going to put this under the scripting Blueprints folder. We're gonna put it inside of there. So I'm going to right-click in some empty space, we're going to create a new blueprint class. It's going to be of the actor variety and we're going to name this BP underscore manner potion. And then we're going to double-click on this guy to open it up. And firstly, we're going to add a couple of components and then set some details. So the first component I want to add is a sphere components. Not this type of a sphere, but rather a sphere collider, sphere collision. That's what I'm looking for. And I'm going to set the sphere radius over here to be 70. And then with your spear components selected inside of this are attached to this rather, I'm going to add a cylinder. And so I'm just going to type in cylinder and we'll find a basic shapes cylinder. And I do have some settings I want to set for this. I'm going to change the scale to be unlocked, so unlock that and we're going to set that to be 0.25, 0.2, 5.0, 0.5. Then I'm going to tilt this. We're going to rotate it a little bit. So right here in the wires rotating is that that to negative 30. And I'm also going to make this material be something like what do I have vertex, something red. Let's go with that. Now it looks kind of man alike. Sure. Next we're going to add a variable inside of our bp Blueprint. So click under this plus button for the variables section. We're going to call this item to use as well. We're going to change the type here to a string. We're going to compile so that we can set a default value. And this time I'm going to type in Amana potion. I'm gonna do this in lowercase, but I'm only doing this to have this be different than how we named this the default value inside of our bp player controller. There we use upper casing for the beginnings of our manna and potion words just to show that we can, because casings not going to matter for our map here. So let's go ahead and compile and save this right away. Now, before we go any further here, I wanted to show off over in our bp player controller that for our map variable here I'm going to hold down Control left-click and drag into our event graph. If we drag off of this release, if I come under Utilities map, we have access to a whole host of functions that can manipulate our map data in some way. In a lot of ways that's similar to our arrays and set container types. And I'm just going to add a few of them here. So I'm going to bring in an ad one this allows us to add to our map. Dragging off of this, there's also another one to find it given item. Drag off of this, I can remove an element from our map dragon off of this again, I can find one that contains, once again, I can drag out. I can do search for just the keys that exist within this map, meaning these guys, I can drag off of this and I could bring in a function that finds just the values of this map. So there's a lot of different functions can manipulate or give you information about your map here. Alright, Next we're going to head back to our bp menopause so that we can add some script to add to our inventory here we're going to add to our Amanda potion inventory when we pick up a man a potion. So coming back in our BPMN of motion, we want to do something when we are overlapping this sphere. So head to your event graph, we're going to right-click on our sphere collider. We're going to add an event for when we begin overlapping that. And we only want something to happen when our other actors that overlaps this sphere is the ThirdPersonCharacter. So releasing we're gonna do a search for Cast to ThirdPersonCharacter. And if it is a ThirdPersonCharacter, we can extend our script here. Next, what we wanna do is we want to talk to our inventory variable here inside of our bp player controller. So how can we do that? Well, back here inside of our bp man of motion, I'm going to right-click and some empty space and type in get player controller. And so a mistake that many make is they think that, well now I've got this get player controller function. I can just drag out of here and do a search for inventory to find that variable. And no, you can't, because we need to find out which player controller we want to talk to you. Project could have many player controllers. So this is the starter to identify which player controller we want to talk to. So dragging off of here, we can cast to our player controller, our bp player controller in order to access the information inside of it. Now I'm going to simplify this node here a little bit. I've got some execution pins right here and right here. If I right-click on this node, I can simplify this node down to what is known as a pure cast. I know that this is not going to fail because I have a single-player project. I know that I've set my bp player controller as the player controller that my project is using here in my project settings. So in this particular instance, it is okay for me to not check if I have succeeded in this caste or not. I know that it is going to succeed. I'm going to right-click convert to pure cast. It's going to eliminate those execution pins, but I can still reach inside of it like so. And access my inventory, which is pretty sweet. So there is my map. Next one I wanna do is I want to grab out of here and do a search for find. And what this node allows me to do is find a given key, given value, given an input key. So the key that I want to search for here is man a potion. So I'm going to drag and drop this onto my input. That's the key that I'm going to be looking up within this map. And it's going to output the value of this. But I want to increment this. I want to increment this every time we overlapped this. So we're going to be starting off with three Amanda potions. When I overlap this, I want you to simply increment this amount. So I'm going to drag off of here. This will spit out my value of three. Dragging off of this, I'm going to type in increments. So this node right here is automatically going to increment this 3-4. In this case. I'm going to wire this through here like so. But it's not enough to increment this. I still need to add this all back to my map here. So what I'm gonna do is drag out of my inventory once again, type in ad, come under Utilities map, add. So I'm going to go like this. We want to add to our manna potions. And what do we want to add that amount are updated. Amount is going to be plugged in right down here. So that's going to set a new amount for our manna potions. And then what I'm gonna do is drag out of here. We want to print this out to the screen so that we can actually see this working. And I'm going to drag backwards off of this type in, append in. We are going to print some texts out to the screen. So the first thing we're going to print out is the name of the item, in this case a man, a potion. Then I'm going to put in a space equals space. And then the third thing I want to include here is the amounts are updated amounts. If I drag this on down from the output of our increments, we can output that amount. So this will read as man a potion equals the updated amount. And then last but not least, we want to destroy this actor. So dragging out of here, we're going to type in Destroy Actor. It. Let's compile the scripts and let's go ahead and save. Now. This is all well and good, but we have not added any man apportions to our level yet. So let's go ahead and do that quick by jumping back to our level tab. Drag-and-drop just a few of these out here like this, and drag, and drag. And here we go. Once again, remember that we're starting at three man a potion. So look up in the upper left here, and we now have 45.6. I would say that that is working just fine. Now, in the interest of time, we're going to head back to our bp player controller where I have set up some script to decrement from our inventory. This is much the same setup that I have in my man, a potion blueprint. However, the only difference here is I am decrementing from our inventory as opposed to incrementing it. Once again, I am using my key here, my Amana potion key, although I'm using a capital M, a capital P, It's still talking to this man, a potion key right here. So that's the one I'm finding. And then I'm simply decrementing from it and then adding that decremented a mountain back to my updated inventory amounts. So we're using the key to adjust the value. So just show this off. I've got this BP controller set as my debug object here. So I'm starting off with three 456. And I should have some red font to decrement this, I'm going to press 7543, et cetera, et cetera. So there you have it. A map variable container for a key, value pairs. Look it up by the key, and then you can increment or decrement the value. It's great for something like inventory, such as this. Alright guys, that is going to do to offer this one. We will see you in the next one. 73. Enum: Welcome. In this video, our goal is to learn about enums, which is short for an enumeration. This is another type of lists we can create and use to help drive logic in our blueprint scripts. It's actually one of my favorite variables to create and use. So what is an enumeration? Enumeration is a datatype consisting of a set of named values. It is a listing of labels, so to speak. Now this is something that we're going to create here in our content browser. And then we're gonna make use of it inside of our ThirdPersonCharacter Blueprint. So come under your scripting Blueprints folder, this is going to be a sensible place to create an enumeration. And if we right-click and some empty space, we've got this blueprints category. And in our little fly-out menu, we have the ability to create an enumeration, it says in the tool tip, and enumeration is a list of named values. Go ahead and click on this, and we're going to give this a name right away. I'm going to call this E underscore health status. Now I always like to name my creative enumerations with E underscore. But again, you can use a naming convention of your choice. And then I'm going to double-click on this to open it up. Now inside of here we're going to click on this plus add enumerator button once, twice, three times to enable us to add some labels inside of here that we can make use of. So I'm going to overwrite each of these. First one's gonna be called Super. Second one is going to be called, okay, you can make these labels, what's your wants? And my third one here is gonna be called hurt badly. So these are essentially going to be my three distinct health status is that I'm going to use to drive some logic within my third-person character blueprint. I'm gonna go ahead and save this and then I can close this out, don't need it anymore. And I'm gonna be jumping into my ThirdPersonCharacter Blueprint. If you forgot where that is under the third-person Blueprints folder, Double-click on that guy to open it up. Once inside of here, we're going to create a variable. So I'll create a variable by simply clicking on this plus Add button. I like to do it in a variety of ways to show off different ways of creating variables. And I'm going to call this E underscore health status. I'll name this the exact same as I named my enumeration. I'm going to hit Enter here. Now over in the Details panel, I'm going to change the variable type. Now, while I named this the exact same as my enumeration I just created, I could have named this anything I wanted to. However, I want to map this to coming under variable type. My E underscore health, whoops, E underscore health status enumeration. There it is, right there. So I am telling this variable that I'm creating, that I want to be of this type. Now once I click Compile here, I can see that I can change my health status default value to be super, okay or badly. And because this is a variable, I can change it. I can change it from super two, okay, or badly, and then use that status to drive some logic. Alright, so let's go about creating our initial bit of script here. I'm going to start off by creating a custom events. I'm going to right-click in some empty space, type in custom, we're going to add a custom event that is an event that we get to name and call it when and where we want to. And I'm going to zoom up here because I'm very far away. I'm going to call this updates health status. And then I'm going to bring in my enumeration variable here, holding down Control, left clicking and dragging. And what we can do with this guy is we can drag out of this and bring in a switch node. If I just begin to type in switch, this brings in a switch node that's going to allow me to switch based on the value of this enumeration. So here we go, switch on eHealth status. You can see the output pins right here, say super, okay, or hurt badly. Those are the exact labels that I have here inside of this enumeration, super okay. Or her badly, if I plugged in a different enumeration here, it would say switch on whatever that was. And it would have output pins corresponding to whatever labels were inside of that enumeration. Now this is great because depending on the value of this variable, it's going to fire out of different pins here. And what this will allow us to do is adjusted something, in this case about our character. What I'm gonna do is I'm going to adjust our character's movement speed based upon our health status, whether it is super okay or hurt badly. So I'm going to bring in my character movement component. Drag and drop it in here. Inside of my character movement component, I have this parameter called max walk speed. That's what's controlling how fast my character can move about the level I'm going to drag out of here and type in max walk speed. I want to be able to set my max walk speed. And I'm going to duplicate this Control C, Control V, control V. And I can plug this same Character Movement Component into all three. It doesn't matter if you have one of these. Or I could drag and drop my character moving components separately. I could have three of these and plug these separately into each of the targets, doesn't matter how you go about doing it. I'm gonna go like this, like this, and like this, let me just double-click on that to bring in a reroute node. And now I'm going to hard set my maximum walk speed based on if my health is super okay or hurt badly. If it's super, I'm going to say my health is going to allow me to walk at that maximum speed of 2000s? It is. Okay. I'll say it's back in my default of 500. If I'm hurt badly, I'm going to set it to 100. Right now. This is all well and good. But we're not calling this custom event anywhere. We need a way of calling this custom event of firing and off so that we can set our maximum wants to be based upon the value of this enum. We need a way now of switching this status of setting that. So that's what this next bit of script is gonna be. Alright, so I'm just going to start with an input event. I'll right-click and some empty space and I'll do a search for key board h because we're going to be using this input event to modify our health. And just a few adjustments we need to make here from things that we had changed in previous videos. Select your health float variable here we're going to change this back to 1.0, which is going to equal 100%. And then with our modified health function, this was created back in our functions section of the course when we were setting out to create a function, you can find out how we did that there. I'm going to make a few modifications to this as well because that section of the course, we modified our modified health function. I'm going to left-click and drag this on top of our press key right here. We had this given input as a passed by reference. We set that as a pass by reference. At some point, we're going to undo that. So with that node is selected in the input section, you can check that because we want to input something they're hard-coded, so to speak. And I also need to modify some stuff about this function. So I'm going to double-click on this to open it up. We've got this increment currently in there. I'm going to delete that out. So what we wanna do here is we've got health value that we're going to hard set right here back on our function. We're going to say every time we press this, we're going to decrement by zero points one, essentially 10% health. So that's gonna be our input going to double-click back on here. When that happens, we're going to subtract that or rather, we're going to add that to our current Health value. Even though that's a negative number, we're going to be adding that negative number to our current health. So we're going to be taking that negative 0.1. We're gonna be adding it to this value, which is going to equal 0.9 or 90%. And we're going to be outputting that. We're going to plug this in like this. We can still maintain that if this is greater than, if that's greater than zero, we're going to play a positive sound effect. If it is less than zero, we're going to play a negative sound effect. So that's all well and good. So make sure you're modifying health function is updated to look like that. I'm going to compile that right away. And back in our event graph, we're going to continue forward here. So we're going to say if our current health dragging out of here is greater than or equal to 0.75. Essentially, if we're, we've got three-quarters health or more, we're going to bring in any branch. That is true. We're going to set our health status here. So we're going to drag and drop this onto the true to bring any center. We're going to say if your health is three-quarters or greater, your health is now labeled as super. If that is false, we're going to bring in a another branch node. And we're going to do another evaluation here. So dragging out of here, we're gonna do a search for another greater than or equal to. So if it is gonna be greater than or equal to 0.26. So essentially 26%. If it's between these two ranges, 26 to 75%. If that's true, we're going to Control C and Control V on this guy a couple of times. So that's true. It's between this range 26.75% health. We're going to say your health is okay. And if it's false, you've got 25% or less health. We're going to say you are hurt. Badly. So that's all well and good. Obviously you see that this is not connected. And the reason that's not connected yet is because I want to sneak a print string in here. We're going to print strings so that we can actually see our current health spit out to the screen. So I'm going to convert this float into a string by plugging in like so. This is all well and good. However, whenever I'm switching the value of my health status variable here, we're making use of that appear to drive our maximum walk speed, but we're not calling customer advantages yet. So we actually have to finish off this bit as gripped by calling where this custom event to fire off. And we can do that by right-clicking in some empty space and typing in up dates. There it is, call function update health status. That is the exact name of this. We're going to call that. This is going to call for this custom event to fire off. We're then going to see okay. What is this health status been updated to? Super okay. Or her badly, Depending on what this is now set to, we're going to drive our character's movement speed. So let's compile this, makes sure that this is all hunky-dory. Forget to save it. I'm going to kinda tuck this away up here. We're going to play this that our debug object as our ThirdPersonCharacter and going to actually select my character moving components. So our default walk speed is going to start off at 500. Even though our health status by default is set to Super, we're not evaluating that yet to determine our maximum walk speed. So know that when I start moving around here, we're going to be moving around in our speed of 500's. So bringing that back on. Okay, you can see that I'm moving at about yay speed that is 500. I'm going to press my H key here. Now at 90% health, which is still super so my maximum walk speed is now going to be 2000. You can see me moving much faster. I'm going to press that H key again down to 80% health, 70% health. Now I'm in this okay range, so it's going to be set back down to 500. I'm still not okay range. So let me keep hitting the H key here to deplete my health now to 20% health. So now I'm hurt badly. So this is as fast as I can run, so to speak. That is a great use of an enumeration variable, determining your health status and then you can modify something about your character. So with that, what are some other uses you can think of? Well, let me just throw a few of them out there. What about you have an enumeration for different weapons. And depending on what weapon you have equipped, say a sword, a dagger, a bot, your movement speed, or even your available attacks could very well. What about any NUM for a different character classes? Warrior made, the, etc. and depending on what your character class is set to, certain weapons may or may not be available to you. Or what about an enumeration for different game states or events? Think of a game like Rocket League. You could have an enumeration for things like gameplay, goals scored, halftime, etc. And depending on what that enum is set to, you can make it so that different things are happening, such as showing a cutscene of a goal after a goal to score. Alright guys, that's gonna do to offer this video, we will see you in the next one. 74. Struct: Welcome. In this video, our goal is to learn and demonstrate the use of the very useful struct variable type. Now, this is a type of variable I create all the time in my own gaming projects. With a stroke, you can hold lots of data types that are related to the same thing within a single container. So let's go ahead and create a struct variable. Here in my scripting Blueprints folder, I'm going to right-click in some empty space in under the blueprints category in the little fly-out menu right underneath enumeration we have the structure also known as a struct variable type that we can create. So let's go ahead and create this. I'm going to name this STR, underscore spells. And then let's double-click on this guy to open it up. Alright, let's define what a struct variable even is. So a structure or a struct variable is essentially a variable that can hold lots of other variables inside of it. So essentially structs bundled data together. You can think of a struct as a giant storage locker with all the other boxes inside of that storage locker as individual variables. Each box inside the storage locker has its own contents. We can then go inside of the storage locker. In this case, our struct and take out the content of a box, in this case a variable as needed. Now, these strokes are great for holding variables that belong together in some way, shape, or form. So we've got a structure that we're going to be creating here called spells. Think about all the different spell properties that we could contain within 11 container of sorts. Here, we can add the name of the spell, the type of effect, the element that it's associated with. Maybe a man of cost, maybe a cool down. All those things are associated with a given spell and it would be great if we could contain them with all in one asset. Well, a stroke is a great place to do just that. Alright, leave this guy open for the time being. We're going to actually create two more enums assets first, before then coming back to our struct. So jump back to your main editor here in, in your scripting Blueprints folder. And let's create these two enums. Can right-click under the blueprints fly out menu. We're going to create an enumeration. This one I'm going to call E underscored spell elements. And then I can right-click on this right away and duplicate it. Control D will duplicate it as well, because it's also going to be an enum and I'm going to call this one E underscore spell types. And then we can double-click on each of these to open them up. So spell elements is open. Let's open up spell types as well. Alright, so under spell types, I'm going to add three entries here. We'll start off with spell types, 1234 spell types. I'm going to do direct damage in display named number two here is gonna be area of effects. The third one is going to be, we'll say healing. Sure. Let's go ahead and save this and then you can close that guy out. For spell elements, we're going to add three entries here, 123, and these will be none. Fire. And my next one here will be wind. And actually let's add one more. Let's do a water as well. Water. What tray? Potter. Let's go ahead and save that and then we can close that out. Now, those created, we need to jump back into our structure and we're going to add some new variables through this. Again, think of a struct as a container that can hold many variables. I'm just going to slide this over to the left here. So I'm going to add, let's see, 1234567 if I'm counting right, so let's add, I believe that's seven right there, 0 through six, **** equals seven. So my first one here, I'm going to call spell, name. And this will be of the texts variable type. Come on, texts, There we go. Second one here will be called spelled type. And this is where we can slot in the room that we just created. We can come under EU and find it down here. Although you can also search for it up there and there, you can see it's spelled types right here. Next one, we're going to call spell elements. And coming under our new category, we're going to set it to spell elements. Next one, we're going to call it manage cost. And whoops, that one did not take right up here. Let's go right back to there, to our spell elements here. Under enums spell elements. There we go, man of costs. We're going to set that to be an integer. We're gonna go cool down next. We'll set that to be a float. Next up we've got spell effect value that can be damaged or healing. That is what I'm referring to you by spell affect value. And it will set this to be an integer. And then last but not least, I've got casting S f x. So this would be the sound effect associated with casting a spell. So I'm going to set this to be a sound wave. Will do sound wave object reference and then something else. Just to show off here, we could set this to be an array, so we can actually have an array of different sound effects that we want to play. So that's kinda cool there. Alright, let's go ahead and save this out up. And I am seeing this warning up here. And if we mouse over it, it does say you cannot parse that value. You got to have something other than none in there. So let's expand this down and let's go ahead and add a couple of default values for this. We can add that default values by not under here. Here we've got this default values tab casting s effects plus, plus, and let me just set these to be. Let's go darker ball. What do we got Dr. Bowles windows open and we'll add data labels. Window close. Yeah, it doesn't really matter what you put there just have two different sound effects. So there is our structure. We're seeing that that is good to go. We can go ahead and click Save there. Alright, with this all done, jump on over to your ThirdPersonCharacter. And if you forgot where that guy is once again in your third person Blueprints folder, Double-click on that guy to open them up. So inside of here, we're going to make use of that struct. We need to create a variable. So come under your my blueprint variable section, click the Plus button, and we're going to call this one my spells. We're going to change the variable type down here from a Boolean to our struct, STR, underscore spells. And there we can find our structure. It's under the structure category. And if I come over into the details panel, I can make this in array of struct. So I'm gonna change the container type here from single to array. I need to compile right here. And when I do, I can add multiple entries to my spell array here. So let's click once and twice, and now check this out. As I expand these down, I've got access to change all of these different properties that I set up here in my struct. So here in my struct, I set up fields for entering in a text name. I entered in. I entered in fields for defining a spell type, spell element, man accost, all these things and here they are available to me now in my BP ThirdPersonCharacter. So let's set some of these. I'm going to say my first spell name here is going to be called fireball, spell type, direct damage, sure, spell element. I'm going to click this drop-down and look at all those options that I defined in my emu. Again, for our spell type here and spell element. We associated these with enums, those named list that we created earlier. So spell element, we'll set that to fire. Man Acosta will set them to be five, cooled down to 0.5 shore spell effect value 25. In this case, I'm meaning that as 25 as direct damage. For my next entry here, spell name. I'm going to set this to be cure. This bell type is going to be changed to healing spell elements. Well, it's not gonna be any of these elements are going to leave that as none. Managed costs will say ten, cool down 3.8, spell effect value 50. And then we can also set the sound effects for each of these. I forgot to do that for the fireball. So expand each of these out. Yes, you can go ahead and change out the sound effects so you can leave the defaults there for your fireball, but maybe for your curing sound effect, you want something different. So I'll try one called ship VR shape scale up. And I'll do the same for this other one ship, ship scale up as well. Those are in the engine content folders. By the way, if you forgot how to access your engine content folders, you can click on the little gear icon, show engine content. Alright, so all that is set up pretty sweet. Go ahead and compile that right away. Alright, so with all this setup, how do we make use of this struck variable? How do we reach into this strike variable and extract the information that we're looking to extract. Well, for starters here we have to add this to our graph. So I'm going to left-click and drag. I'm gonna get it. And this is returning an array because we have two elements in here, a fireball with all of these properties about it. And our index one here is our Q or spell. So we've got index 0, our firewall, and index one in our array, the curing spell. So we can drag onto this and type in gets, we can get a copy here. And depending on what value we input here, it's looking for an integer. We can input either 0 to return our fireball index 0, or we could input one to return our curious belt That's index one. So that's how that works. Then what we wanna do here is right-click on this pin. If I right-click on it, I can split the Struct Pin. Now watch how this node transforms when I do this. Bam. Now I've still got this integer inputs, so I can still define, do I want to be looking up index is 0 here, my fireball or index one here for cure. But now I can output all of the different properties related to that given index. So I can find for index is 0, the fireball spell name, the direct damage, yada, yada, yada. Now note here that you can go back and collapses all down by right-clicking on any of these pins. And I can recombine the Struct Pin. But in this case we want to right-click on this and split that struck pin. Now, something that is worth noting here is there are actually lots of strokes to be found when working with blueprints scripting. And this is a little bit of an aside, but it's worth pointing out here. I'm going to right-click and some empty space and just type in get actor transform. This would get the transform for our ThirdPersonCharacter. Now if I was to right-click on this pin right up here, I can split the Struct Pin a transformed consists of location, rotation, and scale data. But even something like the location, right? That is three values in one in X, Y, and Z vector that determine our final location. Those are three float values. So if I was to right-click on this, I could split this struck pin as well. So you can see how there are actually numerous, numerous nodes throughout unreal that you can do this whole splitting and recombining of struct pins, something like this. A vector is a struct. It consists of three float variables. So I can right-click on this. I can split it and you can recombine. And even our rotator right here that consists of three float values as well, so we can split that. Yeah, worth noting, right-click recombine, right-click. Whoops, not promote. Right-click, recombine, right-click recombine. Alright, back on topic here, Let's make use of our struct. So I'm going to delete this out. I'm going to bring in an event key. So let's right-click and some empty space. Let's try something on the nine key. Sure Why not? I don't think I'm using the nine key anywhere. We're going to drag off of our spell type down here, lead these two guys down here spelled type. And I'm going to search for a switch. On ease spell side. We're gonna do something depending on what spell type we are specifying here. Then what I'm gonna do is I'm going to drag out of my spell elements and I'm gonna do a switch on spelled elements like so. And we're going to say if we're doing direct damage, we're then going to find out what is our elements here. And what we're then going to do is print a string. We're going to pull off of our fire here and I'll kind of recap this. When I'm all finished here. Pull off of this, then we're gonna pull off of our spell effect value. That's like how much damage we're gonna be doing here. Spoiler alert, I'm going to leave this as the 0 elements here. So we are going to be casting a fireball, so to speak, without any effects of any sort. But cashing in air quotes, drag off of here. And we are going to actually not plug that into there yet. I'm going to drag back off of here and do an append. We're gonna be printing something out to the screen. Our a is going to be you dealt space. R, B is going to be the spell effect value is going to convert that integer to a string. We're going to add another pin here. We're going to plug in the spell name for C. So you dealt 25 fireball. And the last word here, we're going to add another pin is going to be damage. And I'm going to add a space before that. And that is going to be all well and good. Nn last but not least, we're going to drag off of here. We're going to play, a sound, will do is play sound 2D. What sound do you want to play it? Well, let's get one of our different cascading effects here. Drag off of this. We're going to get a copy. We're going to drag that in here. As we get to specify, remember our fireball spell here, we've got two possible casting sound effects, element 0 or element one. So let's pick one at random. So I'm going to drag backwards off of here and type in random integer in range. We're going to go between 01. So that is going to be our final set up, making use of our strokes here. Alright, so framing that up pretty good. I think I got that. All right, let's go ahead and compile to make sure that script is good to go. Save, Let's jump in and play and then press that there are nine key. Hey, setting our debug object, jumping back. Here we go. And here we go. Precedent Nike, you should see some texts appear up here. U del 25, fireball damage. I know there's no space between fireball and damage. And as I expand this again, again, you should hear one of these two sound effects play at random. Alright, so I know that that was a very basic setup, but I'm going to challenge you to try to expand upon this sort of a setup. Now, I want you to try these on your own, ensure that you can cast a spell only if you have enough manner. We're not making use of our monocots right here. So ensure that try something else. Ensure that you cannot cast again unless you're cool down, duration has expired. Try this, try adding an emitter or particle system to a spell that you cast here. Also try this, try specifying a vector location that this given spell should spawn that given particle system. So those are all things given some of the prior knowledge in this course, I'd like you to go ahead and try now to finish this off, let's talk about some other possible struck use as well. Imagine you had a quest system struck. You can specify a name, a location, enemies to spawn or be defeated, and maybe reward types and quantities that could all be contained within a struct. Or perhaps character base attributes could all be contained within a struct. And you can specify things like name, speed, health, all those kinds of things. Alright guys, that's going to do to offer this video on the very useful struct. See you in the next one. 75. Flow Control Overview: All right, We have finally arrived at that point in the course where it is time high time to talk about flow control nodes. Now, I know you've seen me up to this point in the course use a lot of these flow control nodes. But we have not yet had an official discussion about it because there's a lot of topics to cover. So that ends right now. Here begins our flow control node conversation. So our goal in this video is to simply get an overview and understanding of what flow control nodes are and their purpose within scripts, a deeper purpose. We'll also take a quick look at common flow control nodes used in scripts. Let's start by defining what flow control nodes, even our flow control nodes are nodes that allow for controlling the flow of execution based on conditions. They assess some data inputs. And depending on the inputs, they determined which execution out pin fires or when an execution out pin fires are both essentially control the flow of execution. For example, we've got this branch node up here. We can flow into it. And then based on a condition input, we can flow out of the true branch if the condition is true, or we can flow out of the false branch if the condition is false. Now flow control nodes have a gray coloring at the top. And as we mentioned earlier in our macro section, flow control nodes are macros and you can see this by simply double-clicking on one of them. I'm going to double-click on my gate node here. And that's going to open up my standard macros library. These are macros, flow control nodes are macros. Now, where can we find a bunch of these flow control nodes? And here are a bunch of the common ones that you will find throughout scripts. I have this all in my Level Blueprint as a quick overview of many of the common ones. Well, if you're looking for some of these, you can obviously search them by name, by right-clicking and searching for them by the title here. There are also located under the right-click menu, right here under Utilities. And then in the utility section, you can come under flow control. And that's where a bunch of these reside. Now, it is worth noting here I'm going to be throwing this select node that does not have a gray banner. It is not officially a flow control load. I'm going to include it in this section as well because it does sort of control the flow of data that gets output based on in index inputs. So in a sense, it is sort of a flow control node. So that's why I'm going to include it as well. Super handy node to know about, by the way, a few more things to know about flow control nodes. Many of them have hotkeys and I included these on the node comments here. And so you can see with a branch node, if you hold down the B key, left-click, you'll bring in a branch. Those are super handy tricks. I would recommend that you get to know because you are going to find yourself using these nodes all the time. Also, flow control nodes, they are useful for gating or restricting when an area of script happens. They're also useful for determining which bit of script happens next. So that's something to know about flow control nodes bare that in the back your mind. They are useful for determining when an area of script happens, which bit of script happens. Next. Example of which script happens next would be a branch. Do I flow out of the true or false? An example of when an area of script happens would be with our gate node. And you can learn more about that in the gate node video itself. Alright guys, that is going to do to all four are flow control overview. We will see you in the next video. 76. Branch: Welcome. In this video, our goal is to learn how to use the branch node using an extremely common locked door scenario as a demonstration. So firstly, let's define what a branch node is. You've seen me use several of these up to this point. Branches are essentially an if then statement encode. They serve as a simple way to create decision base flow from a single true or false condition. Now once executed, the branch node looks at the incoming value of the attached Boolean. You can attach a Boolean variable to this or you can simply hard-coded by having that checked or unchecked the outputs. And then this will output an execution pulse down the appropriate output. So if this is true, and that's what the check mark means, will flow out of here. If this is false or unchecked, will flow out of here. Now, once again, the hotkey for placing this in your graph is to simply hold down the B key and left-click. Now, it's worth noting here that we have previously used a branch node. We did this during the introduction of the Boolean variable. And we did this inside of our ThirdPersonCharacter. So why don't you find your ThirdPersonCharacter. You can find that in the third-person Blueprints folder. Double-click on that to open it up. And what we did during the Boolean video is we made it. So when we input action jumped via the spacebar, we evaluated the condition of our can jump Boolean variable. And if it was true, which we currently have it true by default, then we can jump. If it's false, we cannot jump. And we can see this by simply trying to play when I send my debug object there. And once again, this is set to true. And you can see that by mousing over this while you're playing. And if I press the space-bar, you can see that indeed I am jumping in. As soon as I release. There we go. It however, if I was to change, Ken jumped to false, we'll press the space bar. This will evaluate to false and nothing will happen. So let's go ahead and try this. Pressing the space bar, you can see the flow of execution dies right here because this evaluates to false, which we can see in the little tool tip. There were never getting beyond this branch. It is stopping the flow of execution dead right there. Alright, let's try to show off another scenario here. So I'm going to create a brand new variable over in the My Blueprint section of the ThirdPersonCharacter Blueprint, clicking the plus button at the very bottom here, I'm going to call this hes key question mark. And I won't compile this. And just to let you know here, I'm going to leave this has key as false. I do not have the key right away. Actually, you know what, I'm going to check it to true will say yes, our character does have the key. So we'll compile that save. And then what we're gonna do is jump back to our content browser here, I want to go into our blueprint section. We have our rotating door we created this blueprint is rotating door blueprint when we talked about the rotator variables. So you can review that video if you've not created this door, I'm going to left-click and drag this into my level right away. Then I'm going to double-click on this to open it up. We're going to modify our script here just a little bit. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna kill out our get player character right here and right here, and right here. That was one way that we just had set up there of checking if it was our ThirdPersonCharacter overlapping that door. What I'm gonna do now is we're gonna check grabbing onto this other actor pin. We're going to cast to our ThirdPersonCharacter. This is another way of checking to see, hey, who is the thing that overlapped us? And again, we're checking the box as the component that we're checking to overlap the box component right there. We're going to wire this through. We're going to do something only if it was a ThirdPersonCharacter overlapping us. However, we're not going to open this door just yet unless we find out that our ThirdPersonCharacter has the key, if you cast your ThirdPersonCharacter in this manner, we have yet to officially talk about casting nodes. We can reach inside of our ThirdPersonCharacter and access any functions or variables or anything like that that lives inside of there. We could call a function access variables, etc. Specifically, we want to dry out of here and find r has key. We're going to get, does our player have the key? If you don't see this, trying to do what I just did there, make sure your third-person character is compiled after you created that has key Boolean. Now once again, this is true by default, that's how we set it. So we're going to use this as our condition. If it's true that our player has a key, then we're going to open our door. With this all in place. I'm not going to worry about this end overlap right now. I'm only concerned about the opening of it. Let's go ahead and compile this. Let's save, and then let's give this a play. Alright, so we can check for R script working wrap their, here's where you can set your debug object. If you have multiple doors right there, you can say which door you are checking out to see if it's working. Alright, here we go. We should have that key because we said that true by default, that Boolean. And there we go, it will open. Now, let me just jump back into my third-person character. I'm going to change has key to false, compile save. Let's go back to a rotating door click play right here. And now our character does not have the key. So let's go ahead and you see we're approaching that door. You can see that overlap happening, but it's stopping the flow of execution dead right here in our branch. Alright, Jumping back to our ThirdPersonCharacter Blueprint here in this jump section of script. I wanted to point out that your conditioning a four-year branch does not have to be just a single variable such as this. And it also does not have to be just a single hard input conditioned by checking this box or unchecking this box, you can actually do a more intricate evaluation if you will. And if I move over to the left here, I'll show some other nodes that are oftentimes found to be plugged into a branch. And these are these guys right here. We've got an anti-node, NAND node in or a NOR and an x or if you will. So the comments here describe how these work, but we can give a few of these a try. I'll try out this one because this is very common. You can try plugging one of these into your branch right here. And we can even use our Ken jump is one of the conditions. Now this will return a true if all inputs are true. So let me just click this plus button. Let's go four times. We could keep adding more input pins. Now I'm going to plug my can jump into this. Now currently my can jump. That is false, but I'll check all the rest of these. Now, this should only return true if all inputs are true, these three are true. Can jump here, however is not. So this should disable my character from jumping because not all are true. Compile this and play. Pressing that spacebar. You can see I can jump, let me change, can jump here to true, jump in and play. And now I can jump, all four of them are true. Next I'm showing off this NAND node I can jump is set to true as are all the others. This will evaluate to false because all inputs are true. That's how this one works. So it only returns false if all inputs are true. So I'm pressing the space bar, can't jump. However, if I was to change one of these two false, and it could be any of these that I pick, then it will evaluate to true. So now I can jump. The OR node will return true of any input is true. So I've got three of them that are false, but my can jump here is true. So clicking play here, pressing the space bar, it will evaluate to true because only one that's all I need is true. Next, we've got the NeuroNode. This evaluates to true only if both inputs here are false. So currently my Boolean variable is false, as is this empty slot right here. So if I click Play, you can see that I can jump. However, if I was to set even one of these to true, jump back in and play. You can see that is going to evaluate to false. Last but not least, we've got this XOR node and this is going to evaluate to true if inputs are not the same. So currently my ken jump is set to false. This checkbox is set to true so they are not the same. So this should evaluate the true jumping in and playing. Yes, indeed, I can jump if I was to set these to be both the same. So right now both of them are false. Jump in and play. It does not evaluate to true. So there you have it. Those are some useful node, some complementaries that are oftentimes plugged into the condition input of a branch node. So let's talk about some possible uses for branch nodes. Well, you could ask the question, does the player enough manner to cast a spell? Does the player have enough manna to buy an item? You could do some evaluation of money that the player has an integer value of the amount of money versus the amount of money required to buy an item. If that is true or false. You can evaluate that to determine if the purchase goes through. What about, is a player in the right location to use an item? Or maybe, is the player low on health, you could evaluate? Is the player at twenty-five percent health or less? If that is true, you could do one thing versus if it's false, you could do another. Alright guys, that's gonna do to offer this discussion on branch nodes, we will see you in the next video. 77. Sequence: Welcome. In this video, our goal is to learn about how the sequence flow control node can be utilized in scripts. Now this node, you can fire off multiple sections of scripts simultaneously and in an organized fashion. Now in this video I'm gonna be doing work inside of my Level Blueprint. So if you'd like to play along at home and forgot how to get in there. In your maps. Simply come right here, open Level Blueprint and that'll get you right there. Alright, what is a sequence node? It is one that allows for a single execution wire input to fire off of multiple execution outputs. Now, this is great for events. It only allow you to have one copy of an event within a script, like Begin Play, begin, overlap, etc. Now you can add multiple output pins here if there's multiple things that you wanna do off of, say, Begin Play by simply clicking on this plus button. Now if you want to remove any of these output execution pins, you can simply right-click on them and remove them like so. This is great for keeping scripts organize and to add one of these, because this is such a commonly used node, you can simply hold down the S key, then do a left mouse button click, and that'll bring one in for you. So let's put one of these to use inside of our level blueprint here, not expedite things. I have a little bit of script I set up ahead of time over here in my Level Blueprint. But that's all fine and dandy, I'll explain what I've done so you can play along at home. So I want to do three things upon beginning play here. So let me bring in and begin play event node. I can hold down the P key and left-click to bring in Event Begin Play. And just to show that you can only have one of these event begin plays within a graph. If I try to right-click and some empty space, and I'll do begin play like so. It'll just jump me right to it. Or if I hold down the PT and left-click again, I've gotten nothing. So only one of those can go within a graph. Now, going to hookup event begin play. This will fire off as soon as we begin playing our game. And I'm flowing this through a sequence node. And the reason I'm doing this is because I wanted to do three things off of Event. Begin Play. I want to play a sound. This is gonna be some started music. I'm gonna be getting my player character than casting to my ThirdPersonCharacter. And I have promoted this to a variable here so that I can save a reference to my ThirdPersonCharacter in case I wanted to do something to my ThirdPersonCharacter later, I would just simply need to drag and drop one of these into my graph. Then the other thing I wanted to do here is something a little bit more fancy. I placed a target point within my level. You can find one of these in the place actors panel. So I went here, added a place actors panel, did a search for a target point, is just adds an icon to your editor and it defines a point in space for you that you can use within a graph like I'm using. So with that target points selected, I hold down the R key is in reference and left-click, and that's how I get a reference to that. Then I simply dragged out of that, got the actor location dragged out of this search for random point in bounding box, I specify a size for a bounding box, this is essentially an area within my level around, centered around my target point. Then I drug out of this to make a transform. All I cared about really was the location. The rotation scale did not matter to me. Then I drag out of this and I searched for a spawn actor from class node. Here, I'm specifying my BPMN, a potion that I created earlier in the course. You can specify any class here, it doesn't really matter. So these are the three things I wanna do off of begin play. So Event Begin Play right here using a sequence node. I can go bam, bam, bam. And if you want to organize your script a little bit better, you can double-click on a wire to bring in a reroute node. Again, sequence nodes are great way to organize your scripts. So I'm going to compile this to make sure my script is looking good. So upon beginning play, we should hear some music. We will have a reference to our character, and we are going to spawn a man, a potion. Now, I can play the game and see this, or I can simulate the game and we should hear that music. And we should spawn this potion. Now, this is all going to happen behind the scenes. So this, you're just going to trust this going to happen. But we're going to hear something and see something so I can play the game. And he saw that emancipation is born in here. A little bit of music. Or if you want to test this out, you can also simulate your game. Now to do this, you can come under your three dots right here and choose to simulate. And you can see the hotkey for this. Now when you simulate your game, you're making your game run all the code, all the script is running as well. Whoever you're not jumping in and playing your game. So if you click right here, you can see that it did spawn in a manner potion. And some music is playing as well. I can stop this. Alternatively. That's a civil right now I'm in simulate mode. Just note that alternatively, if you do Alt plus S, that does simulation mode as well. This is great for just making your game run. And you just want to fly around like this and check things out. Now, before we wrap this video up, I just wanted to prove out that you do not need to use sequence nodes. They are essentially a quality of life type node to better organize your scripts. Here is the exact same setup without the sequence node. It'll do the exact same things. However, my wiring is a little bit crisscrossing. And you can imagine if I had 45610 things as could get really, really messy. So if I click play here, you can see I do have that madam potion, lands and music, etc. So oftentimes these sequence nodes do come directly after an event to do one thing, a second thing, a third thing, et cetera. But that's not where it has to go. You can place them where they make sense within your script. Something else I wanted to point out here as well. Once again, you can only have one copy of an event begin play, event begin overlaps those sorts of things. However, there are certain event nodes, such as input events like our eight key, that you can have multiple copies of. A case like this. You would not need a sequence node because you can have one events, do three things. So to prove this out, just clicking in the press that button. Hello, are you there? Hello, are you there? So don't need a sequence node for something like this. Although that wouldn't be a bad idea either. Sequence nodes, quality of life type, note, I use them all the time. That'll do to offer this video. See you in the next one. 78. Do Once: Welcome. In this video, our goal is to learn how we can utilize the do once node within our scripts. Now, this is a fairly self-explanatory node that seems like you'd only need to use every once in a great while. It turns out that this node comes in handy in all kinds of scenarios. So what does the do wants no do, well, it fires off an execution pulse just once out of it. Now from that point forward, it will cease all outgoing execution. It will not fire again out of here into any other script that you have beyond here, until you have a pulse sent into the reset input here. Once you do that, it can do once, once again. Now, to bring this node into your graph, you can right-click and do a search for do once or holding down the O key, you can left-click and that'll get your one as well. Now let's put this to the test by running through an example here. For this, I'm gonna be working inside of my Level Blueprint so you can access that right here. Open Level Blueprint. Also, I wanted to point out here that we're going to be accessing a variable inside of our third-person character. So if you have just come to visit video directly, open up your ThirdPersonCharacter. Within this pathway, we're going to be accessing this total XP earned integer variable within our ThirdPersonCharacter. So if you don't have this, go ahead and create an integer variable, I have the default value set to 0. Make sure you compile it as well because we're going to be accessing it here shortly. Alright, let's jump back to our Level Blueprint. The first thing we're going to need is an event. And let's do this actually with an overlap events. Let's overlap an area within our level and then add some experience points to our character for being so awesome and traversing to that spot. So let's jump back to our test map here and add a trigger sphere. If you don't have this place actress panel, you can find it here. Place actors panel that we'll get to that. Let's place a trigger sphere within our level. With that selected over in the Details panel, I am going to increase the size of our sphere radius, make it a bit bigger. I'm also going to come under the rendering section, unchecked actor hidden game, so that we can see this sphere. Now with this selected, I'm going to jump back into my Level Blueprint. We're going to right-click add an event for this. Coming under, Add Event collision. We're gonna do something on begin overlap. So the first thing we wanna do is check that it is our ThirdPersonCharacter that is the other actor that's overlapping us. So we can do a check here by grabbing out of this other actor pin, doing a Cast to ThirdPersonCharacter. And we'll talk about casting officially later on in the course here that's coming up soon. And with this all done, we can reach inside of our ThirdPersonCharacter and we're going to get that total XP earned. And let's just drag out a here, hit the plus button. We're going to add, we'll say we're going to add a 100 experience points for reaching that sphere. Good job guy. Then we're going to drag out of our ThirdPersonCharacter, do a search for total XP. We'll set it. So we're getting it, adding a 100. We're going to set that as the new updated value. However, we only want to do this one time. We don't want to make it so that we can overlap this sphere again and again and again and get 100 experience points. We only want to say, Hey, you did it the first time. That's great. Never again will flow through the Arduino wants node here. Then Award the 100 experience points. Last but not least, we got to wait to check this. So I'm going to drag off of here, do a print string. And we're just going to print this out to the screen by dragging off of our total XP earned into the string, it'll convert that integer into a string. Compile that, save. Let's go ahead and play to test this out. I'll set my debug object there to my test map. And let's overlap that and see how awesome we are gained a 100 experience points. So check up right in this corner of the screen. 100 experience points. Now that should only happen one time. So I'm going to end that overlap and then I'm going to overlap again. You see that it flowed into the do wants? No, but it did not flow beyond it because this node says do once and never again. Alright, now let's try resetting this by using another input. So let me just right-click some empty space. I'll look for keyboard for sure the F key. So when I press the F key, I'm going to reset this. And so here we go. I'm going to compile this. I'm going to play, I'm going to overlap this. You can see I get my 100 experience points. I'm overlapping again currently, I cannot pass beyond here. However, when I press the F key, watch here we go pressing the left key. It's going to reset it. So it should do once. Once again, I get another 100 experience points. It stops because it's doing it only once I'm going to press the F key. It'll allow me to do it once more. There we go. So that is how the F key works to reset that doing once, once again. Now note on this do once node there is a Boolean input where you can start closed or not. Currently are we are not starting close. You can plug in a Boolean variable if you want to start at close or not. So let me just show you that. If I do start a close, so I checked that box and now play. I'm going to overlap this sphere. But it doesn't go beyond here. Yes, it's called the dual wants no, but we are starting closed off, meaning that we have to reset it here first in order for it to do one. So now if I press F, it resets. And now I can go beyond just once. Not again, press F. So just wanted to point that out as well. This start clothes can make sure that the first time in this case we overlap it. You don't actually do once that you have to reset it first. Let's talk what are some possible uses for the du once note here, well, think of a level up fanfare or notification upon reaching a given experience points threshold, you know, you've reached 5 thousand experience points. You've leveled up. You only want that to play the first time you exceed 5 thousand total experience points, not 5,005, not 5,010, et cetera. Or how about you're interacting with a treasure chest? You want to open it, but open it just once. That would be another great use of a do one snowed. Or how about harvesting a mineral? You've got some iron ore in your level and you walk up to it and you can harvest it just once. And then maybe a timer or could be set to allow for that to be harvestable. Once again, say after an hour, two hours, etc. So those are all possible uses of the Dew wants node. Very common to use it. I love it. One of my favorite flow control nodes, guys that is gonna do to offer this one, we will see you in the next one. 79. Do N: Welcome. In this video, our goal is to gain that knowledge of and demonstrate the practical use of the do n node, otherwise known as the dawn node. Now this is a great note to use to restrict the amount of times something can be done. So what does the do and no do? Well, it fires off in execution pulse n number of times as defined by this integer input right here, you can plug in an integer value or you can hard set it like I've got the number 37 here. So after this limit has been reached, it will cease all outgoing execution until a pulse is sent back into the reset input. So in this case, if we were to hook up an input key to this, say the F key for fire. We would fire out of this exit, this execution output 30 times. And after 30 times, I would have to reset it in order for another execution pulse to be executed. Now, this counter will output how many times it has been done, and we'll show that off here in just a little bit. But that is essentially how the do n node works. It's a lot like the do once node only you get to set how many times it does the thing. It doesn't have to be onetime. You could set this to be one, but you can have this be 1102100, etc. So to add this node, you could right-click and just do a search for Don. There is the do n node or holding down the left mouse button clicking. You can add that as well. Let's put this to practical use. I am in my ThirdPersonCharacter Blueprint. That's where you can find it. So let's try out an example here. I've set one up ahead of time. And here is my example. I'm going to on a left mouse button press, we're going to do three times. I'm going to output the counter here to the screen. This could be a print text, note, it could be print string. It's all going to work the same here. And upon doing that, I'm going to spawn an actor from class. So this is a spawn actor from class node I just slotted in the blueprint effect fire here. You can really slot in anything you want. You do have to give this a spawn transform. I could have just done a GET world transform. I wanted to do. I could've done a get rolled transform, gets world transform for the actor or any of my different components I chose to do on here for my simulated hand. Now this is one that I added earlier in the course. So if you're wondering what my simulated hand is here, it is a sphere collision component. And just to show you where I place this within my viewport, there it is. That's my simulated hand represented by some sphere collision. So we're gonna be spawning a blueprint effect fire at that spot relative to our character. So that's our setup right there. Let's go ahead and give us a try here. Let me compile that, make sure my script is good to go. So we're saying we're gonna do this three times and then pressing the RT will reset that and allow me to do it three more times. Once again, clicking play. Let me just get this all set up to set my debug object to the ThirdPersonCharacter so you can see this script executing. Alright, so turning there is my simulated hand. Once you can see in the upper left is outputting how many times we've done here our counter a second time, 21 more time. Three. Now if I try doing it again, it's not going beyond the due end node. However, if I press the archae recipient now, we're going to reset it. And that will allow me to do it three more times. So here we go. 123, but not a fourth. So something like that, that's set up right there. It could be used to light torches, like in a Legend of Zelda style game. Some other possible uses, we could use a set-up such as this to determine how many times you can harvest an item before you can. That's another good use of the n node. Perhaps you're using it to determine how many times you can fire off a given weapon before you must reload. Or maybe you use it to determine the number of interactions you can have with an NPC before you can't have anymore. You know how so many games have is where you can interact with an MPC, say three times, he's got three unique things to say. And then that's it. Alright, so there you have it. The end node, it's kind of a cousin, is sibling, if you will, of the do one snowed a little bit more flexibility with the do n node they'll do to offer this one. See you in the next one. 80. Flip Flop: Welcome. In this video, our goal is to gain knowledge of and demonstrate the use of the flip-flop node. Now this is the node to use whenever you want to toggle between two bits of script, whenever an event of your choosing occurs. So what is a flip-flop note it takes in an execution inputs like so. And toggles between two execution outputs, a and B. So the first time you flow into this, I'll put a is called the second time. Output b is called the third time. The fourth time b, etcetera. It flip-flops between shooting out of a then B. Now it does have a Boolean output allowing you to track when output a has been called. That is oftentimes used to just ensure that you know which one of these is being called. Maybe you want to print strings so you can see when a is called vs, B, etc. To show off an example, use of the flip-flop note I'm gonna be doing this inside of my ThirdPersonCharacter Blueprint. So if you want to play along at home, you can find that under third-person blueprints, double-click on that guy to open them up. And we need an event to get us started here. So I'm going to right-click and do a left mouse button click event. You can use any inputs that you want. I'm gonna go with the left mouse button. And so when we press this, we're going to flip-flop between a than B than a than B every time we press that. So what I wanna do is drag off this and I'm going to bring in a spawn actor from class node. And the class I'm going to spawn in the first time I press the left mouse button is going to be my blueprint effect fire. Now you can find this if you have these starter content folders and you can navigate to where this is by clicking right here. That'll jump you to wear. This exists within your content browser. Honestly, you can spawn anything you want in here. I'm essentially going to be spawning in some fire and then some sparks down here to simulate me casting a spell. So I'm going to Control C, control V. So the second time we press our left mouse button, instead of fire, I'm going to spawn in sums, barks. Blueprint effect sparks. Now I do need to give this a spawn transform so I can drag backwards off of either of these. And I will say make transform. Now the only reason I want to use this make transform is just a scaled down the effects of each of these. I'm just going to make this be half the size of 0.5 in the x, the y, and the z. We're actually going to attach these spawned effects to our mesh here in a little bit. But this will scale down the size of each of these half size for each of those. Then what I wanna do is I actually want to store what we spawn here inside of a variable. And the reason we're going to want to store these different effects is because when we spawn one, we're going to kill off the other. So that is our idea here behind the flip-flops. So I'm going to right-click on this pin. I'm going to promote the variable. And I'm gonna give this a name of equipped spell 01. So I've promoted that to a variable down here. And then on this guy I'm going to right-click on this, promote that to a variable and I'll call this equipped spell 02. And I entered in that name right down there in case you missed that. Now off of each of these, I'm going to drag off and type in attach. I'm looking for attach actor, two components. Attach actor to component. That's the one we're looking for. Now, the target here is going to be our equipped spell. The parent that we want to attach this to is going to be our mesh. So if we go to our viewport, our mesh is this mannequin right here. So that's gonna be our mesh, the actor. We want to attach our spell effect here to our mesh and we can feed this a socket name. Now back in our name variable video, we created a socket on our skeleton, on our mesh here. And we created a name to socket. Now we did store this to a variable. Our socket name that we created in our name variable video was called hand socket. So I'm just going to drag and drop this, plug this right into here. Now if you did not go through this name variable video, this will not work for you because you need to set up a socket first. I would suggest you go back to that name variable video in order to do that, in order for this to work properly. Now I do need to change my location role here to be snapped to target. The rotation rule to be snapped to target as well in order for this to work, alright, then I'm going to simply copy this. Copy all three of these nodes control C, control V. We're going to paste these down here, like so. And we gotta make sure we hook this in like so. So that's our current setup. So if you need to pause the video here to see what we currently have, but we're not quite finished yet. We then want to do is pull off of this guy in Troy. Actor. Now which actor do we want to destroy? Well, when we're spawning effect fire, we're going to want to destroy our sparks effect and vice versa so that we only have one of these bonding at a time. Now, to do this, I'm going to drag in equipped spell O2, plug it into there. This is the one that we just promoted to a variable down here, and vice versa. I'm going to Control C, Control V with this Destroy Actor right here. Like so. And we want to plug in equipped Spell Number one to this. Now I know that when we run this in a game, we're going to get an error right up here, but I'm going to let this error happened just so you can see how we fix that in just a bit. Now, this is R script that we've got going on. We're gonna be making use of our flip-flop node. Let's compile this to make sure that this is all looking good. We're going to save this. So just to run through this, we're going to left mouse click the first time we're going to execute out of the a output. So this bit of script is going to run. We're going to spawn in the effect fire. We're going to save that affect fire inside of a variable. We're going to attach it to our mesh at the socket name that we provided. Then we're going to destroy actor to. Now the first time we do this, this is going to throw an error when we exotic here because we have not spawned in effect to yet. So that's why it'll throw an error. The second time we press the left mouse button, we're gonna shoot out of the B output of the flip-flop node. It's going to spawn in the effect of our sparks. We're going to save that to variable. We're going to attach it to our mesh at this given socket name. And in doing so, it is also going to simultaneously kill out this effect right here, our fire effect. Now the next time we press our left mouse button, the third time we'll spawn in this viral effect. And we will be killing out sparks the second time we come to this, it won't throw an error because we will have created this variable right here. Alright, let's go ahead and give us a play. We'll try to tuck this into the upper corner. Clicking play. Let me set my debug. Object to our ThirdPersonCharacter. Oh, here we go. I'm going to run around over here. So I'm going to left mouse button. Watch this flow of execution as I do this. Here we go, left mouse button. You see that affect fire is bond in here. It's attaching it to my character, like so. I'm going to press the left mouse button again. It killed out the fire. The sparks is in there. And press the left mouse button again. We've killed off the sparks. We now have fire. Now I'm going to exit out of here. Here's that error that I was just talking about. It is complaining once again that we can't destroy this actor right up here. At the least the first time we couldn't destroy it out when we spawned in our fire effect because there was nothing to destroy. This did not exist yet because we shot through the a output first. Without having shot through the b, we had not created this variable yet. So how do you solve this kind of issue? Well, it's actually quite simple. If we right-click on our equipped Spell, No, right here. And we convert it to a validated yet. It'll convert the node to look like this. And if we wire it through like this, we can say only if this is valid, meaning only if this variable has something inside of it, will we destroy the actor. If it's not valid meaning there's nothing inside of it, then there's nothing to destroy, so nothing will happen. So that's how you can get around that. So compiling, saving, playing, left-click, fire, left-click sparks were flip-flopping a, b, a, b now and we escaped. We no longer get that error. So that is an example of the flip-flop node. What are some possible uses of this? Well, you could use a flip-flop node to swap between two weapons. Maybe you use a flip-flop node to toggle the light switch on and off. Those are some example use cases. What are the ones? Can you come up with? Guys that'll do to offer this one? See you in the next one. 81. Gate: Welcome. In this video, our goal is to gain knowledge and demonstrate use of the gate node. Now this is an extremely self-descriptive node in that you can enter into the gate node. But whether or not you flow out of the execution output pin and do whatever comes after this depends on whether or not the gate is open or close. It starts off close here with your gate node. Now, to bring one of these nodes into your graph, you can right-click and search for gate. Also, you can hold down the G key and left mouse click, and that'll bring in a gain node for you as well. I've got an example that I'd like to demonstrate for you all here inside of your Level Blueprint. So if you'd like to play along, that is where to head. What we're gonna do here is start off with an event ticks. I'm just going to right-click and do a search for event tick. And we're going to flow into our gate every tick. So every frame we're going to be flowing into our game. Now we're not going to be going beyond this until our gate is open. Remember our gate is starting close here. So even though we're flowing into this node, every tick, every frame, we're not going to be flowing out beyond here and doing whatever it is to come next until we open our gate. So how are we going to open and close our gate? Well, we're gonna do this via a trigger volume inner level. So head back to your level. And we're going to come right under here. I'm going to come under basic. We'll add a trigger box, just left-click and drag one of those out here. I'm just going to size it up here quickly. Let's go 150 by one fifty, four fifty, one fifty, one fifty, one fifty. I don't know. It's the first number that came from our minds. Something big, line thickness, we're going to change that to tend to make this a little bit easier to see. However, we're not going to see it unless we come under the rendering section. Rendering section and we uncheck actor hidden game. I'm going to lift this up, hit the End key to smack it on down to the floor. We're going to check to see if we have overlap this. So with this selected, we're going to go back to our Level Blueprint. If you don't already have that open, open Level Blueprint. And we are going to right-click in some empty space. And we're going to add an event for that trigger of volume under the collision when we begin overlapping it, as well as right-click collision when we end overlapping it. So we want to do something only when it is us, the ThirdPersonCharacter overlapping the trigger volume. Another way we can check to see if it is us. I could drag out of here and cast. However, I'm just going to show off a different method. I'm just going to type in get player character. Now, if I drag out of our other actor and simply type in the equals operator, we can check to see if it is the player character that is overlapping us. Now we don't need to grab inside of our ThirdPersonCharacter and execute any functions are calling the variables anything like that. We just need to check if it is our generic player. We don't really care which player character, any player character. In this case, for ThirdPersonCharacter is the one that we are controlling. So this is good enough, can hold down the Alt key left-click. That'll be our condition right here. We're going to copy these nodes right up here, control C, control V. Bring them right here. Like so. So if it is true that we are overlapping that trigger box, if that's true, we're going to open the gates. Now, if we have ended overlapping the Trigger box with our player character, that is proven to be the other actor that is ended that overlap. If that's true, then we are going to close the gate. Now. That is all well and good, but what are we going to do upon opening the gates? Well, we're going to add another actor to our level here. So why don't you hit on back there. And we're going to add a door of sorts right here a little bit beyond our Trigger box. So to add a quote, unquote door, I'm going to come right under here. We're going to come under shapes. We're going to add a cube. And I'm just going to stretch it out a little bit. So hitting the R key, I'm going to scale it like so. I'm not going to be super precise. We're going to lift it up into the air, something like that. Maybe thin it out a little bit like that. I'm going to hit the End key to smack it on down to the ground. And with this selected, I am also going to need to come over to the Details panel and change the mobility of this two movable. Now the reason I'm going to need to change this to movable is because I am going to be slowly moving this out of the way in the next portion of our script. Okay, so with that done, we've got our cube here selected. Make sure you've got that selected. Head on back to your Level Blueprint. You can access it there as well. If you don't already have that tab open, hold down the R key, left-click to bring in a reference. And then we're going to pull out of this and type in static mesh components. So our static mesh actor consists of a static mesh component. And to help drive home that point, if I go back to my level and select my cube, we can see that R cubed consists of a static mesh component, which is essentially this cube right here. But we need to do that in order to drag out of this and bring in the ad relative location node. Now at this node does, you can see our static mesh component of the cube is hooked up to the target. It's looking for a component object reference. This is what we are going to be flowing into once our gate is open. Now this Delta location allows us to change the location of this scene component, of this Static Mesh component. But only once the gate is open. Now I'm going to change this by changing our z location to add one. So we're gonna be adding one to our z location every frame, because we're gonna be flowing into this every frame once our gate is open. So just to review, every tick, every frame we're going to be flowing into this gate. However, right here, this checkbox says We are starting close. We're not going to be passing beyond here in changing the relative location of our cube. However, once we begin overlapping a Trigger box with our player character, our player character is deemed to be equal to the other actor. It is the other actor that's overlapping us. That is true. Then we're going to open the gate and then we're gonna be moving that up into the air. However, when we end overlapping that trigger volume with our player character, when that is true, we're going to close the gates. Let's talk this up, right up here. I'm gonna click Play. If you've not set your debug object, you can click right up here and set it so that you can see that flow of execution going. Let me just, There we go. Stop shown there just briefly. Alright, now I'm going to try to frame that up a little bit better. Bring on my character once again. Alright, so you see event tick were flowing into this gate every frame, however, we are not getting beyond here now watch what happens when I overlap this with my character. You're going to see this open, the gate. Here we go. I can see it's lifting up into the air. And if I end my overlap, it's going to stop lifting it up into the air, begin overlap. It's going to open the gate and continue lifting it up and overlap, et cetera. Now another quick example, use case of the gate node using much of the same setup that we already have in place. I just swapped out a couple of notes here. Here we are casting to our ThirdPersonCharacter both Ana begin overlap and end overlap. And the reason I wanted to go with this approach is so that we can drag out of our ThirdPersonCharacter and call this modify health function that we created when we talked about functions. Now what we're gonna be doing with this setup is making it so that when our character is overlapping this Trigger box, we're going to be decrementing our character's health while they are inside of it. Once they step outside of that trigger box, we're going to stop that bleeding, so to speak. So you can imagine this being like a poisonous gas chamber or maybe, you know, maybe you're crossing a fire pits, something like that. So here we go. You can see this at work. I recommend if you're going to do this, every tick though, you would set your decrementing of health to a very low value. You're actually going to see this represented in our health bar up here because we do have our health bound to this meter on or HUD as well. So here we go, overlapping this. I know the sound is very spammy right now, but you get the point. Stepping out of this poisonous gas area, the bleeding stops. And so there you have it. The gate node, it takes in execution paths. But whether or not you go beyond this and do whatever comes beyond this execution out pin depends on whether or not, if the gate is open or close that we'll do to offer this one guys. See you in the next one. 82. MultiGate: Welcome. We're gonna be talking about the multi gate node here in this video. And I think the best way to demonstrate what this does is to just go ahead and put together an example as opposed to talking about it. So I'm going to be putting together this example here in my Level Blueprint. If you'd like to play along, if you forgot how to get in your Level Blueprint, you can come right here, open Level Blueprint. And to add a multi-grade node, you can simply right-click and search for it or hold down the M key, left mouse button, that'll add one there as well. Now this first example is a little academic in nature. So I went ahead and set up the script ahead of time to save us some time, but I'll explain what is happening. So I brought in 34 input keys to help facilitate this. I've got a pressing of the three key flowing into my multi-grade node. On the output side of things, I added one extra pin. And each of these is hooked up to a corresponding print texts function node. And it's simply going to print out 012 respectively to correspond with output 012. Now, when I press the three key and we flow into this multi-grade node, the first time I press that three key, it's going to output this output 0. It's going to output the number 0 to the screen. This is determined by our start index. A start index defaulting to negative one essentially means start at the top of our list here. However, unlike a sequence node that would print all of these out in rapid succession, It's only going to print out this number 0. It is not going to print out one or two. Now if I press the three key a second time, it will flow into the multi gate node and then print the number one. It'll pick this 1 first. We did this with the first a key press. The second time you press it, it will flow here. The third time you press it, it will flow here, et cetera. The fourth time I press it, nothing is going to happen until I reset. So here we go. That's a quick breakdown as to how this node works. I'm going to click Play up here, going to set my debug object to be our level test maps. So you can see this all flowing in the graph as well. So here we go. I'm going to press the three key. We see the number 0 just flows there. I'm going to press the three key a second time. We see number one. I'm going to press it a third time. We see number two. Now if I press it a fourth time, we're flowing into this. However, we are not flowing out and we won't flow out until we reset. So essentially when you flow into the multi-grade node, it will make sure that all of these outputs are executed. Once all of them have been executed out, then you must Reset it in order for this to work again. So if I press the F4 key, which I'll do right now, just reset it. Now I can press the three key, 0. Press the three key again. One, press three key again to. And if I try pressing the three key again, I'm flowing into it, but I cannot flow out of it until I reset it. And which points I can do it again, 012. Now, let's try that again only this time. Let's check. This is random checkbox. Before this was not checked with a start index of negative one. We were going to fire out of our top. I'll put pin, then our second, then our third in sequential order, guaranteed with is random selected. However, we are going to fire through all three before we need to reset. However, it's going to pick a random index with which to fire out of the first time, the second time, than the third time. Here we go. So pressing the three key decided to go with that 1 first, that 1 second, that 1 third. If I press it a fourth time, nothing. Got to press F4 key to reset it. And then there we started down here first, that 1 second, that 1 third. So that's what the is random Boolean checkbox does. Now, if loop is checked and I play, and I'm going to press the three key here once, twice, a third time, then a fourth time, five times, six times. Essentially when you have a loop check here, you can keep pressing, in our case, the three key again and again and again. There's no need to reset. Lastly, just to show off to our start index by default that's set to negative one. I'm just going to uncheck each of these. Let's set that to say two, not negative 22, and I click Play. Now when I press the three key, we fire out of the two pin first, then 0, then one, or press the three key again, nothing. However, if I reset, then press the three key, it's going to fire out of 2 first than 0, than one. So once again, admittedly, a fairly academic example. So let's try something a little bit more true to a game. And I'm going to demonstrate this here in the Level Blueprint as well. Let's come over to the right here, or any open space here in your graph. Once again, I've set up some stuff ahead of time. I have a multi-day node. Hold down and left-click, he can bring one of those in. And out of each of my three output pins, I did add one here. I brought in spawn actor from class nodes, and I simply slotted in three different classes my blueprint effect, explosion, fire, and smoke. And now I need something to fire off this multi-day. Let me go back to my level here and I'm going to add right up here basic. Let's do a Trigger box. Raise this up a little bit, set our boxes extent to be something like two hundred two hundred two hundred line thickness of ten. I should really leave a Trigger box out here for all of the different examples like this and showing off under the rendering category, uncheck that actor hidden in game, alright, with his events selected. Here in our Level, Blueprints. Level Blueprint, hold down or rather a right-click, not hold down, right-click Add Event collision for when we begin overlapping that, we can check to see that our other actor, we can say equals. This is another way of showing to see if the thing that we're hoping to overlap, this is a thing that we're expecting will say, is that equal to r gets player character. We're not looking to extract any variables are calling functions within our ThirdPersonCharacter. So this will be good enough. Holding down the Alt key and left clicking. We'll say if that is true, will flow into the branch node, one flow control node. And if this is true, we will flow into the multi-bit gates node. And if that is true, we will spawn one of these compile. Oh yes, we need to specify a spawn transform. Well, we have our Trigger box already selected back here in our level. So let's just spawn. It's somewhere in that trigger box right? Holding down the Alt key, left-click to bring in a reference storage trigger box dragged out of here, gets transform. We can plug these in 123, so we're picking one of these spawn at random, compile once more. Let's go ahead and play. I'll tuck this right down over here. We have our test maps selected, wrote up there as our debug object. And here we go. The first time we overlap it were picking one of these random explosion the second time fire, and the third time, we've got some smoke going on in there as well. Now note, if I overlap this again, we stopped right here at the gate. We have not reset this at all. So that would be something that maybe you wanna do to allow some spawning. Once again. Now setup such as this can be used for like a loot drop. Perhaps you kill an enemy and you want to award a random thing, that would be a good example. Use of the multi game. Perhaps you use a multi-grade to spawn waves of enemies. So you could choose a wave of enemy out of our zeros, out one or two. Or perhaps you could use a multi-grade node when talking to an NPC. Once again, many games have it so you can talk to an MPC, and in your MPC, wolves feed up three different unique lines of dialogue. You can make it so that using a multi-grade node when you overlap that trigger volume related to that NPC, you can fire off trigger line of dialogue 12 or three respectively. Guys, that is going to do it all for the multiset node. We will see you in the next one. 83. For Loops: Welcome. In this video, our goal is to gain knowledge and demonstrate the use of the for-loop nodes. Not to be confused with the for each loop nodes, which we will be talking about in the next video. Now these nodes will repeat a section of script again and again. And while they can be used inside of event grass, they really shine when scripting procedural content using the construction script. Now to start with, what is a for-loop? Well, a for-loop is a node that when called, meaning it has an execution wire being plugged into the left-hand side here. It fires a pulse out of the loop, body X number of times, with the number of times being determined by the first and last indices. So for example, if we had some event plugged into our for loop node here, and our first index was 0. In our last index was nine, we would flow out of our loop body here ten times, starting from 0 to nine. Now every time we would flow out of our loop body, we would be spitting out which index between 09 we are at. Again, from 0 to nine, you'd go 0123456789. So when we were at the fifth iteration through, we would be spitting out index for, again, starting from number 0. Now once it has gone through all ten, this completed execution output wire would fire off. Now the only difference between our for loop node here in our for loop with bread node is simply this break input execution pen. You have the ability with this node to break the flow of execution before you get to your last indices. If, for example, your first index is 0 and your last index is 99, meaning 100 loops through here. You could for whatever reason, break it early so you don't actually complete it. And we'll show a demonstration of that later on in this video. Alright, now, as I mentioned at the outset of this video, you can use these nodes here in an event graph, but they really show off their power within a Construction Script, building out procedural content. And in fact, at the very beginning of this course, when I was talking about the construction script, I did make use of a for-loop node. So let me just bring that back up, going back to my test map here, I actually have In example Construction Script blueprint. This is the blueprint that I built out way earlier in the course when talking about the construction script. I've got one of these in my level, but if you don't, you can find it in your scripting Blueprints folder. There is your BP example Construction Script. Also. You can navigate to it here in your Outliner by selecting it and your world and clicking right here. Now, I have nothing here in this blueprint in my Event Graph, my viewport shows off what the Construction Script has built. So here's my Construction Script tab. If you don't have this open, you can double-click on this down in the My Blueprint panel to open it up. And here is where we are making use of a for loop node. Now this whole script right here has been built to generate procedural content. I expose this numbers of section integer variable to the editor. And so by adjusting the number of sections, we can loop through this for-loop node X number of times going from 0 to r number of sections minus one. And this is just doing some math to determine where to place instance static mesh of this wall piece right here. Now I've got a little bit of additional scripts going on here to set the material for this instance, static mesh, but that's what this entire construction script is doing. So the power of this, again with the for-loop, is you get to specify how many times you are going to loop through the rest of this code right here. And in this case, we're going from an indices of 0 to however many numbers of sections I specify. Here in my level, I expose this variable to be instance editable, that checkbox right there. And in doing so, that variable becomes available within the Details panel when I have this blueprint selected. So you can see if I adjust the numbers of sections here, I can expand out this wall. What this is doing. Once again, it is looping through here. How many times? Well, I've currently got this set to be twenty one. Twenty one. Twenty one minus one is 20. So from 0 to 20, that is looping through here all those times to add these sections of walls. So that's the loop body is doing, doing repeating this section of script, however many times going from the first index to the last index. Now, it is worth noting here that loop iterations will take place between frames, so large loops may incur a performance hit. So if we were to set our last index here to be quite high, we will see a little bit of lag. So I'm going to try to set this to a high number here. In my level. I've currently got it set to 21, which isn't too bad. If I try setting this to 500 thousand and hit Enter, watch what happens. And indeed, that did take quite a long time. Now, I cut the video right there to make it seem like it took a lot less time, but that probably took my computer about a minute to actually show all those sections of walls. So just know that you probably don't want to have too many loops through your for-loop node. Alright, let's show off a practical use case for the for loop. Note here in our level, I'm going to add a trigger box and I am going to set the box extends to be something a little bit bigger. We'll go 300 in the x, 300 in the y, and 40 is going to be fine for the Z. I'm just going to pick it up off the ground a little bit, something like that. Let me set the line thickness to be ten. And just like you've seen me do a bunch of times up until now, I'm going to uncheck actor hidden and games so that we can see it. Then I'm going to duplicate this, holding down the Alt key, left-click and drag. And I'm going to set the box extent down for this one, we'll make it 100 by 100 by 100, something a little bit smaller like that, picking it up into the air, hitting the End key to smack it on down to the ground. So what am I trying to achieve with this setup? Well, essentially what I'm going to make happen here. Our character is going to spawn right here at our player start. We're going to make it so that when our character overlaps this Trigger box, we're going to spawn some manner potions within the bounds of this volume right here? Yes, you can use a Trigger box it trigger volume to spawn things within. That's what we're going to use for that. And we're also going to utilize a for loop node to spawn three Amanda potions. So first things first, we're going to select this Trigger box right here. Go back to your Level Blueprint. And we're going to right-click and some empty space. We're going to add an events for when we begin overlapping that. And we will just drag out of our other actor here, type in the equal sign. And this will be our method for checking to see if it is our player character. We're going to right-click get player character. Again, there's all different kinds of methods that we could use for this section to check if it is our ThirdPersonCharacter. This will work fine. Holding down the key left clicking to bring in a branch. Like so. Next I'm going to hold down the O key and left-click because we want to do something one time. What do we want to have happen? Well, we want to drag out of here and bring in a for loop, not a for each loop, a for-loop. We'll set our first index to 0, our last index to two. So 012 will be our three indices. And we'll drag out of our loop body and we will spawn actor from class. And here's where I'm going to slot in our man a potion. Again, you can slot in anything here that is some kind of a blueprint object, I would recommend. Now, where am I going to spawn this thing? I need to speed this a spawn transform. So let's go back to our level. We're going to select this trigger volume here. Then we're going to jump back to our Level Blueprint, hold down the archae are as in reference and left-click to bring in a reference to that trigger box. We're going to drag out of here. Get actor bounds is the node that we're looking for. Then we're going to drag out of the origin here and type in random a point in a bounding box. That's the box extent. We can plug that into the half size. And last but not least, we're going to drag backwards off the spawn transform, where we're going to type in make transform. The only aspect of the transform we're going to care about for this is the location. So take the location of our bounding box right here and plug that into the location of the make transform. So let's recap very quickly here what we've got going on. We are going to overlap this trigger volume. We're going to check to see if it was the player character that did the overlapping if it was, and that's true. One time, we're going to loop through this three times, starting at 0012. So bam, bam, bam, spawning three manna potions within the bounds of this trigger volume. Let's compile. That's going to check to see if our script is good. Save. Let's tuck this script right up here and let's go ahead and play. And you see my two volumes there. Let's overlap this first one here. 123. There we go. Now if I try overlapping and again, no dice, no dice, you can see it's just stopping at the do once node. Now you may be asking why did this emancipation spawn above right here? Well, we are getting our actor bounds for this Trigger box right here, but we are picking a random point within the bounding box by specifying an origin, the center of this. And the random point that we're truly picking is the half size of our box extent. So truly you can actually go outside of the bounds of this so long story short, this is just a quick example to show off the for loop node at work. So let me just quit out of here. To finish off, we're going to demonstrate the for loop with bread node inside of our ThirdPersonCharacter. So here's a directory to find that. Double-click on it to open it up. And we're going to bring in a keyboard events. Let's right-click and some empty space type in keyboard. Bring in any keyboard event that you haven't used yet. I'll go with the E key, shore y-naught, and he will do. What we're gonna do is drag off of this and bringing a for loop. A for-loop with break, not for each loop that's going to come later. Next video. And we're going to have the first index left alone at 0, the last index, however, I am going to put in the number 30. Then I'm going to right-click on this pin and I'm going to promote that to a variable just to show off, once again as a reminder, that if you put it in a number, then promotes a variable, you're going to not only create a variable, but if you compile, you will see that that number that you had hard set in there is now set as the default value for that promoted variable. Pretty handy. Now I'm going to rename this variable. I'm going to hit F2 on this and I'm going to call this inventory items max. So what are we doing here? We're going to go through a hypothetical scenario whereby your ThirdPersonCharacter can hold 30 inventory items. But let's just say on the characters UI, they can only display 15 items on a single page. So in this case, we're going to stop our for-loop with break when we find we have gone, we've gone through this 15 times. So essentially we're gonna be going from 01234567891011121314. That would be 15 times total. And we're going to break our For Loop. So what do we got to do next? We got to drag out of our index here. And we're going to bring in an equal symbol. And we are going to see if our index is equal to 14. Why 14? If we're wanting to truly break it after we've gotten to 15 items because remember our first index is counting 0. So with that set in there, I'm going to promote this to a variable. Right-click promotes variable. We can compile that. Now that is our new value in there. However, let's name this something better than that. So I'm going to rename it over here. Let's call that page one items max. And what we're gonna do next is dragged out of here and bring in a branch node. In between this, I'm going to sneak in a Print String nodes. So every time we're looping through, we're going to print out. So print string, which index we are on. So drag and drop that in there. It'll bring any conversion integer to string. Plug this into our branch. And what we wanna do here is if this is true, our page one items are equal to our indices of 14. Let's compile that again, 14. If this is true, we're going to whip back around here and we're going to break. Double-click on this to add some reroute nose to make that look a little bit nicer. Once we have broken, we've completed. I'm going to drag off of here, bringing in another print string node. And we're simply going to print out to the screen. Each one of your inventory is full or something like that. And let's print this out to the screen a little bit longer. So I click that down arrow right there to expose some more parameters here we'll set that to a duration of ten. So that's what we've got going on here. Again, we're not actually printing anything out to the screen. We're not printing any inventory items, isn't just all hypothetical. Compile this. Save. And let's go ahead and place that are debug option to be our ThirdPersonCharacter. So you can see this script firing off. And this is all going to happen very, very fast. So look up here in the upper left as I tap the E key, page, one of your inventory is false. So you saw all those indices, 012345678910 to 14 until it says page one of your inventory is full. You can see from this example here is we never got to our last index. We were supposed to go all the way up to 30 inventory items. Well, truly 31 if you're counting that 0. But we broke our loop here. We did not get through the loop that many times we broke when we hit 14. So that's an example of a for-loop with break node. Once again, these nodes are great when using them with inner construction script to create something like procedural walls like this, but they can also be used in event graphs as well. Now one final thing to note here back in our construction script that I created way earlier in the course when I created this script using a for-loop node, oftentimes when using for-loop knows the indices is used in some sort of a math calculation. So that's something to keep in mind as well. So for every time we're looping through this, I was using that index number, multiplying it by another number to figure out where exactly to place this instance, Static Mesh, this wall piece. Alright guys, that is gonna do to offer this one, we will see you all in the next video. 84. For Each Loops: Welcome. In this video, our goal is to gain knowledge and demonstrate use of the for each loop nodes, the close cousin of the for-loop nodes that we covered in the last video. So what makes a for each loop node different than the for-loop nodes? Well, they're flow control nodes that take in an array as opposed to any number of indices. Thusly, by taking in an array, they allow you to do something to each array element that is the contents of the array. Now, if you go back to our array video from earlier in the course, you will remember that an array is essentially a list. It is a container consisting of multiple elements that has entries of the same variable type. Alright, to show off in example here we will be doing some work inside of our level blueprint. But first, we're gonna be doing some work in side of our level. Now, I am going to use this SM lamp wall within my star content Props folder. Although really you can use any sort of static mesh to create what we're about to create. I've got a simple wall here. So if you want to place a wall of sorts in your level to play along, that might be good to do as well. Because what I'm gonna do is I'm going to place this wall Scott's along this wall that I've got going on here. And I'm going to show off something else that you can do here in Unreal, right up here within your viewport, this three arrow icon, you can turn on surface snapping. I currently have it on. That's what that check mark means. But if you don't know if you have it on or off, you can click right here. I do have it on. The reason I have that on is to show that off that if I drag and drop this into my level, it'll snap it to whatever surface that I am dragging it across. You can see it's sliding along the floor as well as placing along the wall like that. Now, if I was to release it and left-click and drag, It's not going to slide it along the floor like this. However, if I grab it by the three cornered point there, the translation widget that ball right there. If I left-click and grab it from there, then it will snap it to the surface. Now, I'm going to drag it along my wall here. Of course it's not exactly positioned like I want. I am going to have to rotate this particular one. So hitting the space bar, I'm going to rotate it like this. Rotate it like this, and rotate it like that to get it along the wall. Going to increase it in size here a little bit as well. And I'm going to bring out a couple of duplicates. So holding down the Alt key, I'm going to left-click and drag, holding down the Alt key again, left-click and drag. Alright, I've got three of those in my level. Great. I'm going to select all three of them here in my outliner. I'm going to select the first one, hold down Control, select the other two as well. So I've got all three of those selected. And then back in my Level Blueprint coming right here, open Level Blueprint. I'm going to shimmy on down here and I'm going to right-click. No, I'm not going to right-click. I could right-click and create a reference to each of those individually. If I had them individually selected, however, I'm gonna hold down the R key and left-click to bring in a reference to all three of those right away. They're stacked on top of each other. Unfortunately. Then what I'm gonna do is I am going to drag out of one of them and type in make array. So we're going to add pins to our array here. And we're going to plug each of these three into our make array note here. Now this can output an array. What I'm gonna do is I'm going to simply right-click on this and promote this to a variable. Although note, however, I don't have to do this. I'm gonna be using this array of lamps here, 123 to plug this into a for each new, for each loop node, this would work just fine for the purposes of that. However, just to show off that I can promote this to a variable, I will. So I'm going to right-click promote two-variable, and I will call this my lamp array. Now this immediately sets it to the proper variable type. Ended immediately. It makes it an eraser. That's kind of handy. And what I'm gonna do here is after I set these into an array, I'm going to plug this into an execution pin of my for each loop node, you can use the hotkey of holding down the F key and left mouse button to bring in a for each loop node. We're going to plug this into our array. Now we need an events to fire this all off. I have in my level a trigger volume already placed down. If you don't have one of these, you can come right under here. Come under basic Trigger box, place one of those in your level. I've got my box extents set to one hundred, one hundred, one hundred by line thickness set to tend to make it easy to see. And I've got actor hidden in game unchecked. Now with that selected in your level, back in your level blueprint, right-click. We're going to add an event for when we begin overlapping this. And we do want to make sure that we checked if it is our third-person character. So let's drag out of here Cast to ThirdPersonCharacter. And if it is, and we have set our array variable again, this portion right here isn't super necessary. We're going to do something for each element in this array. Now what do I want to do with each item in our array? All three of these, well, what I wanna do is drag out of our array element and I'm going to type in yet actor location. We're going to use the location of each of these walls to spawn an emitter. So I'm going to right-click in some empty space and I'm gonna do spawn emitter at location. I will plug in the accurate location to the location input of our spawn, a minaret location, our loop body, we will plug into this function node. The emitter here I'm going to use is simply fire my P fire. This is an older particle system. Again, you can put in an older particle system or you could do spawn system at location that is using Niagara sparkle effects, spawn the system at location is the equivalent there. This will work as is however, just for completeness sake. Off of this completed output pin, I'm going to print string. And I will simply put in the string. Done. So we'll print that out to the screen. And what I think I'll also do as well is let's sneak in another print string right up here, control C, control V. We're going to sneak this end before our loop body. We could put it after our emitter if we wanted to. So we're gonna go like this. And for each item in our array here, we're going to print out the array index just so you can see that number being printed out to the screen as well. So let's recap what we've got. Once our character overlaps that trigger volume, we're going to see if it was in fact our ThirdPersonCharacter. What we're then going to do is use these three lamps and make an array. So we're going to have an array, a list of static mesh actors here that are going to populate that variable. We're then going to, for each loop in our array, for each item in our array, we are going to get the actors location and spawn some fire. Let's compile this makes your R script is looking good to go. Let's jump in and play. Setting our debug object to our test map here. Alright, so here we go. Once we overlapped this, we should see fire appearing here, here, and here. It's as if we lit three torches. Now, this is spawning at the location of our lab. It's not low. If we look at our lamp, the translation widget is at the base of it. So that's why this flame is showing a little bit down here. However, we could offset this a little bit and make it appear up top, but you get the points. You can see, I'm not doing this one time. So if I keep overlapping this, you're going to see this text being printed out to the screen. And I'm keeping a spawning more particle effects here as well. But you can imagine a setup like this used to light the lamp. One more example to show off here in our Level Blueprint. This time we're going to be using the for each loop with break node. I've gone ahead and created an array of texts. So if you want to play along, click that plus button. We turned this into the variable type of texts, and we change the container type to be an array. And then I clicked here three times two, you add three array elements made warrior and thief. Now something to note with each of our four, each loop nodes is you have some gray pins on here. Now, these indicate wildcards, meaning we can plug in a variety of variable types to it. And it'll recognize what type we plug into it and change the corresponding type to be the same. Let me show you what I mean. I've got an array of texts right here. If I plug this into our gray array input right here, it's going to recognize that Hey, you're plugging in an array of texts variables. That means we're going to be outputting texts because your array consists of three texts made. Warrior and thief, three array elements. Alright, what are we gonna do with this setup here? Well, we're going to see if our array element is equal to some literal texts. Let's right-click it some empty space. Bring in an equal node operator, equal. Going to plug in our array elements into this. Actually that's the wrong one. My bad. We're going to firstly bringing the make literal text node, make literal text node. That's the one I'm looking for right down there. Out of this, I'm going to drag out and bring in the equals sign. We're looking for text equal exactly texts. That's the one we're looking for, NOT operators equal. There we go. I'm gonna hold down the Control key, left-click and just put this into the bottom one. In our array element is going to plug into the top one. Our literal texture that we're going to be searching for is warrior. Note. We have Warrior listed here as well as in our texts array. So when that is equal, we're going to drag out of here and bringing the branch node. And we are going to drag out of our true. I realized that there is a missing link right here. I'll get back to that in just a little bit. Dragged out of here to type in print text. And we're just going to print out found warrior. And what we're gonna do with this is drag and drop this all the way around into our break input, going to double-click on the wire a couple of times here. Now, the reason I left a little gap here is because I also want to inputs a prince text node right here. So I'm going to flow like this out of our loop body into their, into their, in our array elements. We're going to flow into there. So understand what we've got going on with this setup. We're going to press the B key. We're going to then loop through our array. We have three elements in our array. Each of these array elements we're going to print out to the screen, starting with major, then going to warrior. However, we're going to note that right here we're going to detect if these are equal. If they are equal and that equals true. We're going to print out, hey, we've found the warrior and then we're going to break our execution here, meaning because warrior is our middle index right here, we should never even get too deep because that is our last array entry. We're breaking it as soon as we find warrior. Let's go ahead and test that out here. Quickly compile, save, and play. Pressing the B key. There we go. It says major warrior, found warrior, we never even get to thief. Now some possible for each loop node uses for you to consider, perhaps you can use one of these nodes to destroy an array of enemies, or maybe spawn in array of items, like loot drop items upon destroying those enemies. Maybe you use a for each loop node to check the parameter of all objects in an array and then do something to those with a given parameter. As an example, for any enemies with less than 50% health Yulen to fall. Just some examples to get you thinking, alright guys, that's gonna do to offer this one. See you in the next one. 85. While Loop: Welcome. The while loop node is the focus of this video and we will be demonstrating a use case here momentarily. First, how does it work? Well, you will plug in an execution wire on the input side of the node. And it will repeatedly execute out of the loop body on the output side. So long as the Boolean condition here is true. Now note you've got to be careful with this node, as it is very easy to get stuck in an infinite loop if you're not careful. As a good rule of thumb, do not enter a while loop node unless the condition can near immediately switched to false. For example, if you're waiting to have your character and overlapping a trigger volume to switch a condition to false, you're guaranteed to be stuck in an infinite loop. You have to immediately have a means of setting your condition to false. Alright, now, onto an example use case of the while loop node. Now I'm just going to do a little bit of pre-set up here before we get to some scripting, what I've done is any content characters, meshes, folder. I've simply drag and drop the Imani Skeletal Mesh into my level. Really any sort of skeletal mesh with some collision, static mesh, we'll do a basic shape as long as it has collision will do. We're going to do something off on hit events. What we're essentially trying to set up here is a scenario where Manny is going to be a thief and he's going to steal some excess inventory items from our ThirdPersonCharacter. How devious in deed. Now next, you need to have your ThirdPersonCharacter Blueprint open because inside of here, double-click on that. We're going to add a couple of variables. So under the My Blueprint panel we're going to click Add variable. This first one is going to be called inventory max items. And then I can right-click on that, duplicate it. Control D is how you can duplicate it as well. This one is going to be called inventory. Current items that I need to compile in order to add some default values. So I'm going to say currently our character has 75 inventory items, weapons, shields, health potions, all that kind of stuff. And they're really only allowed to bank 50, that is the maximum they're supposed to have. So underneath this hypothetical scenario, I'm saying our character is carrying more items than they are allowed to have. But we're allowing them to actually carry these excess items until they actually bank them if they're caught, however, wandering the open world and a thief comes along, they can steal any excess items that are character may have. Again, we're seeing that the maximum allowed to quote unquote bank is 50. Currently they are greedy and carrying 75. So a thickens steel up to 25 of those. Alright, with that, I'm going to compile this. We're going to jump back to our level. Makes sure that you've got your Manny Skeletal Mesh actor selected. And with that selected head on over to your Level Blueprint, open Level Blueprint. I've done a little bit of pre-set up here ahead of time. But here's how you can play along. Firstly, I'm doing an actor hits four are many. Skeleton there, Skeletal Mesh. If you right-click at events, collision, add on actor hip, That's how you can add that node. Then out of here you can drag out and do a Cast to ThirdPersonCharacter to find that node. Now, if it is our ThirdPersonCharacter that hits our thief, their Manny, the thief. We are going to flow into this and do once. What we're going to do once is iterate through this while loop. So even though this says do once, we're going to stay in this while loop until the condition here turns to false. Now we have to plug in a condition. Well, our condition is going to evaluate our inventory items. So drag out of your third-person character, type in inventory, we're going to get our current inventory items. And remember, we've got 75 is our current inventory. So I'm going to click on these three dots right here and put it in 75 just as a reminder for ourselves. Then I'm going to drag out, if you're again type in inventory, we're gonna get our max items that were allowed to have. And I'm going to click these three dots and put it in 50. And we're going to compare these two. So dragging out of my current items, I'm going to bring in a greater than node. So if our current items are greater than r max items is long, is this is true, we will continue flowing out of our loop body here. Now, every time we flow out of our loop body, I want to decrement the amount of items in our current inventory. So I'm going to drag out of here and type in decrements. Now this node takes in an input and it will automatically decremented from here. So it'll go 75 decremented. This will actually set it back to the current amount. So 75 minus 174, it'll automatically set that as a new value. Then it will loop again, 73, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So long as this evaluates to true, as soon as this evaluates to false, will stop that process. So I'm going to plug this into our print string here so we can see these numbers printed out to the screen like so. And lastly, out of the completed execution pen, I'm going to bring in another print string. And I will simply print out excess in vain Tory items stolen, stolen by that their thief. So that is our script if you want to play along at home. Now this is an example use case of the while loop because I know, I know that this is going to evaluate to false. I know that my current inventory items will eventually reach this limits. So let's compile this. Save. I'm going to tuck this right up here. Clicking play, setting my debug object to my maps so I can see this script firing off. Here. We go, There is my thief. I've got my 75 items that I'm a rolling around within the level watch up here. Immediately, 7473 is over and it said excess inventory items removed, and it only did that the one time. You can see if I try this again, it gets stuck up at the do want snow. So that is an example. Use case of the while loop. Now, as for differences between the while loop and for loops in general, you should use a for-loop when you know how many times the loop should run. If you want the loop to break on a condition other than the number of times it should run. Maybe then consider using a while loop. All right guys, that is gonna do to offer this one. See you in the next one. 86. Switches: Welcome. We're going to be covering a switch nodes in this video. And right out of the gates, you may notice that switch nodes come in a variety of flavors here. And they don't have a gray banner along the top like the rest of our flow control nodes. I'm considering these part of the flow control category because essentially we are going to be controlling the flow of our script. That is which one of these execution pins we flow out of, depending on the data being input into the switch node. Now switch nodes come in several varieties. In fact, a whole lot of varieties we're gonna be covering the main varieties here. That is a switch on int, switch on string, switch on name. And we'll also do a switch on enumerator. You don't see switch on enums out here because the name of a switch on enumeration will vary depending on the enumeration that you have created. This is what I created earlier in the course, and this enumeration consists of the three labels, super okay, and her badly. So if I was to drag a wire out of this and type in switch, I could bring in a switch on them that is specific to this enumeration. You can see my outputs, there are super, okay, and hurt badly. Now, if you were to right-click in any event graph and simply type in the word switch. You can find a whole host of switch nodes, most of which will never use. But it's good to point out that they do exist. Once again, we'll be covering the main flavors and this one and something that you'll notice his comment about all of these switch nodes is they have one single execution input pin, but they do have different data inputs to them depending on the type of switch node. Also, what is common amongst them is that you can flow out of different outputs depending on the data being input. So this is what a switch on int that is short for Switch on integer node looks like when you first search for it and add it to your graph. However, over on the right-hand side, you see what this node could look like if I add pins to it. So for all of these, you can click this Plus button and add more pins to it. By default, they start off with a default output pin. You can actually customize this with any of these nodes selected over in the Details panel, you can choose whether or not it has a default pin. And you can also, in the case of a switch on it, note, if you are adding some pins to it, like I'm doing here, you can choose your start index. So currently says start at index 0. I could say choose to start at index ten, and then I'll make the first number here ten, and then it'll number accordingly. I'll set that back to default. Switch on string. Very similar. I can add more pins like this. And with that selected over in the Details panel, I can choose whether or not it has a default pin. I can choose the pin names, et cetera. I can choose it. They are case sensitive or not. So there are some different options depending on the type of switch node. Now, the default output pin, when do you flow out of this? You will flow out of this if the data being input does not match any of your different output pins that you desire. This is easily seen on the switch on internode. So right now I have a selection of zeros. If I was to flow into this, I would fire out of the 0 output pin. If however, my number here was saved 50. And we were to run a script through here. It does not match any of these outputs, so we would fire out of the default output. Okay, I've got a few examples I'd like to show off here. So I'm going to be starting in my third person Character Blueprint. Now what I've done ahead of time here, I did this in an earlier video. I created an enum called E health status. This enum, this enumeration consists of three labels, super okay, and hurt badly. I'm just going to slide this section over to this portion of the graph where I have some nodes awaiting for me. And what I'm simply going to do is upon pressing some input key, I am going to alter my characters maximum walk speed. Now, you can alter these parameters right here, this max walk speed parameter, if you select your character movement component, you can see over in the Details panel you have a parameter called max walk speed that, that controls how fast your character moves. So all you need to do is drag and drop. Add this to your graph, the drag out of here and type in set max walk speed, and you will find that node. So what we're gonna be looking to do here is based upon the value of our enum here, super, okay, or her badly, you see those are the three outputs that correspond with the three labels that this enum consists of. If it's super, we're going to increase our max walk speed. If it's okay. We're going to set it to be. 500. If we're hurt badly, we're going to set this to be 100s. So I'm going to right-click and I'll bring in an input key. Let's try the aids key. I don't think I'm using the aid key for anything just yet. So right now our health status is super. So once I press the a key, we should increase our maximum walk speed to 2 thousand years. So clicking play, setting my debug. Object to my ThirdPersonCharacter. Here we go. So I am wandering or bout wondering about I'm going to press that achy. And now suddenly I can move much faster. Boasted changed my health status here to simply be hurt badly. I've changed that now. So once I press the a key, we're going to evaluate this value heard Valley. We will flow out of here and it'll change our max B2, 100. Clicking Play. There we go, pressing the movement keys right now, WAS and D. Here we go. Eight key. Now I'm hurt badly and I'm an Olympian right along. So there is an example of a switch on enum. For this next example, I am going to kill this enemy. Look at that scary guy out there by simply clicking on them. When I do, I'm going to use a switch on inch node to spawn some loop to kinda create a random loot drops system. So if you want to play along at home, I simply added a mesh. This S k, m at Manny from my character mannequins meshes folder, a drag and drop that into my graph. And with that selected, I went into my Level Blueprint here. And I have a few nodes set up ahead of time here. I added an onclick event for that S KM many, again, you have to have him selected and your level and you can add one of these by right-clicking. And events in input events, a mouse input. And this is where I did an onclick events. So what do I want to do when I click on Manny here? Well, I'm going to drag off of here and bring in a switch on node. And I'm going to add some output pins here. I'm gonna go 1234. And I am going to pick an integer value from a random range. So I'm going to drag backwards off of this and type in random. Random integer range is what I'm going to look for. So I'm going to say give me a number between 03. So it'll pick 012 or three. And then I will fire out of the corresponding pins based on which number it selects. Now what I wanna do is if we get a 0 or one, I'm simply going to flow into a play sound to the node. It's going to say fail. So 50% of the time we're just going to play a sound and you are going to get nothing. So we'll say 50% of the time for killing a man. He there you get nothing but the other 50% of the time we're going to spawn something into our level here. I'm going to drag into a spawn actor from class node. You can right-click and do a search for spawn actor from class. We're going to say if we get a two or a three, we're going to spawn. I'm going to spawn in a BP man, a potion we created that earlier in the course. And I got to feed this a spawn transform because if I compile right now it's gonna yell at me and say, Hey, you need to spawn transform for this. So I'm going to say, where should we spawn this? Let me just get rid of these two nodes down here. Well, I already have Manny selected, so I'm going to right-click and some empty space. Actually I'm not going to right-click. I could right-click and get a reference to Manny like that. Or you can hold down the RT left-click and get a reference to Manny like that. Let's drag off of Manny and type in get trans form. We're looking for the world that transform. We get actor transform is just fine. We'll plug that into. That's end. Let's play a sound of sorts after this. So we'll drag off of this play sound 2D, and we'll play teleports. Committed. Sure, that sounds good. Let's compile our script here. So when we click on Manny, we're going to pick a number random between 03, depending on what number we get. We will either fail 50% of the time or 50% of the time we will spawn a manifestation. So this is a way you can kind of create a randomized loot system that is weighted. If I wanted to wait this seventy-five percent of the time to span and to span a man, a potion. You can see how I could go with a setup like that. But I'll go 5050 instead. Compile, save. Get rid of this guy right here. And we'll deal with those string in name switches in just a moment. Hey, This, moving this over to the corner here, I'm going to set my map as my test debug object. And here I go, I'm going to click on it. You'll see this script firing off. Bam, there is a man, a potion at his feet, and I didn't destroy many. I probably should have done that as well. Because we can now continue to click on them. It's all spawning it in the exact same spot. And actually I should do that. Let's kill off many. If we in fact spawn that Amanda potion dragged out of money, we will say Destroy Actor. In the events that we click on. Both of these can flow into there like so. So now when I click on them, bam, dead, we have a man, a potion that we can collect as well. Alright, next example I am showing off here is going to be done inside of my Level Blueprint. And as a little bit of preparation done ahead of time, I do have a Manny added to my level here. And just to show you what else I did here is with Manny selected back in my Level Blueprint, right away I got a reference to Manny down here. So you can get that by holding down the Alt key and left clicking. And then what I did is I draw it out here. The actors location by typing that in. I'll explain all this in just a little bit, but let me backup a little bit. Firstly, we are pressing the five key. So if you right-click and type in keyboard, That's how you can get the five key. Well, we're then doing is we are going to flow into a switch on string node. Now this is what the node first looks like when you bring it in. However, you can add some pins by clicking on this plus button. When you do, you can rename those output pins by overriding these names. And you can see I did that by naming them Bob, Pablo, and whoo. Alright, so I'm gonna delete this one out in favor of the one I set up ahead of time. Now we are flowing a string variable into this, I created a variable here, namestring, and it is of the type string. And I set the default value to be Pablo. As you'll note, that is the name of my middle output execution pin right here. I left a note port right here. Then what I also am doing is not only getting this string variable to plug into here, I'm also setting that exact same string variable back to Whoo As soon as I release the five key. So I'm pressing it, evaluating this string variable's contents, it's gonna be Pablo. So we will continue flowing out of here. And then we're going to teleport our player character, that is us, to the location of Manny. Now we can't flow exactly to the location of manny. I simply drug out of here, brought in a subtract node and I'm simply subtracting by 200 in the x location just to offset myself a little bit. And I plug that in as my destination location. So note I'm pressing the five key. This string variable will read as possible, so will flow out of the Pablo output. We're going to teleports to the location near Manny. As soon as I release the five key, it's going to change the contents of that variable to woo so that the next time I press the five key, we are going to do nothing because there is nothing coming out of the Wu output. Pin. Compile save. Let's go ahead and play here in test this out. Alright, so check right up here. I'm going to be pressing the five key and I will be teleported close to many there. And just to really prove this out, let me fly far away, run far away from Manny. Okay, here we go. Five key. We've teleported. I'm now going to release the five key, setting the contents to Wu now for that string variable. So the next time I press the five key, we can even see that it output whoo. You can see that by mousing over this wire, it's showing Wu. And nothing happens because we don't have anything happening off of the Wu output pin. So there you have it for switching on string. And last but not least, one more example of the switch node. This one is going to be switched on name. I'm also going to be doing this within my Level. Blueprint has a little prep work. I have a couple of name variables over in the variable section. I created these way earlier in the course. One of them is called a level 11 of them is called level two. And when I gave them a default value, I named one starter map in lowercase and the other level to hear minimal default in all caps, these actually correspond to the name of some level assets. If I jump back to my content browser down here within the starter content maps folder, there is a minimal default map and there is a starter map. So I'm going to be using these variables to drive which level we are going to transport to that we're going to go to based upon the selection that we plug into this switch on NameNode. And I'm gonna be going about this a little bit differently. Firstly, I'm going to left-click and drag each of these into my graph. Like so. Then what I'm going to do just to show off a different thing that we can do here is I'm going to make array. An array is a list of like things. These are both named variables, so we can create a list of those. I'm going to add a pin so that I can plug in at level two here. Then I'm going to back this up just a little bit and I'm going to drag out of this. We now have an array consisting of two elements. I'm going to drag out of this and type in random, random array item. And I will plug this in like salts. So this node is going to pick a random array item. We only have two possible selections here. It'll choose one at random, and it will let me click plus and plus flow out of each of these depending on which element it picks. So I am going to change my case 0 here to match level one here. So starter mountain just going to hit Control C, switch on name. I'll override that control V. And then for level to Control C and switch on name Control V. Alright, so if it is the starter map that gets chosen, we're gonna flow to the level named started maps. I'm actually going to drag and drop this level onto this open level by name function. And if this chooses from our array, the minimum default level to here, I'm going to drag and drop this onto here and go like that. Alright, so let's go ahead and compile that. Save it. And we'll give this a play here. So as soon as I press the five key, we're going to freeze because we're going to be transporting the levels here. And so we did in fact transport to another level playing once again, see if we get the other one to show up here pressing the five key, there is our minimal default level, and there you have it, switch on names. So these switch on nodes are super useful. I personally like to use the switch on nodes quite a bit to chronic create a random loot drops system. You can wait those loot drop percentages, but lots of useful applications guys that'll do to offer this video. See you in the next one. 87. Select: Welcome. In this video, our goal is to gain knowledge and demonstrate use of the select node. Now the select note isn't officially considered a flow control node as it does not affect the flow of execution. In fact, there are no execution pins on this note. However, the select note does aid in the flow of data in your script. So I thought it best to include this lesson here. So the select node, what exactly does it do? Well, select notes, take in any index and based upon that index, it will return one of the options inputted. Now this is useful because sometimes you want the return value here to be different depending on the value input. Now just a very quick example. If I change our index type here to be a Boolean, we see that our input pins here change to be true and false. Now, depending on if this is true, we could have the true value here, output. Or if it is false, we could have whatever is input into the false being output. So you can see depending on the value of this, we're going to pick one of these options to return, alright, to bring one of these select nodes into your graph, it's as simple as right-clicking and doing a search for select. Or alternatively, another way that you can bring in a select note is if you have one of these index types, boolean, byte, integer, integer 64, or any enumeration you could drag out of that variable type in find the select note as well. Now just to demonstrate this, I'm going to choose, I have an integer variable over on my left-hand side here. I'm just going to drag and drop this into my graph. I was to get it and then drag out of it and type in select. You can see that I can find a select node from there. And that integer is immediately plugged into the select node. Alright, let's quickly explore some node options here before we show off some examples, I'm just going to delete out this node quickly. You can right-click on a node, the node itself, and you can see how you can add pins to it. Right-click Add pin, or you could remove pin by right-clicking on the node, remove pin. Remove pin. Right-clicking an option or return value can change the pin types. Right now these are set as wildcards, meaning that they can be changed to something dynamically. Do whatever I plugged into this. Say if obviously plug in a vector into option one is going to change all the other pins here the option in the return value to be that same type. Or I could hard set a here by right-clicking on either the option or return value pins. And by doing so, I could change the pin type to be one of the various options. Right-click Change pin type. And I could change this to be say, transforms. I can also change the index type down here either by clicking on this drop-down. And I'm not sure why it's showing it way up here. Once I click on that boolean, byte, integer, integer 64, or any of the various enums. Or I can simply right-click on the pin itself and change the pin type with the little drop-down there as well. But you've already got this drop-down, so I don't find that option to be all that useful. And then of course you can see on the note itself here you have the option to add pins simply by clicking on this plus button. So that's another way you can add some more option pins. Alright, example time, I'm gonna be showing off several select node examples here in my Level Blueprint. So if you want to play along at home, selecting your level tab right here, open Level Blueprint, That's how you can find your way on over here. And I'm going to start off by right-clicking and typing unions select. Now the first example I want to show off your is using a Boolean index. So I'm going to click on this drop-down and select a Boolean index. Now notice that the moment I do this and select boolean is going to change my options here to be false and true because a boolean can only be false or true. I'm going to drag backwards off of my index here and I'm going to type in random bool. So this node is simply going to spit out randomly either the value of false or true, depending on which value it spits out. Let's just say, for example, it spits out false. It will choose that input, the false input here, to return. If it spits out true, it will choose the true input to return. That's how it works. Alright, let's bring in an event node right away. I'm going to Right-click type in the five keyboard input. And we're going to drag out of this and type in open level by name. Now this function will open up a level by name. It is looking for a name variable. Check this out. Over in the left-hand side. I've got level one and level two. These are two named variables. That is the type here that I created earlier in the course. And after I compiled, I set the name values here to be starter map for level one. Level two, I set the name variable type here to be minimal default. Now this is not a mistake. I name these as such because back here in my content browser, in the starter content maps folder, there are two levels, two maps that we can open up called minimal defaults and star map. You'll notice that the casing of all the letters here, minimal default and starter map is a little bit different here than what you see in the variable names. Here's all capitalize, and here is all lowercase for name variables. It doesn't matter. Alright? So I'm gonna plug level one into the false input, level two into the true input. And actually before I drop it in there, note this, the moment I plugged in a variable type into either any of these inputs right here, or let me just snip this wire. I'm going to hold down Alt and left-click. Or if I plug something into the return value in this direction, it's going to change both sides of the node to be that corresponding variable type. So it knows that our return value desired here is of the name. So it is going to say, okay, you're looking for a name variable type, that means you've got to plug-in some named variables. So level one, level two here. So once I press the five key, it's going to open at some level according to the name variable, we plug into it which name variable is going to ultimately pass through here? Well, that's gonna be determined by this select note. The select note is going to take any random bull. It is spitting out false. It is going to pick, it's going to select Level one here, the starter map, and return that to be the level that we opened. If this random bool spits out true, it is going to pick, select the true value here, plugged in minimal default, and pass that as the level to open up compiling, saving, playing. I've got my test map already set up there so we can see this group firing. So when I press the five key, here we go. It jumped me to my minimal default level. In that case, it shows the true option because at random bool must have spit out true. I know that was the minimal default level. Alright, next example here I'm going to start off by placing a Trigger box here in my level. And you can find one of those by coming right up here under the basic section, Trigger box, drag and drop that here. With that, in your level, you can set your box extent to be a 100100100 line thickness of ten. And also, I also recommend making it so that you can see this in your level as well. And you can do that by coming under the rendering section and unchecking actor hidden in game. Alright, with that selected here in our level blueprint, I'm going to right-click and we're going to do something when we overlap that because we do a lot of things in gains when we overlapped a trigger volume. What we're gonna do is we're going to drag out of our other actor and we're going to Cast to ThirdPersonCharacter. That is the characters that we are controlling. And if it is true that the other actor overlapping that trigger box was the third-person character. We're going to spawn something, spawn actor from class. And we're going to plug this in like so. Now what we spawn in is going to be driven by an integer index. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to drag and drop an integer down into my graph right here in integer variable like so, you can create one of these by clicking the plus button and adding an integer variable. I'm gonna get it. And then I'm going to drag out of here and I'm going to type in select. Because I'm dragging this out of the integer variable. It knows that I want to input that as my index. Now, I want to pick something to spawn into my level depending on the integer i input. So I'm going to go like this to ensure that I have the proper classes to put as my options. If I just drag backwards off of the spawn actor from class, knew like though, like so, and plug it into the return value. It's automatically going to change my input pins to be of the same type. Here we go. Alright, so let me add a third pin here. And now I can select different classes that we want to spawn in. I'm just gonna pick some at random here. I've got a man, a potion that I created earlier. We can spawn in some fire blueprint effect. Fire doesn't really matter what you slot it in here, and also do sparks. Those are some common ones I like to. Alright, now my integer here, if it is 0, if that's the integer that we're feeding this, it'll choose Option 0 to spawn into the game. If I change this integer value to one, it'll choose this option to return and spawn into the game. If integer is equal to two, it'll choose these sparks to return and spawn that into the game. Now I do need to give us a spawn transform, because if I compile here, it's going to yell at me and say, Hey you idiot, I need to know where to spawn in. So I'll jump back to my level. I will bring in, let's bring in a target points. I'm going to click right up here. I'm going to bring on the place actors panel and type in targets. Target points. Place one of those right about there. With that selected back here in my Level Blueprint, I'm going to right-click this time. Create a reference to that, will drive out of this and typing get trans form good actor transform. And I know right now are integer is a value of 0. So I'm going to compile here. So we should be spawning in a manner potion. So let's go ahead and play here. Shrink that down. So as soon as I overlap this trigger volume, it should select integer 0 here that man a potion to spawn into the game at the location of that target point. Here we go. And it did in fact do that. Now, that is not super interesting because we knew that that was going to be our result because we have hard set our integer value here to be 0. So what I could do is delete this, drag backwards off of our index and type in random integer in range. And I can say, Hey, pick something between 02, compile, save in play. Here we go. Met a potion. If I keep overlapping because I'm not doing this once. I'll eventually get them all. There we go. And so you can see how it is picking a different option here depending on the random number that we're feeding it. Alright, one last example here for this one, I'm gonna be using my BP third-person character. So if you wouldn't mind jumping into their double-clicking on it to open it up, I am going to be showing how we can use a select node along with an e num in enumeration. Now we created this enumeration earlier in the course. So if you want to know what an enumeration looks like, I'm coming under my scripting Blueprints folder. And in here I have the enumeration eHealth status and you can right-click and some empty space come under Blueprints to create an enumeration asset. In this health status enumeration, which is a list of labels, if you will. I have super okay and hurt badly. Then inside of my third-person character, I created a variable, and I set the variable type to point to that enumeration that I created, eHealth status. I'm going to drag and drop this into my graph. We're going to get that and I'm going to drag out of this and type in select. So we can see immediately because our enumeration right here consists of those three labels hurt badly, okay, in super, we see these as our three inputs right here. Now what do we wanna do depending on if this index here is hurt badly, okay, or super? Well, what I wanna do is grab my character moving component, drag and drop that. And I am going to, let's do something else here. You've seen me adjust my max walk speed before. I'm going to set my jump z velocity. Now the jump Z Velocity is a parameter inside of your character movement component. There it is, that determines how high your character can jump. So I am going to drag backwards. Offices jumped z velocity. This is a float variable than it is looking for and plug this into the return value. Now the moment I do this, it's going to change all of the inputs here to be a float value as well. Now I could plug in some variables to determined these values right here. I'm just going to hard set them here. So I'm gonna say if I am super my jumps, the velocity is going to be 2 thousand. If it is, okay, I'm gonna set it to be 700, which is the default value for the jumps, the velocity. And if I'm hurt badly, I'm going to say we can only jump up to a 100. I'm going to need some sort of input key here. So let me right-click. It's an empty space. I'll bring in the five key here because I'm no longer using that in my Level Blueprint. I deleted it out of there. So when I press the five key, we're going to set our character movements. Jump z velocity property, that property right there. It's gonna be set to 2000s if our health status is said to her, set to super. If it is set to okay, we're going to jump up 700. And if we are hurt badly, it's set to hurt badly. We're going to jump up very little. Alright, so right now the value of this is hurt badly, so I should barely jump up. So Compile, Save, play. Let me set my debug object to the ThirdPersonCharacter here so that we can see the script firing off. So right now I'm hurt badly. So when I press the space bar, I don't jump up too far. But actually that's my normal jumps. Sorry, I got to press the five key here first. Now when I jump up, I'm barely getting up off the ground. Let me set my health status here to be super compile save, play, and now I'm pressing the space bar, That's my normal jump, pressing five. So I'm setting my jump velocity now to be 2000s because the, the output for this is super. So now when I press the space bar, I'm feeling happy. So there is an example use of the select node using an enum. Alright, so what are some other possible uses of the select node? Consider these, perhaps depending on the player's health status and you can add the player played different animations. They could limp, for example, perhaps depending on a mood, enums, happy, sad, that sort of thing, you could alter what music track it's played. Here's another example. Perhaps depending on any equipped weapon enumeration, you could display different weapons holstered on the character. And lastly, perhaps depending on a key integer, you could display x number of key meshes dangling off the players bell. So if you had an integer input that said three, you could display it three keys hanging off the players belt. If that integer index at one, you could have one key hanging off the players belt, that kind of thing. Alright guys, is select node one of the most useful nodes in all of scripting. Know what love it that'll do to offer this one. See you in the next one. 88. Casting: All right, Welcome everyone. Well, we have hit a very key portion of the course where we're going to be talking about different ways to communicate between blueprints. And we're gonna be talking about casting specifically in this one. Now up until this point in the course, you've seen me actually do a lot of casting. The whole concept of casting is essentially checking upon some interaction taking place if a given object is of the type you're looking for, no matter if it is or is not, you can make some bit of script fire off. Now you've seen me do a lot of casting up to this point in the course, including our bp example pickup that we created at the very beginning of the course. And now, just to jump inside of this blueprint, we made it so that when you begin overlapping the collision sphere for this BP example pickup that is this collision sphere right here. We are doing this thing called casting to check to see if it was the ThirdPersonCharacter that was the other actor that did the overlapping. So once again, casting allows us to check if a given object is of the type we're looking for. In doing so. In this case, we were able to reach inside of our ThirdPersonCharacter, grab the health variable that lived inside of it, add some amount to it, and then set that health variable back. We're communicating from our bp example pickup here to our ThirdPersonCharacter, increasing the health of our ThirdPersonCharacter. So you can see communicating between blueprints is a very critical concept to get down. Alright, you've seen me Cast to ThirdPersonCharacter here a million times already in this course. So I'm gonna be doing something a little bit different for our example. Let's head on back to our level editor here. And then my scripting Blueprints section, I'm going to right-click and some empty space. And I'm going to choose a blueprint class, and I will choose the actor class. And I'm going to call this BP underscore. Move when near. And you'll see why named it that here in just a little bit. I'm going to double-click on this guy to open it up. And I'm going to add for our components in the upper left here we'll add a simple, Let's add a simple cone under the basic shapes. And we're also going to add one more components. And this one is gonna be called interp to move. Now this is a really cool component that allows us to move our blueprint here between however many points we set up. Now I'm just going to leave it at that name in Too movement and hitting Enter on that. And with it selected, I'm going to head on over to the Details panel to set up some points that I'm going to have this cone moving between. Now I can set that up over in our control section over here. And if I click on this plus button once and twice and expand these arrows out, I can choose some points in space that I want to move this cone between. I'm going to leave the first one at 000 and the second. These positions are relative to one another. I'm going to just set to be 50 in the z. Now down below, little bit down here in the behavior section, we can choose a behavior type, whether it moves just from point a to point B, that's one shot. Whether I have it do a looping reset, I'm going to choose ping pong here. So it's gonna be doing back-and-forth, back-and-forth between these two points. Mi duration here is one seconds, so it's going to take that amount of time to move between those two points. Next, I am going to compile this. We're going to save this and we're going to head on over to my ThirdPersonCharacter Blueprint. Now if you've forgotten where that is, third-person blueprints, double-click on your third-person character. Now, earlier in the course, we added this simulated hand, which is essentially just some sphere collision. If you have this great, if you did not go through that course and create this, you can create it now. Now I have this attached to my capsule components. So if you do not have this, you can select your Capsule Component, going to add type in sphere, and you can add a sphere collision component. That's what that is. Now, I've set my radius here to be 32. I think I'm just going to set it out in front of my character just a little bit more, something like that. And I'm going to increase the size here a little bit to make it 50. And I called this simulated hand because I'm gonna be doing some checking to see if something has overlapped this sphere out in space. Alright, with that all done, we're going to head on over to our event graph. And with our simulated hand here component, we're going to right-click on us. We're going to add an event and we're gonna do something. We begin overlapping that we already have something on begin overlap because I don't see it in our list here. So the way we can find that is with simulated hand selected way down here. Under the events section we can go to on component begin overlap. We can view where that is. And you can see that this is the example that we set up in our function library video. I'm just going to delete out these nodes for the time being so we can make use of our simulated hand. Once again, I'll delete out this comment box as well. Move that into position. There we go. Alright, now the script I have in mind here is I'm going to drag out of my other actor pin right here. And now I can do casts to move to near that blueprint that I just created. So what we're saying here is if the other actor that overlap our simulated hand here, that sphere collision right there. If that other actor was the move to near a blueprint that I'm about to place in my level here. Let me go ahead and back to my Blueprints folder. Move when near, I'm just going to drag that out here. Alright, so there it isn't my level. Going back to my ThirdPersonCharacter, if that blueprint right here was the other actors that overlap my simulated hand, I can do something. If it was not the thing that overlap my simulated hand, I could do something else, but what I wanna do is reach inside of my BP, moved to near. This will give us access to various components and properties inside of my BP moved to near functions, variables, that kind of thing. I'm going to firstly, right-click on this. I'm going to promote this to a variable because I'm gonna be using that variable just a little bit. So let's promote this to a variable. We can leave it at that name right there. And then we will drag out of here and access our interp, two movements components. Remember in our bp moved to near, we had this component called interpret to movement. Now inside of this component right here over to the Details panel, I'm going to type in the word activates. And you can see that it is auto activated meeting. It would move between those two points that we had set up. Now I'm going to disable this for the time being so that it will not move between those two points that I had set up. It is not going to be activated automatically. Let's compile and save this once again, going back to my ThirdPersonCharacter, we're going to say once our simulated hand is overlapped by our move to near blueprint, we're going to save that out to its own variable. Then we're going to grab inside of it the interp2 movement component. And then we're going to drag out of it and type in the word activates. Vase, not active, activate. And here is where we are telling that interpretive movement component that lives inside of that blueprint to become active, to activate. Now the reason I saved this out to its own variable is because now I'm going to drag and drop this reference right here in my graph. And we're going to drag out of this type in interp to movement. We're gonna get it once again. And I'm going to drag onto this and type in D activates. Turn that back off. I'm just going to turn it off with a key. Let me type in. Let's try the 0 key. So upon our simulated hand components overlapping that BP moved to near blueprint out in her level. We're saving that out to its own variable, a reference to that guy. We're going to grab inside of it and we're going to talk to our interp2 movement component right there. We're going to tell that interpretive movement to become active so that it moves between these two points. Then back in my ThirdPersonCharacter Blueprint, when I press the arrow key, I will deactivate that movements. Alright, with that, let's compile it and save. Let me kinda move this off to the upper left up here. Gonna go in and play. Set our debug object to our third-person character. And you can see our simulated handout there and it rotates with my character because it is attached to my character capsule component. And I'll try to get this from a side angle here so you can see it's not moving at all. However, once I overlap that with my simulated hand here, it does in fact move up, down, up, down. Now when I press the 0, let me move away from it and press the arrow key. It stops, it deactivates that component. Now if I overlap it again, it doesn't activate it again for some reason. I don't know the reason behind that. Not sure if that's an engine bug or not. But you can see it is trying to activate it up here in my script. Once you deactivate it for whatever reason it keeps it the active. But the point is well-taken here that by casting to our bp moved to near, we were ensuring that it was that actor that are simulated hand had overlapped. And in doing so, we were able to follow this script out of this execution plan. Now if that had failed, If it was not the other actor that overlap that simulated hand, once again, we could have done something our cast fail. And there you have it, guys casting essentially allows you to check upon some interaction taking place. If a given object is of the type you're looking for, it is a great, great method for storing of some given the thing to its own variable and also being able to reach inside of it once you have cast into it to access any variables, functions call any custom events, that sort of thing that you want to do to communicate from one blueprint to another. That'll do it all for this video, guys see you in the next one. 89. Direct Communication (Part #1): Welcome. Blueprint communication has been the focus of this section of the course. And in the last video, we focused on casting. And that being one of the methods you can use to have one blueprint communicate with another. Now casting is a wonderful in handy Blueprint communication technique in that if your cast does succeed, you can capture a reference to the thing that you've cast you, as well as it enables you to reach inside of the thing that you've cast you and access any components, variables, functions, call any customer events, that sort of thing. However, it does have a weakness. That weakness is you must plug something into this object input in order for you to actually get a reference to the thing that you're looking to get a reference to or access any of the components, variables, et cetera, that you're hoping to access if you don't plug anything into that object reference, let me go ahead and just kill this out here inside of my Level Blueprint and I compile, it's going to give me a warning saying, can't do it, you must have something plugged into that object reference. So is there another way to communicate from one blueprint to another? Yes, there is. There is a method called direct communication. So in this video, our goal is to demonstrate how we can have two Blueprints talk to one another through a technique known as Direct Blueprint Communication. Now with this approach, you set up a target blueprint that gets referenced in response to whatever script you set up inside of a working blueprint. Now let's show you what I mean by setting up two different actor class blueprints. We're going to have a blueprint light and a blueprint button. And we're going to have one talk to another using this method I just talked about direct communication. Hop on back to your level editor here and inside of your scripting Blueprints folder, let's create two new actor class blueprints. Right-clicking Blueprint Class I will create one of the actor variety and this will be called BP underscore lights. And inside of here I'm going to double-click on this to open it up. And I'm going to add a few components. We're going to add a cone. I'm going to type in cone, basic shape cone. That's fine. And then I'm going to add another one. Under the light section. I'm just going to type in light. I want to add a spotlight. And I'm gonna have to set some parameters for each of these, starting with our lights are Spotlight, we're going to set our intensity to be quite, quite bright. So with the light selected spotlight set the intensity to be something like a 100 thousand. You can set a different light color right here, but I'm going to set it to be 100 thousand right now. I'm also going to have it facing down. So it's rotated this on down like that. That'll do. And also under the rendering section where it says a visible, I'm going to check this or uncheck it rather so that it is not visible. Okay, So you've got a cone and the spotlights. That's great. Alright, head on back to your content browser. We're going to right-click again Blueprint Class actor. This won't be called BP underscore. Button. Double-click on this guy to open it up. And inside of here we're going to add a few components. Add, we're going to add a cylinder to start basic shapes cylinder. Next one we're going to add is going to be a box collision. So I'm going to select my default scene root. It doesn't have to be attached to my cylinder here and it's fine if they're all attached to my default seen routes. So I'm going to click there and type in box. We're gonna go with Box Collision. Box is a fine name. And then I'm going to select my default seen route again. And I'm going to add a text render component. Okay, with each of those, I'm going to set their details one by one. Let's start off with the cylinder first. So selecting your cylinder over in the Details panel, I'm going to set my rotation in the x to be U1 AT pressing enter negative 90 in the y and the z, I'm going to set that to be 180. I figured out all these numbers ahead of time. And then for the scale I'm going to set it to be 0.4.4 and 0.05, something thin like that. So this is going to be our button that we're going to quote unquote interact with in order to make our light, in our light blueprint illuminates to turn on, to toggle on and off. Right next we're going to select our box collision component right here. I'm going to set the location, the x location to be 100. And we're going to set the box extent to be one hundred, five, fifty by 100. Something that extends out a little bit like that. Okay, and then I'm going to select my texts renderer component. You can see it just Showing some texts right there. With that, I'm going to change the location. We're going to set the location to be 20 in the x and one hundred and one hundred and ten rather in the z something right up above, right there. And I will change the text to read right down here. Instead of texts, we're going to have it say press I to injure act exclamation point. And it's not centered above my button there, that cylinder. So where it says horizontal alignment, we can change that from left justified to center just to make that look a little bit nicer. And then in the rendering section, I am going to currently make this invisible so we can't see it to start with. Alright, Next we're going to create a couple of variables here in the My Blueprint panel. So click the plus button along the variables header here. The first one we're going to create is going to be called simply light. And for the type, we're going to do a search for BP lights. This is the blueprint that we just created. So come under object types, BP light, choose an object reference. And what we're gonna do is over in the Details panel, we're going to check this box. It says instance editable. Notice that when I do this, this is going to have the same effect as clicking on this little close eyeball icon. So if I click right here, it's going to have that eyeball icon on. Conversely, if I click right here and turn that off, it unchecks that. That's essentially two different ways of setting this to be instance editable doesn't matter if you click there or click this eyeball. Both of those essentially do the same thing. It's turning that on. Now that's gonna be great because it's going to expose this particular variable in the editor. You'll see that in just a moment here. Now I'm going to compile here because it's asking me to compile it, to give it a default value. But notice this I'm compiling. I am going to leave this as blank for the time being. We're going to populate this back in our level editors. So leave this blank for the time being. All right, we're going to create one more variable here, clicking the plus button. I'm going to call this can toggle lights, question mark. And this would, this will be a Boolean variable. If I compile here, I'm going to leave the default value is false. So you'll see this guy in action here in just a little bit. Now, like I mentioned towards the beginning of this video, Direct Blueprint Communication evolves a target blueprint and a working blueprint. So the target blueprint is going to be our bp light. That's the one we're going to be targeting. Our bp button here, that is going to be our working blueprint. So inside of our working blueprint here, we're going to reference, going to create a reference to our bp light in order to talk to it, in order to work with it. 90. Direct Communication (Part #2): Alright, time to do a little bit of setup back in our level editor. And it probably helps if you have some kind of a wall surface, but you don't really need one. So I'm going to place both of these out. And our love, I'm gonna start with our bp button dragging and dropping this. And you don't have to be super precise with this. However, I am going to wheel it around like that. You want to have the majority of your trigger volumes sticking out in this direction. By the way, I've set it back along the wall again, I'm not going to be super precise with this placement for the time being. And then I'm going to place our light out there. There's my BP light in all of its wondrous glory. It's gonna look something like that. That's good enough. Now if I select my B P button, check this out over in the Details panel. If I scroll all the way on up, I've got my light variable. Let's review this once again, my BP button there is my light variable referencing the B P light variable type. It's currently set to none. So here in my editor, I can set this to directly reference that blueprint. I'm saying, hey, I want that variable B of the B P lights type. But I need to specify which instance of that light I want to talk to because I can have multiple instances of these lights out here. And in fact, let me set multiple instances of this light out here. I'm just holding down the Alt key and dragging. Now with my button selected here, I'm going to click on this little eyedrop icon over in the Details panel. I could click on this drop-down to, to pick one of those four. However, I just want to show the often if I choose this eyedropper icon, then I can move on over to my viewport and directly select that given lights. Now notice if I'm highlighting it, that is not that given variable type, it's going to say you can't select that. However, are BP light is of that variable type, so it allows us to pick that one. So it has allowed me to slop that in there. Next, let's head on back to our bp button. Inside of here, we're going to head on over to the Event Graph right away. We're gonna do stuff when we overlap this box. So head on back to the event graph. I'm going to left-click, drag, delete those out right away. With my box selected. I can either right-click on this to find some events or with F-box selected, I could go way on down to the bottom of the Details panel. There are my various events related to it. I want to do something when I begin overlapping that, as well as when i and overlapping that. So I'm going to click here to add a reference to that right away. Clicking back on my box component, I'll do something when I end overlap that as well. So what do we want to do when we begin overlapping that box, this box right here? Well, we want to check first of all, to see if that is the ThirdPersonCharacter that did the overlapping. So I'm going to drag out the other actor will do some canceling here to ThirdPersonCharacter. And when we do that, we're going to bring in our Ken toggle light. And if you drag and drop this right on this pin, you'll bring in a setter right away. There we go. Handy trick there, just dropping it onto the pin, I will say Yes, we can toggle the light if our ThirdPersonCharacter is overlapping that box where essentially against the urine range. And then what we're gonna do is bring in our texts render component. We're going to drag and drop this right here. And we're going to talk to our text render component. We're going to drag out of this and type in set visibility. Because remember right now that is turned off. We're going to check this box and say, yep, you're now visible. Now I'm gonna do much of the same down here. So I'm going to select hold down Control, select hold down control and select, I'm going to copy these three nodes control C, control V. Paste them down here for when we end overlapping that box. And I'll plug it all in like so. Don't forget this guy. And don't forget to uncheck this box down here, as well as unchecking this box down here. Because when we end overlapping that box, we do not want to be able to toggle the light and also we want to turn off our texts render. We don't want to see that interact message at all. Alright, I'm going to left-click, drag, tap the CQI. We'll call this in range to, toggle the lights. I'll turn this black like my soul. Alright, that is all well and good. And next I'm going to add some interact script down here. Remember, our message was going to say, press the I key to interact. So let's right-click down here and do keyboard. We're going to add a keyboard event for when we press the I key, there's our icky. The first thing we're gonna do is we're going to bring in a branch, going to hold down the B key and left-click bring in a branch. So that when we press that we're going to evaluate, Hey, can we toggle the lights? Remember, when we're overlapping or not overlapping that box, we're setting that to either true or false when we're overlapping it. It's going to evaluate as true. So yes, you can tie with light. So out of the achy, we're going to or not the achy, the true key, true pin, I should say we're going to bring in a flip-flop node. Flip-flop node allows us to switch a then B than a than B every time we do this. And what we're going to flip flop is having our cylinder drag and drop this into our graph. Change the material, good typed set material. Like so, going to Control C, Control V, that as well. And right up here, I'm gonna change this to a green colored material. So let me just click right there and I'm just going to type in the word green. Our material here will be, let's try doing a search for green, vertex. Green that is in the engine pathway is by the way. So if you don't see this, you can click this gear icon, make sure you have show engine content turned on. So we're gonna go green there. And then on this node I'm going to click these three dots and make a note for myself that this is going to be a red material. Material here is going to be vertex vertex red. There it is. Got to set this to be the target for that as well. And then I'm going to drag and find my light. We're talking this light right down here in the variable section drag and drop. We're going to get that. Then we're going to drag out of this type in spotlight. Because remember in side of our light here, this BP light exist the spotlight. And we're going to tell this spotlight dragging out of here to toggle visibility. So if it's off, it's going to toggle it on. And if it's on, we're going to toggle it off. So that's gonna be our script right there. Now we're gonna be changing essentially the color of our cylinder right here, this cylinder material to make it so that it looks green is on, red is off. So let me give us a red coloring to start with vertex Read Only. Alright, let's compile this save. I'm gonna go back to my event graph here. Left-click and drag, tap as CQI and I'll say must turn on. This is a note to myself for the next step to do. And for us to do auto receive inputs. Well, two, player 0 in class D faults. Now you're gonna be like this, makes no sense for what we just did. So why are you putting this as the comment box header here? And you'll see why. Because if I compile this, save and I go in and play, you're going to be like, well, this is going to work as soon as we overlap this Trigger box, we're going to say, Yeah, you can toggle the lightened down here when you press the I key. This will then evaluate to true and it should allow me to change that material for the cylinder and then toggle on the light, but it won't work because of this right here. Let me just demonstrate this quickly. If I jump in and play, I can even set my debug object there. So you can see that script has gone through saying, yes, I should be able to talk with light. So now when I press the I key, let me just move this on up. Press the I key and I see that I'd interact right? I'm gonna go ahead and sit, press the I key. But nothing is firing off. Even though I'm pressing it. What is going on? Well, this message right here was a reminder to myself and to you that we have to turn on something called auto receive input two player 0 inside of our class defaults here. Now BP button should be your blueprint here, class defaults down in here. Under the input section, you must change your auto receive input here to be player 0. Why? Well, our parent class here is an actor class blueprint. Actor class blueprints will not recognize keyboard inputs unless you go inside of class defaults and tell it to explicitly receive inputs. Player 0 is us, the single-player, just us, right? So that'll make that work. Also. If you have multiples of these setups around your level, is probably a good idea here to select your icky and uncheck, consume input. In doing so, you'll make it so that this kind of a setup can work up for, work for more than just one button. If you leave this to just consume this input, it would work just in one case, not in all cases. So thought I would throw that out there as well. Alright, compile, save, play. We're going to overlap this here. Blueprint. Say press I to interact. We are within range. So now when I press the I key, it turns green and you see that that light is now showing and just this light, not every copy of the light, just that one because that was the one that we had said specifically to populate this light variable. If I go back in here, I can interact once again. And I turned it read to turn it off, on, off, on, off. We're toggling the visibility. So this is a method called Direct Blueprint Communication. With this method, we have set up a variable of the type that we want to talk to a given type of blueprint. In this case, we want to talk to the BP lights. And with that BP light variable created, we set it to the instance editable so that we could target it specifically. Here in the level editor Working Class Blueprint is our button and the target blueprint is our light inside of the Working Class Blueprint, you have to create a variable of the target blueprint and then set that reference here in the level editor. Very handy method to communicate between blueprints. Guys that is gonna do to offer this video. See you in the next one. 91. Event Dispatchers: Welcome. Thus far we've talked about casting and direct communication as methods used to have one blueprint communicate with another blueprint and those are fine and dandy, great methods to use. However, there are times in Blueprint scripting where you need one blueprint to communicate with many blueprints. So is there a method to use then? Yes, there is. There's something called an Event Dispatcher. Now, if you're unfamiliar with what event dispatchers are there a lot like Twitter, that is the best analogy I have heard to date. Now, if you're familiar with Twitter, a user can tweet out a message in any folks who follow your Twitter account receive that message, then they can respond accordingly. In Unreal, a blueprint can dispatch, that is, to send out a signal to any other blueprints that are subscribed, that are listening out for that signal, and then they can respond accordingly. Alright, so the example that we're going to go through here is I'm going to create a character blueprint, a boss character if you will. And when this character is destroyed, we're going to make multiple things happen. We're going to communicate from our boss blueprint to other blueprints, multiple other blueprints. Alright, there's a lot to cover here, so I'm gonna be moving a little bit fast, but you have the benefit of pause. So let's get right to it. In my scripting Blueprints folder, I'm going to right-click in some empty space, we're going to create a new blueprint class. This time, character is our parent class that we want. And we will name this BP underscore boss. Going to double-click on this guy to open it up. And let's select our mesh component in our components list over in the Details panel under skeletal mesh, Let's slot in Manny, Manny. And let's make a move as well. So the Anime Class, I'm going to do a P or a BP, many, that'll make a move. And then I've got for the location, we need to drop them down here a little bit. The z location I'm going to set to be negative 93 is going to drop them down a little bit. Now might be a little bit too far. Let's go negative 85 or something like that. Negative 85, something like that. And for the rotation, I'm just going to choose negative 90 and that'll get them facing forward. That blue arrow is facing forward also would not be a boss if he remained that color, we got to make up scary, so I don't have the materials, I'm just going to type in red. There's gotta be some vertex red color in here. Any red will do. I'll go with this laser pointer material. This is just for aesthetics, so that material covers in that portion of his body. And then I'll type in laser as well. Allude to the other laser point material for his other part of his body. Look at that scary guy. Alright, with that, we're going to create an event dispatcher right down here. So you create event dispatchers in the My Blueprint panel at the very bottom here, we're going to create one, clicking this plus button, I will call this boss destroyed and hit Enter there, go ahead and compile and save. Next we're going to add an event for when we overlap this capsule components. So I'm going to select my Capsule Component down in the Details panel. This is one of several ways I can add events for this. I am going to find my own component hit event right there it is clicking this plus button. It's going to jump me from my viewport to the Event Graph. And we're going to build off of this event node. I'm going to drag out of the other actor pin. And we're going to find out, is that our third person character. If it was the third-person character that hit us, we're simply going to call out this boss destroyed. We're going to send out the tweet, if you will. So the way we can call for this is to drag this in here, like so. And it's going to say, do you want to call bind, unbind all these options. In this case we want to call it, we're going to send out that tweet. Now the note is going to look like this. It'll have a little envelope on it as well. So that's going to send out the tweets to any subscribers if you will. And lastly, we want to drag off of here and type in Destroy Actor to make sure that our boss goes bye-bye. All right, with this, we can compile and save. The tweeting is accomplished. Next, we just need a subscriber or three. So jump on back to our level. And won't you go ahead and place some of these light blueprint out in your level. We created these light blueprints earlier in the course. And you can find those in your scripting Blueprints folder. If you don't have these created, you could choose some other blueprint that we created earlier in the course as well. These are just the ones that I happen to choose. Also, I have placed one rotating door blueprint that we created earlier in the course out here as well. I'm going to show different methods as to how this sort of communication is going to work. But I'm going to start with my BP rotating door. So inside of my BP rotating door, I want to dig inside of that blueprint. Let's head on in there. We're going to add a brand new variable. So under the variables section, we're going to click the plus button. And I'm going to call this the boss character. And under the variable type, I'm going to click right here, do a search for boss. And there I can find my object type B, P, boss, that blueprint that we just created. And I will make that an object reference. Now with this variable here selected over in the Details panel, I want to check this box, for instance, editable so that we can slot in our boss from the level editor. And if I compile here, we can see that there's nothing populating this variable right now, but with this instance editable check, alternatively, we could have clicked on that eyeball. I will be able to select our boss place in the level. In fact, I'll do that now. If I place my boss into our level, like so. Now I can select my door blueprint. And over in the Details panel, I can see it is asking for me to slot in a boss character to populate that variable. I could select this right here and select my boss there. Alternatively, I can select this little eyedropper here in order to pick the proper boss character from the scene. And there you go. Now you can see our bp boss populates that variable inside of our bp rotating door. Now what I need to do here is have a rotating door subscribe to that boss destroyed event. And this can be done back in our rotating doors event graph. So the first thing we're going to do is come up to this portion of our event graph right up here above where our door rotation timeline was. We created all this growth when we put together our rotating door, I'm going to hold down the p. P is in play key. And we're going to left-click with the P key held down to bring in an event begin play. Next, what we're gonna do is bring in a reference to our boss character. So I'm gonna hold down the Control key, left-click and drag, and now it'll give me a getter right away. However, I don't want this to be just a typical getter. I'm going to convert this to a valid dated gets. Now if I right-click on this, I can see that option convert to validate the get. And what this does is it allows me to check right here. If this variable is valid. By that, I mean, is it populated with something? Is it actually something that is not null, not none. If it is populated and spoiler alert, it is because currently I've got my rotating door sets to have that boss character value set to that boss. If it is valid, we can fire out of this pin. If it's not valid, meaning this variable is null, we could do something else. So this is a validated get, use those all the time. Next, what we wanna do is pull out of our boss character here. And I'm going to sign in if I type in assigned correctly there here's what I'm looking for. A sign boss destroyed. Now when I bring this in, I'm actually going to be bringing in two nodes, so check it out. Assigned boss destroyed. When we do this, we're going to bring in a Bind node as well as a custom events. I'm going to leave this custom event with that name. You can name it to something else. But here's how this works. Upon beginning play. We're going to check to see if our boss character variable here is valid. If it's populated with something, if it is, we're going to bind this custom events to this boss destroyed, this boss destroyed Event Dispatcher. What essentially we're doing here then is telling this event to wait for that event to fire off. When we call, when we call this boss destroyed events. Right here when we touch that capsule component of the boss, we're going to call that event right here, will be waiting out, listening for it. This will not fire until that boss destroyed event is called out. Our bp boss is calling it out right here with this Event Dispatcher. And right here are rotating door, is listening out for that with this setup right here, that listens out for it. Once this happens, we can shoot out of this custom event. That's essentially the setup there. So what I'm gonna do is after we have listened out for that boss destroyed events, we're going to delay or just a short amount of time here, we're gonna delay for one seconds. Then I'm going to wire this down into my door rotation. So we're going to open the door. That's something cool to do right? After you defeat a boss, suddenly that door becomes unlocked. So I'm going to compile and save this. And let's go ahead and play test right away. So here I go. Set this write-up. Here. I'm playing. So you can see that fire off right through there. So now this event, this boss destroyed custom events, is listening out for this boss destroyed. This boss destroyed events to be called out. That Event Dispatcher, that is the tweet, the message being sent out. So here we go. We're going to watch this eventually fire off as soon as I run into the capsule component of our boss. Let me bring on our player window here. Alright, and that door will open up after a second. So here we go. Boss goes, bye-bye. 1 s later. There it opens. That tweet was received and the BP rotating door responded accordingly. Now note a setup like this could be duplicated inside of our bp light blueprint or any other blueprint for that manner that we place in our level. And that would work just fine. All of those could subscribe to our boss destroyed event in a similar manner. By the way, a lot of times it's great to have these listening out for that event right upon begin play, so that whenever that event happens, they can respond accordingly. However, I'm gonna go with a little bit different method of listening out for that event, so to speak, by using our Level Blueprint. So I'm going to jump back to our level editor here. We're going to open up our Level Blueprint. So open Level Blueprint, find some empty space inside of here to work on. Now the first thing we need to do is jump back to our level and let's select our b, a P boss. Now because our bp boss exists in the level and we do have them selected. Please have them selected, jumped to your Level Blueprint now, we can right-click and some empty space and do a search for boss destroyed. So check it out. We can add a boss destroyed event. So this event will be called when our bp boss calls for that boss event destroyed to occur. Now, what we're gonna do next is bringing a reference to our three light actors. So going back to our level here, I'm going to select the first light, the second light holding down Control left-click, and the third light as well, control left-click. All three of those are selected right here, heading back to my Level Blueprint, I'm going to hold down the R. R is in reference and left-click to bring in a reference to all three of these. Stack them numerically like that. And what we wanna do is drag out of one of them and type in set visibility. Sorry, we have to get the spotlight important for us. So I'm going to say get spot light component because each of these lights consists of a spotlight component, which we can see with one of them selected consists of the spotlight component. And I'm going to drag out of the spotlight component and type in set visibility. And we will say that it will become visible. And I can duplicate Control C Control V, that spotlight for each of these. Like so. And when this happens, I can also drag off of this and say Place down to D. Let's bring in a little sound. Sure, like so. And will have an explosion Q playwright. Alright, so now check it out. When we touch our boss with our ThirdPersonCharacter, we're going to call this events. It's going to send out that tweet. We already know that the rotating door is going to be listening out for a palm begin play. And once they hear that the boss has been destroyed, it will fire off this and rotate open that door. Here in our Level Blueprint, we can just call this boss destroyed events. We can add this event immediately. By having this being called. We're going to then just set the visibility of our lives. So let's go ahead and try this. This time we will focus on our lights. In once we destroy the boss. Let's go on. Door opens. Now once again, I could have taken a similar approach inside of our bp lights to have that BP quote unquote, subscribe to the boss destroyed Event Dispatcher. But I just wanted to demo here that you can have these event dispatchers fire off directly within a level and actually sublevel blueprints. So long as a reference to that actor, in this case, our bp boss, contains an Event Dispatcher that exists in your level. Well guys, there you have an Event Dispatcher is a great method to use when you want to have one blueprint, talk to many, base upon one event happening. Guys, I'll do to offer this one. See you in the next one. 92. Blueprint Interfaces (Part #1): Welcome. In this video, our goal is to learn about how to use Blueprint Interfaces to communicate between blueprints. Now with a Blueprint Interface, you can create a collection of empty functions. Then you can assign which blueprints have access to those functions. Then those Blueprint Interface functions, which can now be found inside of those blueprints, can be given unique functionality. Now this is great for a generic type functions where do you might interact with something? And then depending on the Blueprint that you've interacted with, they might respond differently. So we're starting off with a graphic here. So we're going to create a blueprint. Inside of our Blueprint Interface, we're going to create a function called interact. And then we're going to implement this Blueprint Interface in three different blueprints are blueprint light, our blueprint boss in our ThirdPersonCharacter. Now, inside each of those three different blueprints, we're going to get to customize exactly what interact does. Alright, back here in unreal, There's a lots to take care of. So let's get started. I'm within my scripting Blueprints folder. Let's right-click in some empty space. In here, I'm going to call under Blueprints in, in the little fly-out menu, I'm going to choose Blueprint Interface. We're going to name this BPI underscore functions. Then we're going to double-click on this guy to open it up. Now, inside of here, all you see is just empty graphs tab it says new function. And then the upper right under the My Blueprint tab, it's waiting for us to give this function a name. So let's create our very first function and it'll be called interact. Down in the Details panel you can see it also changed the name of this tab over here to interact. And we're going to change the output here to add one. We're going to create one output and it's simply going to be called interacted with question mark. And we will leave it be a Boolean. So this is our empty function. It's simply has one output. Now, note, you cannot do the following from here. You cannot add any new variables, just inputs and outputs. You cannot edit the graph at all. You can't like movies around or tick that box or anything like that. You cannot add components. This function isn't set up to do anything. The idea here is that this empty function gets added inside of other blueprints and then inside of those other blueprints, we can customize what it does. So let's now add this Blueprint Interface to other blueprints. Let's compile this first and save. Then heading back to a level editor. We're going to open up our ThirdPersonCharacter. We're going to come back under our blueprint section and we're going to open up our bp light. And then we're going to also open up our bp boss. Although those BP boss MBP light were created in other videos right inside of each of these blueprints, we need to add that Blueprint Interface, and this is done under the Class Settings button. So I'm going to start with my BP boss right up here, Class Settings. And then over in the Details panel, Here's where we can add the Blueprint Interface and clicking right here in this drop-down under add, there is our BPI functions. We're going to add that BP light. We're gonna do the same class settings, add bp functions. And then under our ThirdPersonCharacter, same thing. Class Settings, add bp functions. Now, if you weren't paying very close attention and it's easy to miss this upon adding this Blueprint Interface over in the My Blueprint section of each of these blueprints, we now have an interfaces section underneath the My Blueprint panel. And if I open this up, we can see that we now have access to interact. If I double-click on our Interact function right here, will open up a function tab. And so now you can see we can add unique functionality for each interact function in each of these three different blueprints. So let's start off with our boss blueprint here, we have double-clicked on our Interact function here. Let's give this some unique functionality. We're going to say if we call this interact function, all we're going to do for our boss is we're going to drag off of here. And I'm gonna say destroy the actor. And then we'll just check this box saying yes, we did interact with them, compile and save that. We're going to move on to our bp light next in inside of here, we're going to simply grab our spotlight component, click and drag. To drag off of this, we're going to type in set visibility. We're going to wire our execution wire through like this. And we will set our visibility to true. And we'll also check this box for interactor interacted with. Let's compile and save that. And then we'll jump onto our ThirdPersonCharacter and we'll add some unique functionality in here. All we're gonna do is right-click in some empty space and say get actor, location. And we're going to use this location to spawn and emitter. So dragging off of here, I'm going to type in spawn emitter at location. You could spawn system at location as well. System uses the Niagara particles. This is the older cascade particles either will do. I'm going to plug this in here, and I will spawn in an explosion. Because explosions are always fun. I'm going to set the scale to be nice and big. So 22. And so, and I will also check this box to say yes, we have interacted. So we've now set up some unique functionality under each of these three blueprints for when we call this interact function. Let's go ahead and compile and save this. Let's head on over to our event graph here. And earlier in the course, we set up this line trace functionality. So if you don't have this already created, you can copy what you see here. We're sending out a line trace into the world. And currently when we hit an actor, we're just printing out the name of that actor to the screen. We're going to modify this a little bit. So I'm going to delete out these nodes right here. We'll get rid of this branch node here. I will bring another one in momentarily. But what you need to do is out of this Hit Actor, you can drag out of your outfit and break this hit result, expand this down out of our Hit Actor. We're going to search for inter act. And in parentheses it should say message. Hook this in like so. Now this is going to call the Interact function inside of the Hit Actor. If that Hit Actor does in fact implement the Blueprint Interface. If the hit actor does not implement the Blueprint Interface, then nothing happens to that actor. So what we're gonna do next is we're going to drag off of our interacted with output here. I'm going to bring in a branch node. And we're going to simply say that if this is true, we have interacted with something and it did evaluate to true, we're simply going to print out to the screen. Let's print out interacted with Thing number inside of our Interact function in our ThirdPersonCharacter. We're setting that to true. Here we're spawning and explosion inside of our lights. When we interact with this, we're just going to turn on the spotlight and we're going to say Yelp, you've interacted with it. Inside of our boss. They interact function. We're simply going to destroy the actor. And we said, yep, we've interacted with it. One more thing here, we need to set up inside of our boss in order to actually have that visibility trace whips the visibility trace here inside of our ThirdPersonCharacter. In order for this to actually interact with the boss, come inside of your boss and select your capsule collision. We just need to change up the collision settings a little bit. Under the collision Component, Collision section. Under the collision preset, we're going to change this to be custom. And we've got to make sure that the Visibility channel is set to block in order for our line trace here in the ThirdPersonCharacter to actually hit it. Let's compile and save that. Alright, so back here in our ThirdPersonCharacter Blueprint, we're going to be pressing the arrow key to send out a line trace along the Visibility channel starting from our actors location, the ThirdPersonCharacter ending with our line trace endpoint, which if I go to the viewport, that is this point that we set up right here earlier in the course. We're then going to break out our hit for any actor that we do hit, we're going to call the Interact function that lives within our BPI functions Blueprint Interface. If the thing that we hit has implemented that Blueprint Interface, it will call that interact function and in fact perform whatever we set up that function to do in our bp boss, it'll destroy the actor and say, Yep, we have interacted with it. It'll tick that Bool in our bp light. We're going to toggle the spotlight on and then also tick that Boole to say, yep, we've interacted with it. If however, the thing we hit has not implemented This Blueprint Interface, nothing will happen, which is fine. Now, if we have hit something that has implemented this interact function, this Blueprint Interface, we're going to pass that Boolean along here. And if it's true, we're going to simply print that out to the screen. Alright, back here in our level editor, make sure you've got a BP boss placed in your level as well as a BP light that is about ground floor. We're gonna go ahead and jump in and play and pressing the zero key. Once we are in front of our light there, we should see some texts appear right here. So zero key. You see that light, you see that interacted with thing. Great, that works just fine. And we're going to shoot it out. And our boss character here you should see some texts appear, as well as our boss being destroyed. Here we go. Zero key, boss has gone. You see our line being shot out into the world there as well. There was the impact point and that is indeed working. Alright, a little bit of nuance to discuss here as it pertains to calling a Blueprint Interface functions back here in our ThirdPersonCharacter you saw me earlier, drag off of our Hit Actor here and type in the word interact and we see interact message and we got that envelope version of it right here. This is identical to that. Now this signals the supplied target right here to call that function. However, something to note about this, calling that function, you don't actually have to implement the Blueprint Interface itself within this blueprint to be able to do this, what I'm talking about is here in our class settings. You can see within this blueprint, I have implemented. The interface is you don't have to have this implemented in order to call this for the supply to Target. And just to help drive home that point, I'm going to jump back to my level editor here. I'm going to place my BP button out in my level. With this selected. We created this in an earlier lesson. I'm going to slot my lights here to be this light. So I'm going to choose this little eyedropper. And I'm going to choose this light right here so that BP Li2 is now associated with that variable inside of our B P button. I'm going to open this up now, RSVP button. And I'm just going to modify this bit of script right down here when I press the I key, when I'm within range. So I'm going to go like this, just going to not worry about this toggling of the material at all. I'm going to break this, holding down the Alt key and left clicking. What I can do right now is right-click. And if I search for a message, not message, I'm looking for interact. That's what I meant. Interact. There's my B PI functions interact message. So I can call it for this light target right here. Because remember, my BP light does do something, or BP light does have this function implemented and it will toggle the visibility. But no, it's, what I'm talking about here is in my class settings, I don't have the BPI function's interface implemented. That does not prohibit me from calling this function. So just to further drive home the point, what I'm gonna do here is play the game. And I'm going to overlap this button right here. I've now overlapped it. I see that actually saying, yes, I am within range right now. That Texas backwards, but never mind. I'm going to press the I key now is going to call this function. In my light blueprints. Here we go, pressing the I key, and it does in fact call that function and turns on that light. Now note, when I search for that interact function here by right-clicking and I type in interact, that is the only option that I get. However, back in my BP ThirdPersonCharacter where I do, I do have the BPI functions Blueprint Interface implemented. I can right-click in some empty space and I type in inter act. I have another version that says call function right up here. And now look at this version. This is a local function call. Now, I could set up something like this here inside of my ThirdPersonCharacter Blueprint. Let me just delete this out. That function that I just deleted it out is identical to me, left clicking, dragging and dropping my interact function right over here into my graph. So either way you'll bring in a copy of that local version of the call. So for this setup right here, I'm going to press the nine key. This is going to call interact on the target of self. My ThirdPersonCharacter Blueprint. I'm just passing along that Boolean and then we're going to destroy ourselves. So if you remember here in our local function, we're simply going to spawn an emitter at our characters location. Compile save. Let me go back to my event graph here and play. Set my debug object to my self. And now when I press the Nike, boom, it does in fact call that interact function. So in order to call a local version of that function, the Blueprint Interface does need to be added to the blueprints in order to respond to that version of the interface call. 93. Blueprint Interfaces (Part #2): Alright, still more to show here related to Blueprint Interfaces. So let's dive back into our BPI functions and we're going to add a brand new function up in the My Blueprint panel. So click Add Function and we're going to name this damage. And we're not going to add any inputs or outputs. We're simply going to compile this and save. Now let's dive back into one of our blueprints where we have implemented this Blueprint Interface already. I'll go into my ThirdPersonCharacter Blueprint. Now, note over in the interfaces section, we now see our damaged function appear. However, it shows up in this yellow color. Now this color means that the function has been added, but it cannot be called inside of other blueprints since it has no return value. And by that I mean, let's go back in our BPI functions. It has no return value, whereas I select our Interact function, it does have a return value, return a node. So that's fine. No big deal. Here in our damage function, we're gonna go without any inputs, without any outputs. We're going to leave it just like this and we're going to show how to use Blueprint Interfaces in a slightly different manner. Here in my ThirdPersonCharacter Blueprint. Remember I do have our Blueprint Interfaces implemented and there is a damage function. Now if I try to add it to a graph, it's gonna be like Nope, can't do it. However, if I right-click on this, I can implement this as n events. So watch what happens when I do this. It'll add this as an events to my graph. And now I can make some functionality happened off of this. However, I have to make sure that I actually call this events from some other blueprints. So let's do this here inside of my ThirdPersonCharacter Blueprint, I'll say, okay, whenever we call this, we're simply going to destroy our character, Destroy Actor that's simple enough. Compile and save that. Now from another blueprint, we need to actually call for this to happen. So let's jump into say are BP example pickup. I will double-click on that. And I'm just going to hijack the original functionality of this just for the time being, I'll set it back after the video. I'm going to say that when we begin overlapping this sphere right here, we're going to check if fits the third-person character. And then off of this, I'm simply going to drag off of it and type in damage that BPI functions. Damage message. We're going to go like this and like this. And I will get rid of these just to make this a little bit more clear. So here's what we're doing. Inside of our bp example pickup. We're checking to see if we've overlapped that sphere, this sphere collision with the ThirdPersonCharacter. And if we are, we're going to call for that damage Blueprint Interface. Now, events to occur here inside of our third-person character. So let's go ahead and try this clicking play. And I forgot to add that to our level. Let's add one of these. And so the moment we touched that we should die, BAM, and we do. So that's another way that you can use a Blueprint Interfaces instead of implementing them and then adding some functionality for each function, like we did with our interactive event. We can simply leave them in our Blueprint Interface without any inputs or outputs. And then do like we did in our ThirdPersonCharacter, where we right-clicked on it and we converted it to an event. Then in doing so, you can do anything off of it, so long as you call that event from some other blueprints. Now, this is kind of kind of a way of calling out a custom event in any other blueprints that implements this interface, right, Last but not least, we're going to talk about how to use a Blueprint Interface to communicate with a Level Blueprint. Now, it is best to add a Blueprint Interface to a sub level for easier communication with the level. Let's get to a demonstration. First of all, let's make sure you've got the level tab open over here. If you don't already have that up in your editor, you can get that by coming under window and then opening up the levels TAM. And earlier in the course we did create a sub-level. I'll go ahead and create a another sub-level just so you can see how it's done once again, right here where it says levels, you can go here and you can create new. And it will prompt you to create a new sublevel. I will choose an empty level. Create. It's going to ask us where do we want to save this? Let's put this in our scripting levels holder, and I will simply call this sub-level underscore 02. We're going to save this out. Alright, I'm going to right-click on our sub-level to here. I'm going to change the streaming method. To be always loaded instead of Blueprint, change it to always loaded. Then with our sub-level right here, I'm going to click right there to open R sub level Level Blueprint. And inside of our sub-level Level Blueprint, I've got our class settings right up here. And once again, here is where I can implement our Blueprint Interface. So I'm going to click Add. There's my BPI functions. Alright, next back in our level editor, you can make sure that this is the current level by checking right here. Level sublevel two, that's our current level. If we click off of it, that blue also shows that it is our current working level. We're going to add an actor to our sub-level here. I'm going to add, Let's go under it right here. Let's add a shape. Let's do a cylinder. Sure, something like that. So we've got an actor in our sub-level. We can view this by clicking this eyeball icon off on to show that that is in fact a part of sublevel two. And then we're going to make sure we've got our cylinder selected and we're going to head back into R sub level two level blueprint. We're going to go into our Interact function here. Double-click on that to open it up. Hold down the R key, left-click to bring in a reference to our cylinder there. And we're going to drag off of here and type in Destroy Actor legs. So we will say then that yes we have interacted with it. That's great. Compile and save this. Then we're going to dive back into our ThirdPersonCharacter Blueprint. And what we're gonna do is set up a very simple scripts. We're just gonna go right click, I don't know the eight key. I don't think we've got anything going off the eight key currently. And I'm going to right-click then in some empty space and typing and get streaming level. And here's where we want to put in the exact name of our sub-level O2. There it is right there. Sub underscore a level, underscore 02. Then we can drag off of this and type in inter act message like so. This will allow us to communicate with our sub-level two and call that interact function that we set up inside of Sublime too. So that's going to kill out that cylinder. Now, I'm actually not going to be doing anything off the bools. I didn't actually have to check that box, but I did. So let's go ahead and compile this. Let's go ahead and play. And now when I press the eight key, bam, it is gone. We have in fact communicated via Blueprint Interfaces with our sub-level too. Well guys, that is going to do to offer a Blueprint Interfaces. Once again, with Blueprint Interfaces, you can set up a functions inside of them. You can then add them to blueprints via the Class Settings. And then once you do, you can set up functionality inside of them that is unique to wherever you have added these Blueprint Interfaces quite handy into you guys that is gonna do it all for this one. See you in the next one. 94. Parent (Base) Class: Welcome. In this video, our goal is to initiate a conversation around the concept of inheritance in blueprints. Now to truly demonstrate the power of inheritance with blueprints, we're going to create a parent class, a base class upon which other future blueprints will derive. Now what this ultimately means is that any blueprint we create as a child of this parent come pre-built with all the components, all the functionality in variables that the parent already has. Now, if you've ever created a blueprint class, you've already used inheritance and may not have even realized that no blueprint in unreal exists without inheriting from something else. As an example of what I just mentioned there, check out our ThirdPersonCharacter Blueprint. If we open that guy up in the far upper right, it lets us know what the parent class was. In this case, our bp ThirdPersonCharacter inherited from the character class are BP example pickup that we created at the very outset of the class. The parent class for that is actor. This is made even a little bit more clear if I come back to our content browser and I right-click choose Blueprint Class. Down below, where it's asking us to pick a parent class, you can see the hierarchy of different blueprints. Object is the most base class actor inherits from object. And if I expand out actor under here I can see something like our bp example pickup that inherits from the parent class. Alright, so what we're gonna do in this video is create our parent, our base class. And then in the next video we're going to create a child class that is based off of our parent class. And you're going to see how our child inherits all the properties of the parent just as you are a child and inherited some properties from your parents. So too will our child class inherit from our parent class? Let's go ahead and right-click and some empty space here. I'm gonna do this inside of my scripting Blueprints folder. Right-click Blueprint class. We will base this off of the actor or a parent class. And I'm going to name this my BP underscore. Parents pickup, like so. And I will double-click on this guy to open it up. And I'm going to add some components. So we're going to start off by adding some sphere. Sphere collision. Will set the details here. After this with our sphere collision selected, I'm going to add a static mesh source Static Mesh is attached to our sphere. And then with our static meshes selected, I am going to add, I'm going to type in Niagara. I want to add it in Niagara particle system components like so. We're gonna, we're gonna add some Niagara particles here in just a little bit. And we're also going to add a rotating movement components as well as interpret Too movement components. So our, our blueprint here is going to both rotate as well as bob up and down. So that'll be pretty cool. Alright, let's set some details here. So selecting our sphere, first and foremost, come over to your details panel. We're going to set our sphere radius to be 100, something nice and big. You know, scrolling back here are static mesh. I'm going to come under the Details panel and I will choose 1M underscore cube. Let's just do any cube mesh that on will be fine. Something 50 by 50 by 50. Sure, that's a little bit small, so I'll scale that up to maybe double the size there. To actually, let me set this back by lock our scale here. I can set that to be two and hitting Enter, it'll scale it up accordingly in the x, y, and z. Next, I'm going to choose our Niagara component here. Now, I did, prior to this video, I did make sure that I had some Niagara particles added to my project. And I'm gonna show you where you can add these, because this can take a little bit of time. Down here in the Epic Games launcher, if you come under Unreal marketplace, I simply came under the free section here. And I did a search for Niagara. And in here, I chose these base pickup VFX set. Now to add this to your project, you can click right here. Eventually you'll get this Add to Project option. You can click right here. Now, I've already got this added to my project, so I'm not going to re-add it, but you can select your project. If your project does not show up, you can click this button to ensure that it does show up. Then you would click here to add to your project. Now I can take a little while to be added. Once it has been added, I'm just going to minuses once again back here on our content browser. It'll show up as this folder essay underscore pickups set, et cetera. And right here in my directory, right here as a pickups FX nagger system. This is where we can find some Niagara particle effects. This is the newer particle system in Unreal, using Unreal Engine five. Alright, going back to our parent pickup, Let's select our negra particle system here. And where it says Niagara system, I am going to slot in one called energy. And I'll do this NS energy underscore two. Next, I'll select our interp2 movement component. There's our particle coming in. And I will set a couple of control points here, clicking the plus button once and twice, and I'll expand each of these out. I'm going to leave the index is zero at that location, index1, I'm simply going to have it bob up in the z-direction by 20. And then I will also set our behavior type here to be ping-pong so that it goes back and forth between those two points. Now, our rotating movement already has a rotation rate of 180 in the z. So if I was to simulate this, you can see what this is going to look like. Spin around. Particles are attached to our cube there. That is so lovely. Alright, Next I'm going to add three variables down here, which will be eventually inherited by our child. So I'm gonna click under the My Blueprint variables section, the Plus button right here. The first one is gonna be called pickup S FX. And we're going to change the type here to be sound bass sound basis to search for that sound base object reference. We'll set these all a little bit later. I'm going to click the Plus button. We're going to add another one, this we call pickup VFX. I'm going to set the type here to be egg garage system, that Agora system object reference. And we're going to add one more variable here. And this one will be called item name. And we're going to change the type here to be a string. Alright, compiling, we can then set some default values for all these. So my itemName going to set the default value to be item name. For our pickup v effects, I'm going to slot in coin Burst, that is a Niagara system. And for my pickup S of x, I am going to choose one called objects. Object pickup. This is in the engine contents. If you don't see that, you can click this gear icon and right there you can turn on your engine contents so that you can find that object pickup. That's what I'm going to go with. You can swap in any sounds or a particle effects you want. Those will be my defaults. Alright? With that, I'm going to compile and save right away and then head on over to my event graph where we're going to do a little bit of scripting. First things first we're going to left-click drag around these three event nodes that are already here by default, we're going to delete them out. We're going to right-click on our sphere collision component, right-click Add event. We're gonna do something when we begin overlapping that. So we're going to add that to our graph. And as you may have guessed for going to drag out of our other actor and see if it was the ThirdPersonCharacter that did the overlapping. If it was, we're going to play sound, 2D. What sound do you want to play? Well, we've got a pick-up sound right here. We're going to just drag and drop that on the pin. Moving on down. Next we're going to drag off of here and we will do spawn system at location, spawn system that location under the Niagara section, spawn system is where you can spawn Niagara VFX. We already have one saved in a variable right here. So let's drag and drop this on top of the system template. Let's feed this a location. So let's right-click. Get our actors location. Which actor? This BP parent pickup, wherever this is going to be located, that'll be the location where we want to spawn this. Then we're going to drag off of this and print string. What string do we want to print in? Well, we're going to drag backwards off of this, bring in an append node. And four are a, we're going to type in got colon space. For the b. We're going to slot in our item name. So drag and drop that on here. We're going to add one more pin. And I will do a space exclamation points. So this should read got colon, space, item name, space, exclamation point. It's both, they don't really need these spacer between the name and the exclamation point. So I'm going to backspace there. And then last but not least, we're going to drag off of this and we're going to destroy the actor. So that is going to be our script. If you want to pause the video right there and get a good look. See, alright, next, just to simplify our graph here a little bit, I'm going to left-click and drag around all of these nodes except for our event. And then if you right-click on any of your selected nodes right here, I can right-click on them and I can collapse to function. When I do this is gonna be crunched down to a single node and right over in the My Blueprint panel under the functions area, it's going to say, okay, name this thing. I'm going to simply call this function pickup. Like so. If I double-click on this function, you can see what it looks like on the inside here. And that's great. We've now got a very simplified event graph. Let's go ahead and compile and save. I'm going to place one of these down in my level. And let's just give this a quick play test to make sure that we can in fact collect this. So dragging and dropping this red in here. Let's go ahead and play. And away. We go There it is. Little burst of particles of air as well. Alright, We're off to a great start here. And in the next video we're going to create a child of this blueprint and that child will inherit all of the components. The variables is the functionalities of this parent. Now this is a great way to go about working in unreal, because if you think about it, there are many things in games that are similar to one another, such as pickups, weapons, enemy types, etc. They all share some common things about them. So why recreate the wheel again and again? Why create a unique blueprint for every single blueprint pickup that you're going to have. It's best to work by creating a parent class. It's going to have a lot of the base functionality that say all pickups are going to have. Then in each of the children script functionality, add some components as some variables or properties that are specific to each and every individual pickup. But the shared functionality should go within a parent blueprint. Alright guys, that is gonna do offer this one. We will see you in the next one. 95. Child Class (Part #1): Welcome. In this video, our goal is to show how to create Child Blueprint Classes and then how to customize from there. Now creating child blueprints is awesome from the standpoint of not having to recreate the wheel by having a child class blueprints inherit all of the base components, variables, and functions from a parent. We do not have to recreate all of that in the child. Instead, we can now customize each child blueprint as we see fit. Additionally, if there's some added component, variable or functionality that we want to retroactively add to the parent. All child class blueprints will gain that automatically, which is pretty sweet. Alright, so let's start showing some of this off by first creating a child class. So here's my BP parent pickup. I'm going to right-click on this. And to create a child from any existing blueprints, simply right-click on it and the topmost option, there you go. Create Child Blueprint class. It's going to prompt us to give it a name. So I'm gonna change this to be BP. Child pick up. Then I'm going to double-click on this guy to open it up. Now, take a look here. So here's my child pickup. I have my parent pickup open right up along the top here as well. And if I toggle between the two, you can see that they look identical. You'll also note that the parent pickup has this listing of components. And notice that in our child we have that exact same listing of components. Now in the parent pickup, we've got these variables right down here. In the child pickup. We have these variables right down here. And if you do not see these variables right down here that were inherited, you can click on this little gear icon and makes sure that show inherited variables is ticked on. You must have that ticked on in order for those inherited variables to show. Because if you tick them off, they go bye-bye, shown inherited variables. And there you go. Now a couple of things to take note of here. If you look in the upper right, it says our parent class is the BP parent pickup. And also over in the list of components, if you wanted to edit any of these things, say you wanted to change out this sphere component if you clicked right here in edit in Blueprint, note what happens here. It actually jumps you back to your parent pickup. So in the child where you see all of these right over here, if you click on any of them, it's going to jump back over to the parent, be like, Hey, you want to edit this here in your child, while the place to actually do that is in the parents, because any changes that you make here in the parent, they will propagate down to the child. Now, just to drive home that point really quickly, I'm going to add a temporary light here in my parent pickup. So I'm going to come under, Add I'm going to type in light. We'll add a point light shore. I'll leave it at that name. Now, if I go to the child pickup right now, you don't see it. However, if I go to my parent pick-up and then click Compile, save it, and go back to my child. Boom, there is that point-like component and that would be right now buried on the inside of my cube there. So there's where it actually resides. I'm going to delete that because I don't actually want it. So if I did want to delete this out of say the child, I could delete it out here. Nope. Can't do it. Right. Because you're trying to do it, but it's like, No, I'm inheriting this from the parents. So you gotta go Edit and Blueprint, deleted out here, then Compile and Save. And that change will be propagated on down to your child. Now once again, what makes working in this fashion so awesome is with our parent pickup, we created the base functionality for picking up this pickup. Simple overlap here in our event graph, right? And when we overlap it, we simply do this functionality right here. We don't have to recreate all this inner child and we can demonstrate this by dragging and dropping this guy level. So I've got the parents on the left. I'll make the parent a little bit taller, the child on the right. And if I jump in and play, you can see that I can pick up one. I can pick up the other. That functionality does indeed trickled on down to our child. But what makes us also great is that we can make some changes in our child while keeping that same functionality. So let me just do some very superficial changes here in our child. I'm going to change some of our components here, not the components themselves, but the actual properties of the components. So e.g. I. Could select my Static Mesh Component and change it to be something other than a cube. I could change this to be, let's go a cone, some cone shape and he cone shape will do. I'll just shrink that down to be one all across the board there. Yell to sync that down a little bit. I could change out the particle effects from my lightning bolts here to be something like We'll do the healing something with some hearts. Sure. Let's do healing three maybe something like that. Rotating movements. I can change that out as well. Yeah, once you change out your Niagara system here, it's going to take a little while to swap out. Actually, I don't like that one because that's kind of a fire and forget one. Let's try healing wants something persistent like that. Interpreter movement. I can change this as well. In this case, we're going to change out the duration from one seconds to 3 s. So it's going to take longer for it to go from. Position zero here to position one. I can change out my rotating movements. I can change out the speed at which it rotates. So I'm gonna make this one spin a little bit faster here. We'll say 200, something like that. And I can change my pick-up sound effects does not have to remain this object pickup. I'm gonna change that to be floating view. I close any option here we'll do just try something different. My pickup VFX does not have to stay the same there. I could change this out from coin Burst to coin Burst O2. And my item name does not have to stay the same. Instead of item name as an item name, I'm going to change this to be health back. Alright, so with all those changes done, I can go back and save. Let's try this out. You can see that it looks visibly different. Different particle effect. It will have a different particle effect when we pick it up as well, look like that particle effect goes away pretty quickly here, but here we go. The parent, the child. Different particle effect, different sound, etc. Alright, this is all well and good in that our child has indeed inherited the functionality and the beginning components of our parent. We just simply swapped out some of the superficial elements. Our child here, that is the look in some of the sounds and that sort of thing, the variables. But let's extend our functionality in the child a little bit further. Let's make it so that while we haven't inherited all this stuff and that's all well and good. We want to take our child a little bit further. We wanna do something specific to our child pickup here. So we're going to start off in our ThirdPersonCharacter Blueprint. Going to go into third-person blueprints that are Person, Character, and our health function. We created this earlier in the course. We created a modify health function and it looks like this. We're going to drag this out into our event graph. I'm going to right-click bringing a custom event. I'm going to call this health child pickup. I'm going to plug this into our modify health function that we created. Again in earlier video, we talked about creating functions in our health child pickup custom event. I'm going to add one input here, clicking this plus button. I'm going to name this health. I'm gonna change the type from boolean to float. And I'm going to plug this right away into our function for modify health so that we pass along this health value into our function. We're going to pass something into this in our child pickups. You'll see that here in a little bit. Then what I'm gonna do is I am going to bring in a print string here. Then I'm going to drag backwards off my print string and bring in an append node. And I am going to have my a value here is simply say health colon space. And our b value is going to be the current health that we're going to have after we do this calculation, dragging this in like so it's simply going to bring in a conversion node, converting a float to a string. So our modify health function currently looks like this. If I double-click on it, you can see what it's doing right there. We're playing different sounds depending on the health value being passed in. We're clapping that health value as well. But that's essentially what we've got going on. Let's compile this very important that you compile and save this. And it's important that you compile so that we can actually call for this function or this up rather custom events to occur from our child pickup. Alright, so all of this done in your ThirdPersonCharacter Blueprint, head on back to your child pickup. Now, inside of here, if you search around your event graph, you're like, I don't, I don't see any of this functionality back here in our parent. We are doing some scripting right here, like so. And I know we created this function, this pickup function here inside of my parents. And it looks like that, but if I go into my child, I don't see any of that. Well, here in our functions section of the My Blueprint panel, if you come right down here, you can override your pickup function that currently exists inside of your BP parent pickup. So if we click on this, we will now see that pickup function that we created inside of our parent. And this is what it looks like inside of our parent, inside of our child. It looks like this where we're simply making a call over on over to our parent pickup saying like, yep, that is the function that we want to execute. Now, I can extend this out even further. What I'm gonna do here is right-click and some empty space type in, get player character. Cast to ThirdPersonCharacter, like so. Now because we created that custom event inside of our ThirdPersonCharacter, and you are sure to Compile and Save. We're going to make a call to this custom event health child pickup. So in our child pickup, I can now drag out of here and type in health child pickup. And this will make the call on over to our ThirdPersonCharacter Blueprint to execute this. Now, back here in our child pickup, we do need to pass along some health that we would like to pass in to either heel or we could hurt our character. I'm just going to hard set something however you could right-click on this. You could promote this to a variable or a local variable. A local variable would only be seen by this function right here. I'm just going to put in points to five right here. I will compile this as well. And let me go back to my ThirdPersonCharacter Blueprint and just make sure that our health right now, it's currently set to 100%. So I'm going to set this down to be 50%. And just as a quick play tests, I want to make sure that our health meter is in fact showing 50% health. Alright, so with this all done, we can actually jump in and play. I could have just tested it there but wasn't thinking straight. So notice my health right ear is at 50%. This should heal it up to about there on the health meter because that is what we're instructing it to do. And here we go. We did indeed increase our health 2.75. And you saw that string passed along as well. So you saw here inside of my child pickup, I simply extended that functionality that we were already inheriting from the parent. The parent pickup already had script in it right here. So when we overlap that sphere, we're going to call for that function, this pickup function inside of the parents. So our child is going to be inheriting all of this. And our child is also going to be extending it by here. We're making this call on over to the custom event inside of our ThirdPersonCharacter. Something else worth noting here is that when we did pick up our child here, notice in the upper left it said Got Health pack. And the reason is saying God health pack is because here in our child pickup, we change the item name to be health pack. And if you recall, inside of the parent pickup function that we created right here is where we are saying got item name and then exclamation point. So let's respecting all of this. It is calling this pickup function inside of our parent. But it's also respecting the variable names that we have changed here in our child pickup, namely is not saying item name anymore in our child pickup, we said nope, it's now going to say health pack. 96. Child Class (Part #2): Alright, in part number two here we're going to be discussing some of the finer bits of nuances that you may come across when working with parent and child class blueprints, some things that you should know about. So let's assume that you create a parent pickup like we've done. And let's just say we've added this rotating, moving components like we've done and we want to make it so that any children of this blueprint obey this rotation rate of one atm that there's no chance we want to have no way of the child class blueprints deviating from this value. We want to lock them out so to speak. Well, we can do here is we can uncheck this editable when inherited checkbox. And you're going to find this checkbox on all of our different components right here. What happens is when you uncheck this and I will, I'm going to uncheck it. And then I'm going to compile this once again and save. Now if I go into my child pickup, It's going to inherit all of these values because I just compiled and say that those changes will propagate on down to the child once make some edits in your parent. So our rotation rate is 180. Our child pickup will now have that same rotation rate, rotating movement of 180. But check this out. I can't change any of the properties right here. In fact, along the top it says components flag is not editable when inherited. That is this checkbox right here. When inherited must be edited in the parent blueprints. So it's letting me know, hey, you can't change this here. You'd have to go back to your pair blueprints. If you click right here, it's sent me back to my parents. I could click this box right now. And once I click that box, I can head on back to my child and oh, I can't change it yet anymore. However, if I go back to my parents, compile, then head on back, then I can change it once again. So that is something you should definitely, definitely know about. Something else to note here is that just because you have a property set in your details panel for a given component, that does not mean that that's going to be the actual property value obeyed in the game. Now let me show you an example of exactly what I mean by that. I'm going to change my child pickup here to have a rotation rate of simply ten. Okay? Rotation rate here of ten. And the parents with the rotating movement components selected. I'm going to change it here to well, actually I'll leave it at 180. So you might think OK, parent hazard at 180, child has it at ten. However, if in my parent pickup in the Event Graph wanted to do something on Event Begin Play. I'm going to hold down the P key, left-click bringing Event Begin Play. And then I bring into my rotating movement in components so that I can talk to this in some way. And I say with this rotating movement components selected, I'm going to drag out and I'm going to alter this property rotation rate. So dragging out of that rotation rate, I'm going to set the rotation rate. And I'll say we're going to set it to be 1,000. So note what I've got going on here. The rotating movement component, I had it set to 180. But upon beginning play, I am changing that value to be 1,000. Here in my child pickup. I have it to be ten, you may say, okay, it's gonna be ten for this. But remember, the child is going to inherit all of the functionality setup in the parent. And the parent right now is saying, hey, as soon as we began play, you're going to change you're rotating movement to 1,000. So the child is going to respect that as well. So if I jump back here in my level test map, and actually a cone is a really poor mesh to see that rotation rate, I'm going to swap that cone out really quickly, coming back into child static mesh. Let's do something that we can actually see rotating around. How about this pipe? We will see rotating around. Alright, so now if I was to simulate that is to run the game, but not actually jump in and play. You can see that they're both spinning around quite fast. Indeed, this one appears like it's spinning around a little bit faster because it's got those particles all dancing around. But indeed they are both spinning around at quite a rapid rate, the rate that we have set up in the parent, which is to say 1,000 because our child is certainly not spinning it around at a rate of ten. Now I think the key takeaway there is just to be mindful, where you are creating a script. Just remember if you create any script inside of your parents that is going to propagate down, that is filtered down to your child in any children that your child may have as well. So if you want to have some functionality that is unique to the child, only scripted within the child, and skip scripting it inside of the parent because this is going to apply to anybody on down the lineage chain. That leads into our next point here. Just as you see this parent having a child, our Child Blueprint can also have a descendant. So let's try this out. I'm going to go back to my content browser here. With our child pickup, I can now right-click on this and create a child Blueprint class. And I'll call this BP underscore. We'll call this grand kid. Pick up. If I double-click on this to open it up. And let me just put it right here. So we've got parents, child grandkids. We can see that the parent class is the child pickup, but our child pickup has a parent pickup above it. So check this out. Our grand kid, you would think that our rotation rate would be the same as our parent pickup because of what I just described, our parent is going to override upon play are rotating movement to be not 181000, the child's going to respect that as well. And so should our grandkids, right? Let's go ahead and give this a try. Places out here. And we should give the grandkids a different mesh here as well, just to drive home the point that it's different. So I'm going to select these static mesh here and let's try this quad pyramids, something like that. And so now if I was to simulate this, alternatively, Alt plus S will simulate it. They're all spinning at the exact same way. It's just a little bit of a visual trick. This one looks like it's spinning slower, but they're actually all spinning at the exact same rate. So whatever we set up in our parent for script is going to propagate down to the child, which will propagate on down to the grandkids as well. Alright, one more concept I want to demonstrate here, and it has to do with input overrides. Now I'm gonna go back to my parent pickup here. Once again, my parent pickup descends from the actor class a blueprint. Actor class blueprints do not process. That is, they do not fire off keyboard input events by default, however, we can make it so that they do recognize that is to fire off keyboard input events if we set them up that way. So I'm gonna go under my class defaults here. And in the details section where it says input, auto receive input. I'm going to change this from disabled to player zero. In doing so, I can now add a keyboard input event or a controller input event. And it will recognize that. Now we change this here inside of my parent pickup. If I go to my child pickup, same class defaults, and we come under the input section. It now also sets that up as player zeros as well. Same thing in our grandkids, we go under your class defaults. That changes have been propagated all the way on down the line. That's great. Alright, let's go back to our parents. And in some empty space here, I'm going to right-click and let's do something when we do the keyboard. Let's do, let's do the, we'll do the K key shore the KCI. Alright, off of pressing the KCI, we're going to print string. And what we're going to aim to print out is simply going to be parents. And with our K key selected here, note that over on the right we have consume input checked as well as override parent binding checked. Now, what will happen here when I play, let me just click on these three dots, will go to new editor window. I'll set my debug option here to be my parent pickup. Notice that I can pick any of these three, but I'm going to choose my parent pickup. Bring on that window. When I press the K key right up here, I see parent printed out just onetime. Onetime only. Now you may be saying to yourself, What the heck, I thought any sort of scripting changes that you made in apparent that that scripting change is going to propagate on down to the child and thus the grandkids as well. So why didn't we only see this printed out one time? Why didn't we see it printed out three times as in the parents than the child and the grandkids. Well, this is functioning as so because our consume input here is checked. Now what that means is that other actors with lower priority won't handle this function. That means it'll just stop here and it'll die here. Now note what happens when I uncheck this consume input checkbox. Let's go ahead and play again. I'm going to press that KCI and look in the upper left of our play window here, we see parent printed out three times. That is because by not consuming the input here, we are allowing that key, K key to propagate down. That is to function within our child in grandkids pickup as well. So when consume input is checked, it'll function just in the highest level. With that uncheck, that change will propagate down to any descendants. Alright, so let's push this all a little bit further. I'm going to left-click, Copy these nodes right here, control C. And I'm gonna go inside of Maya child pickup. And inside of my event graph, I'm just going to hit Control V to paste those. Now with my K key selected over in the Details panel, I'm going to say, let's consume the input right here. And also I'm going to change out my print string and now to be child. Okay, and let's go ahead and play tests from here. Now what you'll see when I press the K key, let me set my child pick up right here as being the one that we want to see. When I press the K key. Now, you'll see child, an only child. Now, something to note here. This is because we've got our child is set to consume input, meaning the parents won't register it. Now, this is being greedy. It's saying consume it here, ignore our parents. That is the one we want to process this input key for. Now, if we uncheck it here, uncheck consume input here in our bp child pickup and play once again, going to press that KCI and now we see parent child child. What is happening here? Well, by not consuming it, we're allowing it to also show to also be used inside of our parent pickup. Our parent is saying parent here in our child, we're seeing child. And remember our grandkids is descending from us, the child as well. So child, child, but in the parent itself, which is also unchecking, consuming input. It's saying parents. So that's why we saw the result that we saw there. Alright, so there you have it. The concept of inheritance shown off in Unreal and the power that it provides. Here we have demonstrated that you can create a parent pickup. From that you can right-click on it and create a child pickup that will inherit all of the properties and functionality of the parent inside of the child, you can create custom functionality. You can customize some of the variables and also some of the component properties as well. And then we also showed that you can keep the lineage going. You can right-click on your child and create a grandchild as well. So these powerful concepts can be used all throughout your game to simplify various systems that you may want to incorporate, such as a weapon pickup system, a lot of weapons to pick up. They all may have their unique properties about them, but the pickup functionality, so to speak, would remain the same. Guys that'll do it all for this video. See you in the next one. 97. Framework Overview: All right, welcome everyone. In this video, our goal is to gain a familiarity and understanding of what are known as Framework blueprints in Unreal, this is a critical topic that everyone working in Unreal should know about. So what are these framework blueprints? Well, they're high level blueprints associated with a project that determine key things about your game, such as the rules of your game. Those kinds of things are oftentimes contained within a game mode blueprint, or the player in your game, otherwise known as the character or the pond. Did you control those sorts of things? So where are these framework blueprints found? Well, every project has some by default, and in fact, some have existed up to this point in the course. Some of you have known about, others you haven't, but this is where we're going to reveal all. So you can find these framework blueprints right up here in the upper right of your editor under Settings, project settings. In here, if you select maps and modes, we've got a default Game Mode. And your default Game Mode contains all of these blueprints inside of it. Oftentimes this is collapsed. You can expand this out. So you can see inside of here we've got a game mode. It Default Pawn Class, a HUD class, player controller. And I would even throw in the game instance class, which is down here. All of these blueprints we're talking right here, and these right here, these are known as your framework blueprints. Now I just showed you that you could access these within your project settings, maps, and modes by clicking on this button right over here. Alternatively, if you come under edits, you can find your project settings there as well. You can access maps and modes and find your framework blueprints as well. Alternatively, if you click right here and come under your project settings right here you can see your what is known as your game mode blueprint. And then down below you can see some of those framework blueprints in this section right here as well. Now, each of these different framework blueprints such as the game mode, a character, a player controller. Those are all specific types of blueprints. And we'll see some of those and how to create those within upcoming videos in this section of the course. Now, in just this framework overview video, it is important to note that while we have some blueprints, some framework blueprints to be found within our project settings here, maps and modes. These are our framework blueprints. These are blueprints that control things about our project. That is, every level that we create within our project. It is possible to override these framework blueprints on a per level basis, on a per mass basis. We can find that by coming back to our main level editor. If I come under Window and access my world settings, we can see if I come under the Game Mode section and I click this drop-down right here. This is where I can override my framework blueprints for a specific level. They're found in the world settings. So if in my project settings I had some framework, blueprints is setup for my project and determine things like, Well, I'm going to be controlling the ThirdPersonCharacter throughout that's determined by my Default Pawn Class. I can actually make it so that within a specific map with any specific level, I can set a specific pond that I want to control just within that one level that is found in the world settings. So you can find that not only under the Window world settings option. You can also find that right here, clicking right there. And you can see are your world settings overriding your game mode right now we can see that we're not overriding anything. That's what that alert is right there. Alright, so once again, that is our overview of frame work blueprints, your framework blueprints contain these blueprints right here. I would also throw in the game instances, well, these are all different blueprints types and they contain key information about your game, such as the rules determining the Gamow blueprint, what character you are controlling, the Pawn Class, et cetera. We're gonna be exploring those further throughout this section of the course. We'll see you in the next video. 98. Game Mode (Part #1): In this video, our goal is to learn about the importance of the Game Mode blueprint in Unreal, we're going to learn what it does, how to create one, and how to tell our project to use this asset. Now, we have had a game mode blueprint existing in our project settings since the beginning of this entire course. Now when we created this project, we use the third person template. And within our third-person Blueprints folder was this BP third-person game mode. If you come under your settings, Project Settings, you can see in the maps and modes section that the default gateway mode was automatically slotted to be BP, third-person game mode. So there has been one here the whole time. Now, what is the Gamow blueprint? Well, it's one of two main classes which handle info about the game. The other being the game state blueprint, which is another framework blueprint down here. Now game modes are designed to define and implement the rules of your game. Some examples include the number of players allowed, player spawn and respond functionality transitioning between levels, that sort of thing. Now the game mode also determines other default classes use in your game. Now to help drive home this point right here, I'm gonna go back to my level editor here and double-click on our third-person game mode. Now, if you see this, this is what is known as a data only blueprint. But even here we can see within this third-person game mode, here are our various other framework blueprints such as our player controller class. That's something that we created earlier in the course. And our Default Pawn Class are BP, ThirdPersonCharacter inside of your Gamow blueprint. This is where you actually slot all the rest of your foot, your framework blueprints. You can do it here or in your project settings. If you change it in one spot, you change it in the other. Now, just for your information, you can open up what is known as the full blueprint editor by clicking right here if you ever see that. But even in here, your third-person game or blueprint, if you have class default selected up here, right over here is all of your different framework blueprints. Again, these are associated with your game mode blueprint. Now I just mentioned earlier that the Gamow blueprint was one of two classes at handle info about your game, the other being the game state. So the game mode exists only on the server, whereas the game states that guy right there. You can find it in your project settings right there that exists on the server and is replicated to all clients. Alright, let's create our very own Gamow blueprint and then set it here in our project settings. So to do this, I'm gonna go back to our level editor. Now, earlier in the course under my scripting folder, I created a folder by right-clicking here, new folder. I named it Framework. Now actually I created one of our framework blueprints earlier in the course is player controller blueprint. I created this during the event. Begin cursor over video. If you want to review that. Although we will be talking about player controller's soon, within this directory is where I'm gonna be creating a brand new game mode. So right-click it some empty space Blueprint class. And right here in our picked parent class, we can choose a new game mode. It's known as Game Mode base. And it even says that defines the game being played, its rules, scoring, et cetera. We're going to click on that. I'm going to call this our bp underscore Game Mode. Then with that created, I'm going to right-click and save it right away. Control plus S can save that as well. And I can slot this in, in my project settings. Again, you can access your project settings here and here. Under maps and modes are default Game Mode. I'm going to change this to be my BP game mode. Now note that once I do this, check this out, it's going to automatically set the rest of my framework blueprints. Now my ThirdPersonCharacter is no longer in here. Now I was using that along with my player controller that I made earlier. So I'm going to want to set those back in here. So I'm going to close out my third person game mode that I have open right up here. Close that out. And I'm going to open my BP gay mode right here. So note that if I change my Default Pawn Class within my BP game mode that I just created, if I change that back to BP ThirdPersonCharacter, if I change it here back in my project settings, under Default Pawn Class, it changed it here as well. Likewise, if I change my player controller, this is the player controller that I created earlier in the course. Bp player controller in the event begin cursor over video. If I change that here, my project settings, bp player controller. And I go and look inside of my BP game mode. You can see that that change is reflected here as well. So you change it in one place, you change it in the other. I'm going to go ahead and save this out right here. Now note this is not the only place that I could have edited all this information or even set my game mode itself, Bacchae by level editor. If I was to click right here under this Blueprints button, you can see project settings, game mode. I could create a game mode from here. I can edit my game mode from here. And down below I've got my different game mode classes as well. So I could select e.g. a player controller from here. I could create a player controller from here. All kinds of options under this Blueprints button right up here. That's how you can access your game mode, edit your game, would create a new one, change any of the framework blueprints that exists with inside of it as well. Alright, now for an example, use case of a game mode blueprints. I'm gonna need a trigger volume and I've got one over to the side of my level here. But if you'd like to get a trigger volume or a Trigger box, same thing. You can click right here. I like to come under basic Trigger box. Go ahead and drop it into your level. And then with it selected in the Details panel, you can set your box extent. I've got 100s across the board. I set the line thickness to be ten. And then I also under the rendering section, turned off actor hidden and games so that I can actually see this trigger volume. Now inside of my game old blueprint, I'm going to create a variable. So coming under the variable section, clicking this plus button, I'm going to call this levels. And over in the Details panel right up here, I'm gonna change my variable type, at least the first half of it to be integer. And then I'm going to click this little drop-down right next to this because I'm going to change the type here, the container type to be a map container type. That's going to allow me to create a key value pair. If you did not see the video about Map variable containers, this is a good time to review that now, otherwise I will continue forward. So our key here is going to be of integer type R value here is going to be of the name type. I'm going to compile this and I'm going to add two key value pairs. So the first one we're going to add is clicking this plus button. And I'm going to set this first one to be level one. And I'm going to set the value here to be starter map. And then I'm going to click the Plus button once more. I'll say level two is going to be associated with minimal underscore default. Now if these look familiar, these two maps names, that is because back in our starter contents, maps, I've got two maps by that name, one starter map, one, minimal defaults. You'll notice by casing for starter map within my variable there is a little bit different, but that does not matter. Not for names, not burning variable types. So that is going to be all well and good. I am going to compile and save this very important that you do that for this next step. And next what I'm gonna do is come back to my level editor here. We've got our Trigger box. Make sure that you have this selected for our next step here. And coming under our blueprint button right up here, we're going to click this open Level Blueprint. Make sure you've got your trigger box here selected open Level Blueprint. And we're going to right-click and some empty space. We're going to add an event for that trigger box for when we begin overlapping it, we want to find out if the other actor was our ThirdPersonCharacter. So Cast to ThirdPersonCharacter, we've done that 1 million times. And if in fact it was our ThirdPersonCharacter that overlapped us, we want to access some information inside of our game mode. Now, the way we can do this is right-click and some empty space and type in get Game Mode. Now, you might think, Okay, great. We can now access with this note right here. Well, why don't I just dragged out of here and see if I can access this levels variable that lives inside of here. So let's go ahead and try that, right? Let's drag out of here and type in Levels. And I don't see that variable anywhere in here. Well, that's because we need to cast to rbp game mode in order to actually access that level variable that lives inside of it. So let's try this drug out of here. Cast to BP game mode. That is the Gamow that we just created. And so if you've got a setup like this, now you can drag out of your SBP Game Mode pane right here, type in levels, and right down here, you can get your levels, your key value pairs. We're gonna do is drag out of here. I'm going to type in bind. And I'm going to say that when we begin overlapping that we want to find look number two there while we're talking about here by me putting in the number two is we want to access level to right here, and we want to then open up the map name associated with level two. So we put in number two right here. And I'm going to drag out of here and type in open level by name. You can see the output here is a name variable type, that is this name right here, minimal defaults. Now, when we overlap that trigger box, reaching on over to our game old blueprint and saying, hey, Jay mode, you determine the rules of our game. And this rule determines that when I overlap that trigger box, I'm to go to level two. Let's compile this. Let's save. Let's go ahead and play here. Set my debug object. Sure. So you can see that script firing off as soon as I overlap this. And here we go. There we are minimal defaults. The new level. 99. Game Mode (Part #2): Alright, let's try another example here. This time we're going to try responding the player. So for this, I'm going to start off in my third person Character Blueprint. Under third-person blueprints, ThirdPersonCharacter. We're gonna do a little bit of script in here first. So the first thing we're gonna do is bring in a key. Let's see what we've all got here. We make use of the four key. It looks like we haven't made use of that. So I'm going to right-click it some empty space, type in four. Let's do keyboard for. And we're going to say when we press the F4 key, we're simply going to destroy the actor meaning ourselves. So pressing for, we're going to destroy ourselves. Great. That is all needed for this next step. So compile and save this. Now in our bp Game Mode, head on over into there. We're going to head on into the Event Graph of here. We're gonna do something off of event tick. You always have to be a little bit careful when you use event tick. You can Bork your game by doing it too much scrip off of event tick. But for academic purposes, I'll be using this fact. If I come under class defaults, I'm going to say our tick interval is going to be every 1 s. We don't need to be taking every frame. So we'll say every 1 s. I'm going to right-click and some empty space, get player character. We're going to then drag off of this and do cast to our third person character. Then what we're going to do is drag out of here and type in on destroyed. Now, if I start typing in on destroyed, I had this assign on destroyed. That is the one I am looking for, a sign on destroyed. Now when I click on this, I'm going to bring in two nodes, a Bind node, as well as a custom events. I'll describe what's happening here in just a moment's going to hook this in like so. And I will leave this custom event name as such. Now, if this all looks familiar here, this binding, uh, to this custom event. This is because this is a setup that we use when we're talking about event dispatchers to listen out for this on destroyed event in this case, for our ThirdPersonCharacter, we are subscribing to our ThirdPersonCharacter is on destroyed Event Dispatcher. That's essentially what we're doing. You may be saying to yourself, wait a minute. In our ThirdPersonCharacter, we did not create an Event Dispatcher at all. Well, if I go back into my ThirdPersonCharacter, if I scroll on down to my event dispatchers, I will actually be able to find under Event Dispatcher game a dispatcher for on destroyed. Now this gets called when I destroy the actor. Now if you don't see any of this down here, it's because you need to click on this gear icon and show inherited. If you turn that off, don't show inherited, you won't see it. This is an inherited Event Dispatcher inherited from the parent class. So if you turn it in on ThirdPersonCharacter event dispatchers game, this onDestroy, this is getting called. This is sending out a signal when we destroy our character here in our game mode, what we're doing here is we are subscribing, we're listening out for this on destroyed event to happen. And then when that happens, this will fire off and tell, tell the next node to do whatever we want it to do. Now what we wanna do is we want to respond, we want to restart up with our players. So a way we can do this is right-click and some empty space type in git player controller. And if we reach inside our generic player controller here node and do a search for restart player. There is a function node related to your player controller. This will restart your player at your player start actor location. So this setup right here will be enough. So let's check this out. I'm going to compile and save in play. So it was the four key that's going to destroy us. And when we are destroyed, we're gonna be respond right back at this spot. So let me run off of that spot. The four key. I respond in that spot, tap foreign key, respond to that spot, et cetera. Now, for those of you saying, Hey, why are we using event tick here? Well, if I did, an event began play, Let's go ahead and give Event Begin Play. Let's do begin, end event, begin play a try. What would happen here? And let's just disable this. Is we're listening now for this onDestroy event. As soon as we begin play here, That's great. But that listening out for that event has already happened. So this is only going to fire off the onetime adheres this event. Upon beginning play, we're listening for it just that one time. So if I press the F4 key here, it does rosette us back one time. But if I press the F4 key again, does not happen. That's because we listened down for the first time upon beginning play with event tick. Remember, we were listening out for this every single second. That's how we set up our event tick within our class defaults, alright, some Game Mode notes to end this video on. Game may have any number of game modes. We only have one, however, setup in our project settings at a time, your primary game mode is set up in your project settings. But remember, you can override which game mode is used in your world settings. And you can find that under Window world settings, right there. Always possible to override the game mode in your project settings. The game mode blueprint is where you set up the rules for your game. Things like respond locations, things like what level to travel to next, things like number of allowable players, that sort of thing. The Game Mode is not a great blueprint to store variables that need to carry over data from one level to the next. Things like lives or score. Now this is because when you open a new level, any variables created and stored inside of the game mode, or reset back to their original values. And I want to demonstrate this here quickly before we end this video. Alright, let's assume that in our bp game mode that this is a great place to store how many lives are. Character can have spoiler alert. It's not, but just play along under our variables section, you're going to click this plus button. I'm going to call this lives. And over here is where you can make sure that it is set to a single variable of integer type. I'm going to set my default lives here to five. The reason mine showed up as fives because I cut the video there in, recreated this ahead of time. Now I'm going to compile this and save very important to do that. Next, what I am going to do is I will make it so that inside of my BP third-person character, I'm going to decrements how many lives we have inside of our game mode. So ThirdPersonCharacter. I'm going to right-click. I don't think I'm doing anything off of the six key. So what we're gonna do from here is right-click get Game Mode. We will cast to our bp game mode. And once we have done this, we can then reach inside of here, find out how many lives we've got to hold it. Let's get our lives and will dry out of this and type in decrements. This is kind of a special node in that we're getting our lives here. We have five, this will decrement one, subtract one from it, and then it's going to set it back. So no need to set lives here as well. So we're gonna go 54321, etcetera. That'd be great. Now when this all happens, let me go ahead and compile this. Save. Remember in my Level Blueprint, I've made it so that when I overlap that trigger box, I'm going to transport myself to level two. So after I transport to level to, my third-person character is going to come along with, I'm going to press the six key and see how many lives we have. So that is going to be our proof that soaring lives inside of our game mode. Not a great idea because those variables gets set back to their default when you change levels. Here we go. So click and play. I'm going to press this six key. We can see, well actually you know what I need to do, I need to print this out to the screen. Let's drag out here. Print string. Let's print this results. Like so. Compile, Save, and play. Set my debug option to be my ThirdPersonCharacter. So now when I press the six key, 4321, so I've got one life left, so to speak. I'm going to overlap this. We're gonna go to another level. Now when I press the six key, you would assume that I had one life, I shouldn't go down to zero, but 4321, that lives variable gets set back to zero. So just a little bit of nuance there to understand with the Game Mode blueprint. Any variables that you set inside of here, they will be set to, they're back to their default values if you ever change levels. All right guys, that is going to do it all for this discussion on Game Mode blueprints. It is the blueprint that sets other framework blueprints here inside of your class defaults. And it is a great place to set up rules for your game, such as respond functionality. That'll do it all for this video. See you in the next one. 100. Pawn: Welcome and continuing our discussion of framework blueprints. Our goal in this video is to learn what a Pawn Class Blueprint is. How to create one in how to set one up so that our project knows to use are created Pawn Class Blueprint as the default avatar we want to control. So let's talk about what the heck a Pawn Class Blueprint is all a pond, is an actor that can be possessed and receive input. It is the physical representation of a player or AI entity in the world. Now pawns can be humanoid, as is our third person characters that we've been controlling up to this point in the course. Or it might not be humanoid. So it could be something like a car or spaceship, a rolling ball, something like that, that you can control. Alright, let's go ahead and create a pawn class. And I could do that straight away from here inside of our project settings, maps and modes, selected game mode drop-down by clicking this plus button right here next to Default Pawn Class, I could create the proper blueprint using this method. I just choose a folder. I'd want to save it in et cetera. However, I'm going to not do this just to show you how we can create this back here in our level editor, I'm going to come under my scripting framework folder. And if I right-click in here, I can also come under Blueprint class. And you've seen this window 1 million times, pick a parent class. One of the most common ones to create is a pawn classes. Second one down here, and it says, a pawn is an actor that can be possessed and receive input from a controller. Let's go ahead and click here the pawn. And I'm going to name this guy BP underscore pawn. And then I'm going to double-click on m2, open him up right away. We're going to set up some stuff over in the Components panel. So the first thing we're going to add here, click Add under components is we'll add a static mesh. And over in the Details panel, I have a given static mesh in mind. It's HMD is what I want to search for. I'm looking for this generic HMD. Now, this is something found in your engine pathway. So if you don't see this and you want to play along at home, click that gear icon, make sure show engine content is on. This is going to look like a VR headset. We're going to control one of those. I'm going to send my scale here, 255.5 with this lock icon on, I can just change one of these. I'll choose the middle one here, the y scale, click F5. Then when I press Enter, because I've got that lock icon set over here. By pressing Enter, it's going to set it to five across the board. Alright, I'm also going to change the material for this to be Chrome. I'll do a chrome ball. So we're gonna, we're gonna steer something like that around. That's exciting. Alright, next component I want to add here. Make sure we've got our default seen route selected. So here's how it works. The default senior at all your other components that you add are going to be attached to it. So right now our static mesh is attached to our default scene root. That's essentially a point in space where we are attaching things to. So I'll choose default seen route, choose spring arm, spring arm. Think of that as a selfie stick. We're going to be using this to attach a camera component too, which might, with my spring armed components selected. I'm going to add and attached a camera components, not Sony camera, just plain old camera cameras. A fine name. I will accept that so we can see camera is attached to our spring arm. For the camera, I'm going to set the location for this to be 100. Let me zoom out my viewports. I can see that the rotation we're going to set to be negative 20. And if I select my spring arm, you can see right now that if I was to rotate my spray arm around, pressing the space bar, the camera is going to go along with it. Now the reason this is offset, it's not attached to that red line. The spring arm camera, which is determined by this arm length. By the way, you could set that further, farther away, closer, I'm going to set that to 300. Now the reason this is not attached to that red line right there is because I do have the Z height set up to be 100 and we're angling it down negative 20 degrees in the y-direction. Last but not least, we are going to add a floating Move are floating pond movement component. And it says in our little tool tip here, this is a movement component that provides a simple movement for any Pawn Class. I say we go with it, yes, As we will need that to move this giant headset around. Now, I am going to cheat here. I'm going to copy and paste some script from our ThirdPersonCharacter into the Event Graph of our pons. So I've got my ThirdPersonCharacter up open over here. If you forgot or that guy is third-person blueprints. There's your ThirdPersonCharacter. So what do I want to steal in here? Well, I want to steal. The movements controls. So where it says movement, input, gamepad and mouse, I'm going to left-click, drag around all these Control C. I'm gonna go into my ponds event graph. I'm going to delete these all out and do Control V to paste those in here. And then I'm gonna go back to my ThirdPersonCharacter. And I want to be able to look around. So this is going to be our look around controls for the mouse. I'm using a mouse. You got gamepad. Look around controls over here. I'm going to steal the camera input, the look around inputs for the mouse. Left-click drag, Control C, back in my pond, Control V. Now, that is all well and good. This will allow me to look left and right. The yaw and the pitch right here will allow me to look up and down. However, I need to change something back in my class defaults of my pond here. So in my class defaults, pawn, I'm looking for a couple of boxes to tick, and they're right up here where it says use controller rotation pitch. I want to make sure that that is checked. Where it says use controller rotation jaw. I want to make sure that that is checked as well so that I can pitch my camera up and down and also look left and right. Alright, with this all done, I'm going to compile and save. And now in order for me to actually test this out, I need to slot in my BP pawn here to be my default Pawn Class. Now I could do it here. But just to show off different techniques, I'm gonna go back to my level editor here. I've got this blueprint of button right up here. So I'm going to select that my current Game Mode is my b p game mode. Let me just go down to my scripting framework folder. You can see in the last video we created BP game mode, clicking right up here. That is currently my game mode. So if I choose in this drop-down right here, pawn currently, ThirdPersonCharacter, let's select a new Pawn Class. And I'm going to choose my b p upon. So I'm going to set it right there. You can see if I come back in here, come right under here, that has now set as my new pond. If I go into the Game Mode acid itself by double-clicking on it. You can see here my Default Pawn Class has now been changed. And also, if you go on your project settings, you can see your Default Pawn Class has been changed here as well. So you change it in any one of those three places. It changes it in the other places. So now, when I go and click the play button here, I will not spawn in as the ThirdPersonCharacter right here at the player starts actor, I will spawn in as his giant VR headset. Let's go ahead and give this a play. Let me go back into my pond right here as well. So you can see this script firing off. So I'll click play right here. There's my giant headset. Let me select my debug object as my spawned in BP pond. So you can see this is all firing off continuously. The input axis turn right. Let me zoom up on this a little bit. These are firing off continuously. Input axis move forward and backward, move right and left. Axis events do fire off continuously like this. Let's see if I can move around. We can see i'm I can look around and holding down the right mouse button. Left and right. That's yaw, pitch up and down. W a S. Andy, it looks like I'm moving around. Just find we now have a pawn that we can play as. And so there you have it. If you have these components in this script, you can have a upon a class blueprints to control in your game as well. Of course, you have to have it set within your game mode, your project settings in that default Pawn Class slot. Pretty cool. Alright, in part two here we're going to create a character class blueprint. A character class derives from a pawn class. We will see you all in the next video. 101. Character: Alright, welcome back. In this video, our goal is to create a character class blueprint from scratch. Now the character class is an extension of the Pawn Class, and it is a special type of pawn that has the ability to walk around. I thought I would include it here within our framework Blueprint discussion because inside of our project settings, where all of our framework blueprints can be found, as well as inside of our game mode, where the framework blueprints can be found in slotted in either or. We have a slot for Default Pawn Class, and that is where a character class blueprint can be slotted in either a pond or a character can be slotted in because the character derives from the Pawn Class. Now to help drive home this point, we're going to go back into our scripting framework folder. And we're going to right-click in some empty space where we're going to create a Blueprint Class. And right here in our pick parent class window, we can see if we choose a character. It says a character is a type of pond that includes the ability to walk around. And if we come under are all classes section check out the hierarchy of different blueprint classes. Underneath the actor class. We can find, I just expanded out that triangle there. We can find the Pawn Class. Pawn inherits from actor. And inside of here we can see that the character class inherits from pawn. I'm going to choose character right up here. I'm going to name this BP underscore character, underscore female. Then we're going to double-click on this to open it up. And you can see we've got a bit of work to do here because we don't see anything in our viewport. So let's go ahead and get started. The first thing I wanna do inside of our character, female blueprint on her class defaults. I want to come under the Details panel and where it says use controller rotation yaw. I want to uncheck this. Note. If left true, our character would automatically be oriented in the direction that we're looking. You know how you can pivot that camera around your character. Well, if you did leave that true, your character would automatically be looking in that direction as well. I want to uncheck that because I want our camera to actually be looking face-to-face with the character. You can experiment with that if you'd like, when we're done with this whole process. Alright, I'm going to select our mesh next. And over in the Details panel I need to slot in a skeletal mesh. Let's go ahead and shoes. We've got SKS, Manny, which is the male version I'm going to do S, K, M, Quinn. It's gonna be the female version that's going to load in here. Now while that's loading, and I'm also going to slot in an animation class as well. So under anime class, I'm gonna be looking for ABP Quinn. And you'll see Quinn now animating. Also, I need to set my character mesh down here a little bit. So I'm going to set the location, the z location to be negative 87. I'm going to be super precise with this. That's going to be good enough. The rotation I'm going to set to be negative 90. This blue arrow indicates forwards. So you want to have your character facing forward just like that. Alright, next with our Capsule Component selected, I'm going to add a spring arm components. A spring arm component is essentially like a selfie stick, although there is a setting or two that can be very useful for controlling things about your camera. I'm going to leave that name there as spring arm and over in the Details panel, I want to find under camera settings right here, Use Pawn Control Rotation. I want to make sure that this is checked. Now this is going to make it so that when we hold down the right mouse button in our game and pivoted around, the camera is going to rotate around, which is something that we do want. So you can play around with that setting as well as soon as we're done with this video. Next, I want to select, with my spring arm components selected here. Want to add a camera. Nowadays, Sydney camera, but just a regular camera, and it should be indented like this. The camera in this way is attached to your spring arm, is essentially attached to the end of your selfie stick here so you can see my spring arm. If I was to change the target arm length, the camera would adjust with him. Set that back to its default of 300 for now. So with my camera selected, there is nothing I want to change here, although I will point out inside of here that if you wanted to, you could change something like your field of view setting. Lot of users like to play around with that. Play around with that, find a field of view that is to liking. Next, I'm going to change my character movement component here. I've got one inside of here that is called Orient Rotation to movement. Now there is a whole lot of different parameters inside of your character movement component that control your characters moving properties. If I search for this audience. That's the one I'm looking for, Orient Rotation two movements. I do want to check this. By checking this, I'm going to orient that is rotate the character to move in the direction you're trying to go. Without that, it's going to be so that your character could be looking like they're walking in one direction while they're actually moving in another direction. So that's a good one to make sure that you've got checked. Next, if I jump over to our event graph, you can see that I don't have any script in here that's going to control how my character moves. I'm going to cheat in the interest of time. So I'm going to delete out these nodes. We're going to jump into our ThirdPersonCharacter and steal some nodes from there like we did in the last video. So if you don't have ThirdPersonCharacter open under third-person character, blueprints double-click on your third-person character. Inside of here, we're going to steal our movements controls right here, all this stuff, left-click, drag, control C, coming into our character, female, control V to paste. This is going to control our character is forward and backward movements, as well as our left and right movements coming under our ThirdPersonCharacter. Once again, I am now going to steal my camera input mouse. If you've got a gamepad that you want to play your game with as well, you might consider stealing that. I'm only controlling it with the mouse, so I'm going to left-click and drag right here, control C, coming under character female, control V. And with all that done, let's go ahead and compile and save. Alright, next, we are going to slot in our bp character female as our default pond class. So let's jump on back to our level editor here. And I want to set this in side of our world settings. I'm going to override our world setting, our project settings right now. I'm using my b p game mode. If I use this game mode for my entire project, this is going to determine the framework blueprints used for every level, every map in my project, unless I override them in my world settings. So right now my project settings are saying, Hey, if you click the Play button, you're gonna be using your BP pond. And we can see that by me playing. There is my child VR headsets. That is my BP pond that we created here inside of our framework folder, BP pond. I want to say I'm a world settings. I'm going to change it for just this map. This will override the project settings. Now to do this, I'm going to choose a different game mode inside of my project settings. I've currently got my BP game mode. So I'll say for our world settings. And if you don't have this open, you can come under Window and turn on your world settings right there. That'll bring on this panel. For our game mode here, I will use, will say BP, third-person game mode. And while we normally have the third-person character slotted in as the character to roll around with watches by click Play, we now control the ThirdPersonCharacter. Instead of our bp pawn, I can say instead, let's choose to use our bp character female. Just to show another way of slotting something in here, I could choose something from the drop-down list. However, I could select my BP character female here. And with that selected, simply click on this arrow right here to use the selected acid from the content browser. And now with that slot it in, I could control my BP female character, character female. And you can see I'm moving in the direction my character is orienting, or my character is oriented in the direction I'm wanting to move. And also I'm able to run towards the camera like so kinda show improvement. Some of those checkboxes, checkboxes just did let me exit out of here quickly. If I was to go back into my BP character, female character movement component and uncheck, Orient Rotation to movements. And then click Play. Now check this out. When I move around, my character does this. They're not orienting to the direction that I'm trying to move. So I'm gonna go ahead and set that back Character Movement Component. Let's go ahead and check that. Next. Note that in our spring arm component, we had checked this. I need to undo the search filter there. We had checked this youth upon rotation setting. If I uncheck that and play, and I hold down the right mouse button, which I'm trying to do right now. I'm not actually rotating around my character. Instead, the camera is just moving and rotating on its own to face whatever direction my character is moving. I don't necessarily like that, so I'm going to check that back on. And finally, if you remember back in our class defaults we had made it so that we unchecked use controller rotation. Ya if we did have that check, if we did. And then we went ahead and played, I'm going to run around using WAS and D. You can see how you get this kind of scary result, which looks terrible. I can rotate it around like so. And my character is going to skate and simply facing in whichever direction I'm looking. Don't really like that much. And so that is why I prefer having that unchecked as well. Alright, there you have it. We have created a character class blueprint from scratch. With that created, you can go ahead and slot in any character or pond into your default upon class and whatever game mode you have chosen. You can see here in our world settings, we are overriding the game mode in just this map, just this world that we have set in our project settings. If we had nothing set back here in our world settings, the project settings would determine Pawn Class that would be used in this map. That's gonna do to offer this one, guys, see you in the next one. 102. Player Controller: Welcome. In this video, our goal is to learn about the role of the player controller blueprint in the overall setup of our gaming project. And also to explore some scripting concepts that are often associated with player controller blueprints. Now if I was to dive into my settings, my project settings, over in our maps and modes section. If we expand out our selective game mode right here, we can find the player controller class. Now once again, we can slot in a player controller here or inside of our default gateway mode. If we change something inside of our default gateway mode, that is one of these framework blueprints right here. It'll change it as well inside of our project settings. So the game mode is the one that determines the arrest of the framework. Blueprints change it in one spot, like here. It'll change it in your game mode and vice versa. If you change it here in your game mode, like a player controller, it'll change it in your project settings. So the player controller class is going to be the focus of this video. Now those of you that have been playing along all the way through since the beginning of this video, may recall that we have created a player controller blueprint. In fact, in the video titled events begin cursor over. We did create bp player controller. And the reason we created that there is so that we could turn on and click events and also show mouse cursor. There are some things specific to a player controller blueprint that we dove into earlier in the course just to show it off there. But now, here's the part where we explained what the heck a player controller even is. What is general purpose is in the framework of Unreal Engine blueprints. Now, to better understand what the heck a player controller blueprint is in Unreal. Consider this scenario. Consider a game like Lego Star Wars, where you can control a whole host of characters, but only one at a time. You as a player have some desire, some things you would like to do with your character and the game itself. You, the player wield a controller. In this case, we'll say it's this Xbox controller. Now you're playing the game and you are controlling just one character at a time. Let's say you're starting off as Yoda here. You can press the a button to make them jump. You can press the X button to make him swing his lightsaber, et cetera. Now however, let's say that Yoda dies. Sorry, Yoda, you are gone. That character is gone. Now, your player controller, which is represented by this actual controller, possesses a new character, in this case Anakin. Now, again, with Anakin, you can press the a button to jump, the X button to wield his lightsaber, et cetera. But then, oh, and I can dies. So that character class goes bye-bye. However, your player controller lives on and it keeps attaching itself to new players. In this case, you are now controlling account Du Gu were once again, you can press the a button to jump, press the X button to swing his lightsaber, et cetera. And perhaps you want to even do something like access the pause menu. Now, if you were to build some of this functionality within the character class blueprint, what happens if your character is dead? Like e.g. what if you were back here controlling Yoda? And that functionality to pause the game existed inside of your Yoda character class blueprint. Well, once he's dead, there'd be no way to pause the game. Player controller blueprints exists throughout your play session. And you can think of a player controller as being the puppet strings used to control your puppet, your character class. So any sort of shared functionality that you may have between character classes or any functionality that you want to have for you, the player itself, such as pausing the game or interacting with a menu screen. That kind of functionality you'd want to build out in your player controller blueprint. So in short, things to remember with a player controller, blueprint controllers are non-physical actors that can possess a pond or a pond derived class like a character. By default, there is a one-to-one relationship between controllers, a player controller, and a pawn, aka a character. Each controller controls only one pond at a time. And player controllers are best used to implement user centric functionality like bringing up a pause menu or an inventory screen. Or for shared character functions, like swinging a lightsaber if all your characters can do that sort of thing. Or jumping, if in fact all possible characters can jump as well, any sort of character specific functionality, that kind of functionality should exist within your pond or character class blueprint itself and not the player controller. Alright? If you don't already have a player controller Blueprint built from earlier in the course. You can create one now by right-clicking. Blueprint class player controller. And we named that guy bp player controller. And once again, you want to slot this into your framework. The way you can do that is under your project settings, which can be accessed here under Settings, project settings, and under maps and modes, you can slot it in right there. Alternatively, in your game mode, blueprint itself. And once again, we have the BP Game Mode lording over our project here. In this asset itself, the game mode blueprint. Over on the right-hand side, you can slot your player controller in right there. You change it here, you will change it in your project settings as well. Also back in your level editor, if you come under your Blueprints button right here, and you expand out under Project Settings, Game Mode, player controller. Here you can edit your current player controller, create a brand new one, or select an existing one. Now, if you open up your bp player controller here, earlier in the course, we had class default selected inside of our bp player controller. And this is where we checked on the ability to show a mouse cursor to enable click events and to enable mouseover events. We can also enable touch events as well. So there are some very game-specific things, ways to interact with your game and your menus that are housed inside of your player controller blueprint. Now before this video started, I went ahead and created some functionality inside of our bp player controller here, I wanted to show how we could script some character functionality inside of our player controller. Now remember, when you're playing a game, you're player controller attaches to whatever pawn it is that you are controlling pawn or character whenever you have set up inside of your Default Pawn Class. Now my script here is I'm making it so that when I press the Up button, I'm getting my current player character, the one that I'm playing as and I'm simply launching the character. Now the target here is a character, not a pond. So this will only work for characters that I am controlling. I could have also called this jump function that also exists inside of my character class blueprint as well. But I wanted to do this launch character a because it's cool. And b, because it shows off another character specific function that we could use. You must get player character and drag out if you're first in order to find this. And all it's going to happen here is whatever character I am possessing here. If I press the up key here, my player controller blueprint, I'm simply going to launched whatever character I am controlling up into the z-axis using that value. This is kinda like a super jumps. So if I was to just play here, I'll set my debug. Object to my loan player controller. Bring on my character once again. I've got a few more characters out here we'll be using shortly. So now when I press the up key on my keyboard, that is like a super jump. So this does indeed prove that I can script character specific functionality here inside of my player controller blueprint. Alright, now consider this scenario back in my level editor. I've placed two more BP character females out into my level itself. I simply rename them character female green and one character female red. And I simply change the material zero for one of them to be green. And I did that by selecting the character mesh, changing the element zero to green, and selecting the other one, I selected the character mesh and change element zero to read. And then with each of these selected, I did this one at a time. I went into my Level Blueprint and I created this script right here. There is a reference to my character or female. I believe that's the right one. I need to update this. I'm going to right-click on this and refresh that node. There is the red, there's the green. You, as long as you have them selected in your level, like your red one right here, you can go back into Level Blueprint, hold down the Alt key and left-click. You could do the same with the female green as well. And note my setup here. If I bring in a get player controller node, I can find nodes, function nodes for unprepossessing a target and then possessing another target. So check out this grip that I have going on here inside of my level blueprint. When I press the three key, the very first time, we're going to shoot out of this a output. In which case we are going to get our player controller. That is whichever player controller we are using at the time, our bp player controller, we're going to and possess whatever target it was controlling. In this case, it will be unprepossessing. In my world settings, I currently am spawning in a BP character female. It will be unprepossessing this female character. Then be told to possess. This player controller will transfer possession over two. My BP character, female red. Then the second time I press the three key, we're going to shoot out of the B output pin because flip-flop goes a, then B than a than B. So the second time you press the three key will shoot out of the beam. We're going to, I'm possessed whenever we're now controlling, which in this case will be the red character. And we will then transfer possession over to the character female green. So our player controller is being told to and possess one character and possess a new one. So let's just talk this up in the upper left here. I'm going to click Play. Bring in our debug object of our test map. And so check it out. So if I also press the Up button right now, I've got that super jump functionality built inside of my player character. That's super jumping kicking capability. That will transfer over to any character I possess. So I'm pressing up key. Alright, now I'm going to press the three key while mid flight. I've transferred possession over to my red character here. Check this out. If I press the up key here, my player controller functionality transfers over and you can see my other ones, cotton flight, they're pressing the three key. I press F3 key. When I was in flight, I've transferred possession by player controller is now controlling my character female green. And of course that functionality that I built out inside of my bp player controller will transfer over as well. So if I press the up key while controlling the green character, I can Super jump as well. So that is a demonstration showing that inside of my bp player controller, I can build out functionality for any functionality that I want all characters to share, all ponds to share. However, I have functionality very specific to an individual character or pawn. That type of script would be best to put within the individual pond or character. Alright, now I also mentioned that building out something like screen interactions, pausing the game, et cetera, that sort of stuff is great to build out inside of a player controller blueprint because pawns, characters they can die player controllers exists throughout your entire play session. So I'm going to come up some empty space here. I'm going to right-click. I'm going to do a search for keyboard and let's do something when we press the P key, P. And I'm gonna make it so that when I press the P key, I'm going to bring in a flip-flop node. So the first time we press it will shoot out of a. The second time we press it will shoot on a beat. And all I wanna do here is set game, paused. Control C, control V. So the first time we press the P key, we want to set the game to be paused. The second time you press the P key. We want to set it to be unpause. Now this is very important. Check this out with your P key selected here. You need to make sure that you check this box for execute when pause. Because if we left this unchecked, you would be able to press the P key to pause the game. But because the game is paused, it wouldn't recognize pressing of the P key again to unpause it. So you got to make sure that that is checked if you want to be able to use it to pause and unpause. So check this out. I am playing the game. I can run around, press the P key, game is frozen. Pressing the P key again, it will unfreeze it. I will press the three key, change over to my red character here, press the P key, pause, press the P key again on pause, and likewise transfer possession over to my green character. Press the P key, pause, press the P key again, unpause, shared functionality all within the player controller blueprint. Now something you may have noticed here is that our player controller blueprint recognizes and processes input events without any sort of special setup. We didn't have to go into our class defaults and do anything special in order for this to work or in order for this to work. Now, character and ponds do the same as does our Level Blueprint. They all process these input events by default. So what happens if I use in this case, say the UP event in a player controller, in a character blueprint and a Level Blueprint. What happens? What's the priority? Well, let's run a scenario here inside of my player controller. If I press the up key, I'm launching the character. Let's set up in our bp character female, which I'm currently controlling here in my world settings that is. My player controller class. I will just bring in the up key. I have to do search for keyboard up. And I'm just going to drag out of here. And I'm going to print string. And I'll say character. Female will just print that out to the screen for say, 20 s. Just to give ourselves a little bit more time here, we'll change it to be pink to make it nice and noticeable. Alright, compile, save that. And then inside of our Level Blueprint, I'm also going to bring in the keyboard up. And inside of here we're simply going to play a sound and we'll just do an explosion, right? Alright, so Compile, Save. Now I've got the up key implemented in our Level Blueprints, our character, and our player controller, which one of these is going to take priority? So I'm going to go ahead and click play here. And I'm pressing the up key and I jumped super high. I didn't hear anything and I didn't see any print texted in the upper left. So the player controller is the highest priority. Now what if I wanted this up key to actually process in my other blueprints as well. How would I set that up? Let's exit out of here quickly. And now with my Up key selected here, my input events, this consume input is the key that's determining that only this input event is processing within my player controller and not the other blueprints. So long as this is checked, this will consume this input, meaning this is the only place where it is going to be registered. It's going to eat it up and won't recognize it in any lower priority Blueprints. If I uncheck this and we try playing again, and I press the up key. Now you can see that I did the Super jump and you also heard that explosion sound. What happened here is I press the up key and said, Okay, launched with the character, we're not consuming that input. And here my level tests map. It also processed the upkeep, but it also said right here we are going to consume this input, meaning it stops right here, is not going to allow any other blueprints to process it. So the order goes. Our player controller has first priority, the Level Blueprint has second priority, and then your pond and characters have third priority. So if I wanted it to process here in my female as well, here with my level test map, I gotta make sure I've got up selected, do not consume the input. So our setup now is inside the player controller. We are not consuming that input. We're allowing it to filter down inside of my Level Blueprint. We're not consuming that up input. We're allowing it to filter down inside of my character female. Doesn't really matter here. This is the third priority. We can consume it here as well. It'll print that out to the screen. So now when I play, I press the up key, I'm going to super jump. You're going to see that texts for character female right up here. And that explosion will be heard as well. Here we go. Super jump explosion character female 12.3. Alright, so to recap, the player controller blueprint is one that can be slotted in within your game mode. Player controllers are non-physical actors that can possess a pond. They have a one-to-one relationship controlling one pond or character at a time. And pleasure controllers are best used to implement user-centric functionality, like bringing up a pause menu or for any shared functionality between characters or ponds that you might be taking control of. Guys that'll do to offer this one, we will see you in the next one. 103. Game Instance: Welcome. In this video, our goal is to learn about and demonstrate use of the game instance blueprint in unreal. That's this guy right down here. Now this is personally one of my favorite framework blueprints in all of unreal because it acts as a great, reliable storage container that you can go to to access variables and whatnot no matter what level you are in. Now, I don't know if this is technically considered a framework blueprint because it is not one of these blueprints that gets slotted into our game mode. Now you remember from earlier in our discussion about framework blueprints, the game mode is what determines the rest of these framework blueprints such as our Default Pawn Class, player controller, et cetera. The game instance is separate from that. It is not part of your game mode at all. We can see that I've got my BP Game Mode open across the top here. And if I was to select our default classes or a class defaults rather. We can see over in the class of section, there is nothing here for a game instance, blueprints. So what makes this blueprint so special? Well, it is unique in that it is not destroyed when changing levels in your game. It persists so long as your game is running. Alright, so at this point you're probably still wondering why the game instance blueprint is so valuable like who cares if it persists, if it exists throughout my entire play session? Well, what makes the game instance so valuable is that it actually carries over variable data from one level to another to another. Without getting reset. You see any variables you set in your pond or your player controller, or your game mode, they will be reset back to their defaults when you change levels, game instance does not have that problem. It will store and carryover variable data from level to level without those variables being reset. Not a really helped drive home this point. I've set up a scenario that we're going to test out here. Notice my default mode, Pawn Class and player controller class right here. Bp Game Mode, BP pawn and bp player controller. Inside each of these, I have created, and I'll start off with my BP pawn here, a Lives variable. By default it's going to be starting at zero. And inside of here, I simply created this script right here. So I'm going to press the six key. We're gonna get our lives. This node is going to increment it. This is a special note and that is going to get our lives and it's immediately going to set it back. So the first time I press six, it's going to change this to be one, then two, then three, et cetera, et cetera. And we're going to be printing that out to the screen. We're gonna be doing the same sort of setup here inside of our bp player controller. So I simply copied and pasted this bit of script into my player controller. I simply swapped out the input key. There is my lives variable as well. Now inside of my game mode, the game mode doesn't recognize input events. However, inside of my game mode, I did create a Lives variable. I will start this off with zero as well. Now, because I couldn't increment that here. Let me compile and save this quickly. I am doing that in my Level Blueprint. So I went here, went into opened my level blueprint, and through the Level Blueprint I can press the achy, get my game mode, cast, my game mode, get access to that lives variable that exist inside of that game mode blueprint. I can increment it and print it out to the screen from there. So in three different blueprints, my BP pawn, my player controller, and my Level Blueprint, where I'm accessing that variable inside of my game mode, I'm going to be incrementing that lives variable. Then what I'm gonna do beyond that is here in my Level Blueprint, I set up this script. When I press the L key, I'm going to open a new level. The level I'm gonna be opening is this minimal default level. This is a level found in my starter content maps folder, that guy right there. And I want you to know that inside of my minimal default Level Blueprint, I set up the same bit of script so that we can increment our bp game modes lies variable once again. So what you're going to see with all three of these, I'm going to increment these variables and I'm going to transfer over to a new map. And then I'm going to attempt to increment these variables again after I transferred to the new map, you're going to see that those counts are starting over at zero once again. And hence that is the detriment of storing some variables inside of a pawn, a player controller, or a game mode if you're transferring levels, which games oftentimes do transferring from level one to level two, those variables inside of these three blueprints are gonna get set back to their default. Alright, so here we go. Here's going to be our playtest, clicking play. Alright, so I will start off pressing the six key. As you can see, I'm incrementing my spawn. My pawn lives variables sum up to 25 there, and I'm going to press the seven key. The Lives variable inside of my player controller is all the way up to 25. And now I'm going to press the eight key. And the lies variable inside of my game mode has now been incremented up to 25. Now I'm going to press the L key to transfer over to a new level. Here I am. Now, because I've got it set up in my project settings that this is my default gateway mode, my Default Pawn Class by default, player controller. Those are all going to transfer over to control what Game Mode, Pawn Class, and player controller I'm rocking with here in this new level. So check it out. I'm going to press the six key. You can see my lives variable inside of my pond started back at zero. I'm going to press the seven key instead of my player controller started back at zeros, so I'm having to count from scratch again and then pressing the achy. My lives variable inside of my game mode also restarted from the beginning. So this is where the game instance really comes in handy. If you want to have something like a Lives variable transfer over from level to level, remembering what that value was prior to coming into the new level. Alright, so let's go ahead and create our game instance blueprint. We can do that here inside of our project settings under maps and modes, game instance. You've got this plus button right here to create a new game instance. However, I'm going to jump back to my content browser. And inside of my scripting framework folder, I'm going to right-click and some empty space. And under Blueprint class, I'm not going to see Game Instance up in this area is not super common. But under the all classes section, we can type in Game Instance. And you want to choose this guy right here, game instance, not platform game instead it's just good old game instance. Select this and I'm going to call this BP underscore game instance. Alright, Next, let's go ahead and slot this inside of our project settings. If you forgot where to access Project Settings, you can access it here. Or under Edit Project Settings. You want to come under maps and modes. And it's right down here at the bottom. Clicking this drop-down, I'm going to slot it in my BP game instance. That's great. No Save button or anything here, we can simply just exit out of our project settings or return back to our content browser. I'm going to double-click on IBP game instance here to open it up. And we're going to add a new variable, and I'll call it lives. And we will make it be an integer. We'll go ahead and compile and save. And we are going to leave this at a default value of zero for right now. Now, what I can do here is I want to print out how many lives I have to the screen. A way that I could do this, you might think is, well just right-click and do a search for Begin Play, and you'll find out that that does not exist. What you wanna do is here inside of a game instance blueprint, you want to look for an event called event in knit. This is kind of like the event begin play. Inside of BP Game Instance, inside of a game instance blueprint, this will fire off at the very start of our game. So if I print string, I can drag backward off of this. I will type in, append. In the a, I will put in game instance. Let's do game instance. Lives in for the b value. Let me add a couple of spaces after that. Game instance lives double-space. And then I'll simply drag and drop this into our graph, get it, and plug this into the B, a conversion node will come in as well. So if I compile and save and play, you can see immediately in the upper left it says Game Instance lives zero. Alright, let's go ahead and be generous and say instead of zero lives, you actually start with three lives. And we're going to say that here in our level, I'm going to compile and save this really quickly here in our game instance blueprint, let's say back in our level, we're going to make it so that when your character reaches this Trigger box that we've had out in our level, we're going to award and extra life, good job. You've made it all the way to the end of the level. So back in my Level Blueprint here, you can access level blueprint like that. I'm going to modify this script here a little bit. In fact, I'm going to kill this out completely. So long. And so long as you've got your trigger Volume selected back here in your Level Blueprint, we're going to right-click. We're getting to add events for when we begin overlapping that. Let's do a cast to actually I'm going to have to cast to BP pawn, cast to be P pond because that is currently. The pond that I'm controlling in my game. So that'll be doing the overlapping. I have no world setting override to the game mode currently. So just wanted to make that clear. When we overlap that trigger box with our bp pawn, we're going to right-click get Game Instance. Then we're going to cast to BP Game Instance. Inside of our bp game instance, we had a variable called lives. And let's go ahead and drag out of this and simply increment it. Alright, so that's gonna be all well and good. So this is great. This should print out. I will, actually, I will print this out to the screen, print string. And we'll print out that updated amounts right here. So when we overlap that trigger box, we're going to add a life and printed out to the screen compile, save. Let's go ahead and play test is quickly. Let me set my debug object. And I did see very quickly that when we began play it said game instance lives three. So I'm going to overlap this look in the upper left here as I do. So we now have four overlap again, 56, there it is, 67, etc. Now, here's the problem with our current setup. If I press the L key to transfer maps, I have no way of printing out our current lives value to the screen. I mean, on our event in it, event initialized, we are printing it out to the screen. And when I'm overlapping that trigger volume, we are printing it out to the screen. But in my new map, I have no means of printing it out to the screen. Just because I'm feeling fancy here inside of my player controller, I am going to make our bp game instance lives value appears. So we've got a lot of Blueprint communication going on here. So inside of my bp player controller, I'm going to modify this script right here. When I press the seven key, I will simply get gamed instance will cast to our bp game instance. We're going to get the lives variable that lives inside of there. And we're simply going to print this out to the screen. Like so. So I'm going to compile and save here. So understand what we have going on here inside of our bp game instance, this is going to exist so long as our game is alive no matter if we transfer level or not. So inside of our bp game instance, upon initializing our game, we're going to print out how many lives we have to screen. That'll be three. When we overlap this trigger a volume right here inside of our level blueprint. We're going to reach on over to our game instance blueprint, grab our lives in, increment it, and print that out to the screen. And then when I transferred to a new level here are new level is going to respect our project settings here, including our player controller class. And in our new level. Inside of our player controller, I'm going to be tapping the seven key to get our game instance and it'll show us our updated and modeled lives is carried over. So here we go. Pressing Play, Game instance lives three. We're going to overlap this 456.7. I'm going to press the L key to transfer levels. Now remember up here in my player controller, the player controller is going to carry on over, even though the value of the variables inside of it are gonna get reset. Our bp player controller is going to exist here again in this level, that is what is lording over our pawn here. So inside of our player controller, I'm going to press the seven key. Now. I'll set my debug objects to my spawned in player controller. Now when I press the seven key, you can see that that variable has carried on. We have seven lives inside of our bp game instance. Now before we close out this video, I wanted to show you how powerful this was, especially as it relates to widget blueprints. So down in my scripting widgets folder, I'm going to open up my WPP HUD and over MEW BP HUD graph tab. What I've done between Camera cuts here is off of Event Construct. I got my game instance. I'm casting to BP game instance. I right-clicked on this pin and promoted this to a variable in order to capture my game instance in a variable. If you do this, this will allow you to back in your Designer tab to create bindings directly two variables related inside of your BP game instance, e.g. if I was to drag in a text widget here, instead of this saying textblock right here over in the Details panel, I could come under where it says binding. And now because I created a reference to my BP game instance, Check this out. As BP game instance, I can bind this to my lives variable. This will still say text-block by default. But if I compile and save, I could then MIB P player controller create this bit of script, event, begin play, Create Widget, create your HUD through that, and then Add to Viewport. And so then what this would allow me to do is play my game. And inside of my B, W BP HUD, my lives should be represented right here in my HUD. So let's go ahead and play this. And you can see game instance lives three and we see that now reflected in the HUD. It's bound to that lives variable inside of our game instance. If I was to go over that for five, you're seeing that update as well. And I'm going to press the L key to transfer levels six. It's still present here in my new level as well. Alright, so there you have it, the game instance blueprints. One of the main benefits of it is it does not reset variables between level changes. Something to note here, if you are ever getting advanced enough where you can create and implement a save system in Unreal, which is obviously outside of the scope of this course. The game instance blueprint is oftentimes the facilitator between grabbing data from a saved game file and bringing it to your current game, as well as writing data from a current game to a save game. It kind of acts as a go-between. Alright guys, that's gonna do it all for this video, we will see you in the next one. 104. Compiling: Welcome. This video is going to be all about compiling. That is this button in the far upper left of blueprints. So our goals will be as follows. Number one, we're going to demo ways to compile blueprints. Number two, we're going to learn how to quickly locate an issue when your blueprint fails to compile. And number three, we're going to show how to combine the Compile and Save actions inside of a blueprint so that you don't have to obsessively compile, save, compile, save, compile, save can all actually be done with one step. Alright, I've got my ThirdPersonCharacter tab open across the top because I'm gonna be doing some work inside of here shortly. But let's start by talking about what the heck compiling even is, what is going on when we're pressing this compile button. Well, when you are compiling a blueprint, what you are doing is you are kick-starting the process of converting the properties and all the script in your graph of a blueprint assets such as our third-person character here, into a class, namely our third-person character class. In computer programming, when you compile code, the compiler, which is usually another program gonna take the program that the human Rhodes, in this case, our script and all the properties and variables and whatnot. And it's going to convert it into a program that the computer can actually understand. Now I can help drive home this point a little bit further by doing this, I've got this jump input script here in our ThirdPersonCharacter. If I was to left-click and drag around all these nodes, do control C. I've got a notepad app opened down the bottom here. I'm just gonna do a Control V inside of here. This is all of the code that is backing all of our jumped script right here. So essentially when you are scripting via these nodes that you're linking together, there is code backing all of this when you're compiling your checking to make sure that your code in any properties, variables, etc, that you are, that are all a part of this, are good to go, that it's clean and that there's no errors, that the machine can read it and knows exactly what to do and can make use of it thusly. Alright. Now, something important to know about compiling is that in compiling a blueprint, we can be made aware of issues with our blueprint scripts. However, note that it won't catch all errors because some areas are simply human in nature. E.g. over here, I brought in a spawn system at location node. Now I can say, Yeah, I want to spawn this system, this Niagara particle right here. But what if I have my scale set to 000 and then I've got some event trying to spawn this system in, but I don't see it. I may be left wondering what the heck is going on. There must be something wrong with my script. Well, in fact, there might be nothing wrong with my script. However, I'm not getting the result I'm expecting because I set the scale to be zeros, zeros, zero, meaning I wouldn't see it. So compiling a blueprint won't catch errors like that. Alright, here in my ThirdPersonCharacter event graph, I've set up a scenario where I'm going to make it where we intentionally create some bad script and then try to compile. I'm going to make it here so that when I press the B button, I'm going to spawn some actor. Let's go ahead and say, Man a potion. However, I am going to intentionally leave this spawn transform input blank if I try to compile right now, you're going to see that when I do, it's going to throw an error here. And in fact, that tool tip is going to say there was an error during compilation is see the log for details. So by log is pointing to this compiler Results tab that just appeared at the bottom of my screen. And it will let me know that, hey, you have something that needs addressing. In this case, my spawn a transform PIN is invalid for us to spawn a man apportioning, we have to tell it where to spawn. Now if you don't see this compiler Results tab down here, or if you accidentally close it out, you can get it back in the way you get that back or just about any other tab here that is missing is you come under your window and in here you can find compiler results. Turn that back on. Now your compiler results shows any errors or warnings when compiling a blueprint. And what's nice about it is it has some hyperlinks that you can click upon to jump to the trouble spot. So we could click right here on our spawn transform. And that'll just show us where that trouble spot is. So if you are somewhere out yonder in your graph way out here and you're like, Where the heck is this error? Let's go ahead and click on it and it'll jump you right to it. Now watch what happens to our Compile button, our icon up here when we go ahead and fulfill the spawn and transform requirements of this spawn actor from class node. I'm just going to plug in the world transform of our line trace endpoint. That's just an error component that I had added to my third-person character who's just out a little ways in front of our character. I'm going to plug this in here. Note that as soon as I plug it in, the icon over our Compile button has changed. We now see a question mark in yellow. So when it changes to this icon, that means that some change has been made to our blueprint here. That's going to happen whenever anything new gets added to a graph or in any new variable or function, or macro or component gets added. It's letting you know, hey, something is different. Now, there are a couple of ways to compile a blueprint. You can click on it or there is a hotkey associated with it. Pressing F7 will compile as well. I'm not going to actually press a seven right now because F7 is my hotkey for starting and stopping my recording down here. But just know that F7 is what you can use as a hotkey. So I'm going to go ahead and click Compile here. That green check mark means good to go. And you can see that in the tool tip right there as well. Now let's discuss some compiling options. These three dots right over here reveal them. We can save upon compiling and we can do it Never. We can do it on success only or always. If it's never, which is what I've had it for most of this course. We have to compile. And then if your compiler is successful, you want to save it directly afterward in order to make sure that all those changes made to your blueprint or actually saved on success only, will save only when your blueprint compiles successfully. And always means it's going to save it whether that compiling was successful or not. We've also got this jump to Error Node option. You can check this on or off. It's actually a checkmark that you can check on or off. I'm going to turn it on here. And this is going to be pretty sweet to let us know where an error exists in our graph. It'll jump right to it if we make one. So I'm going to disconnect this quickly. You can hold down Alt and left-click, and then I'm going to navigate to somewhere random in my graph like this. So now when I compile, it's going to jump me right to it. I like that option on a lot highly recommended that's jumped to error node right there under those three dots. Now, just a quick note about that jumped to err node option. It acts like clicking on one of your error hyperlinks down here. That's pretty cool. It obviously cannot jump to all errors at the same time. If in fact you do have multiple errors, it will jump to the error at the top of the list. That is the most recently discovered error. Also, I wanted to hit back on this Save on compile option. If I go to my Level Blueprint and I click on these three dots right here. I can see that if I go under the save on compile option, all of this is grayed out. You're going to find that these options are not available any level or a sub-level blueprint. This is because the saving of a level or sublevel itself saves the blueprint associated with it. So just thought I'd point that out right here. You could do press F7, that is the hotkey within a level or sublevel blueprint. Note that it will save the level or sublevel itself as well. Now, lastly, I just wanted to point out once again that your compiler results will not show all human error. So back here, my ThirdPersonCharacter Blueprint. We can say that, yes, indeed, this is where we want to spawn this man, a potion out in front of our character a little bit. However, if I was to break this wire right here, I'm going to hold down Alt and left-click. I'm gonna go ahead and compile. And it's gonna be like, Yeah, Good to go. Even though you may think while you're playing the game that Hey, I'm pressing the B key, but I'm not spawning any man a potion. Once again, unreal, cannot know your deepest desires. It does not know that you actually meant to disconnect this or have it connected. So will not catch errors such as that. Alright guys, that's gonna do it on this video and compiling. We will see you in the next one. 105. Breakpoints: Alright, welcome back everyone. In this section of the course, we're going to learn how to better troubleshoot our blueprints. That is how to debug them. We're gonna be starting off with this by talking about breakpoints. The goal in this video is to learn how to create and use breakpoints within our scripts to help us analyze what's happening when a script is executing. Now I've set up a scenario here. I'm going to be controlling them IBP pond, I'm gonna be overlapping One of my specific rotating doors that we created earlier in the course. And you're gonna notice that our game is going to freeze up, but intentionally not unintentionally. So watch I'm going to overlap the trigger volume. Just trust me, there's a trigger volume in front of this first door. Nothing seems to happen, but I'm going to overlap this second trigger volume in front of this door. And lo and behold, we freeze up the game. We have hit a breakpoint. So what is a breakpoint? It is an intentional pause or stop that you create within a script as denoted by this red dot on this node right here. Now the purpose of doing this is to find out whether the script is functioning as you'd expect. Maybe an event we're expecting to fire off isn't. Maybe a function we're expecting to fire off isn't firing off. Maybe a variable that we're expecting to have a value hasn't been set yet. Essentially, a break point gives us a timeout to more closely inspect how our scripts are behaving. Alright, I'm gonna currently quit our game and explain how to set up breakpoints within your own blueprints. So clicking the Stop button right up here. The first thing you should understand is that you want to make sure that you are assessing the proper blueprint, the proper instance of the blueprint. I'm currently looking at my BP rotating door now note out in my level I have two of them. I've got this guy, BP rotating door and the second one, BP rotating door to now MIB rotating door blueprint. And this is a blueprint that we set up during our rotator variable video. I have set a break point for when we begin overlapping this box component. Now up at the top here, if I click this drop-down, I will note that I am currently assessing, I'm currently debugging BP rotating door to and you can see it in parentheses right there. That is the one that I currently have selected. What this means is that if I am overlapping that box component for BP rotating door number one here, this will not pause. This will not stop the execution of my game because I'm currently assessing BP rotating door number two. So this is important to understand. If you have, say, 50 instances of a given blueprint out there, it will only stop the execution for when you overlap that given instance, that given copy of the blueprint. So here I've got BP rotating door number two. Now how did I get this break point, this red dot on this node to begin with? Well, there's a few ways to do it. You can right-click on a node. And you can see in our right-click menu, we've got breakpoint options. The first year that I will use is toggle breakpoint. There is there is a hotkey F9 associated with this. So because this is currently on, I can toggle it off and vice versa, I can right-click, toggle it back on. Once again, with this node selected F9, we'll toggle it off, on, off, on. I could right-click on it once again and remove the breakpoint like that. I could I'm going to press F9 to bring it on once again, I could right-click on this and disable the breakpoint. What that means is it'll keep the breakpoint on here. However, it will not stop the execution of our game when I do overlap BP rotating door number two, this or drive home this point, I can click on this and overlap that and you see it, it's a fire off, but it did not pause my game at all. It kept that breakpoint on there, but it did not pause the game. Now, you may be wondering, why didn't I get rid of this breakpoint altogether? Why did I just disable it? Well, sometimes you want to have a listing of your breakpoints that you can view so you don't lose track of them. If I come under, Debug are right up here and I bring on my blueprint debugger. In this window right here you can see it's got my rotating door. Right here are my lists of breakpoints. And you can see I've got this breakpoint right here corresponding with that guy right there. So if I was to double-click on that, it'll highlight it. That empty circle right there shows that that is a disabled breakpoint. I'm going to dock this right down here. And if I was to right-click on this node and enabled breakpoint, take a look now in our blueprint debugger under breakpoints, we can see now that that is a filled in red dot, that is an active breakpoint. So any other breakpoints that we have in here, it'll be listed under here. And once again, that was under Debug blueprint debugger. There's my rotating door and my list of breakpoints can be toggled on and off right there. Alright, now we can see that we have this breakpoints set up for when we begin overlapping this box component for that rotating door. Number two, let's walk through what happens when a breakpoint is hit. I'm gonna go ahead and click Play up here. Now note this is rotating door number one. I'm overlapping that and nothing happens. I'm going to overlap the box for rotating door number two. Immediately the game stops. We open up our event graph for rotating door number two here. And we can see that we have overlapped that box. However, we're not sure exactly what overlapped a yet. So we can continue on with our script to further assess this red arrow is showing the current node that we are on. We're currently overlapping that box. If we click right up here, we can step to the next node in our execution chain, FTN. The hotkey will also jump us over there. So note that tool tip. So upon overlapping that box, we're going to check if it was the ThirdPersonCharacter that overlapped us. Now, I was controlling our bp pons, so this cast should fail. Now because it does fail. We have nothing hooked up off of our CAS field pane right here. This should kick us right on out of here because there's nothing else to continue on with. Our script is essentially dying right here. Let's go ahead and try jumping to the next node. As you can see, it did not jump over to our next node. In fact, if I bring on our play window once again, let me just minimize this. There we can see we're back playing our game. Alright, let's go ahead and quit out of our game here, return back to our engine. And now let's make it so that in our project settings, we are no longer defaulting to the Pawn Class of BP pond, but instead we're bringing in our ThirdPersonCharacter. And the reason we're doing this is because in our rotating door script, we're checking right here to see if it was the ThirdPersonCharacter that overlapped us. Note back in our level, I've cleared out our world settings as well. So we're going to be respecting the project settings, the project settings that we have for our framework, blueprints, BP Game Mode, BP ThirdPersonCharacter, bp player controller. And now if I was to go ahead and play our game, we're gonna go ahead and overlap the trigger volume for BP door number two. It is going to hit our breakpoint here. Now let's talk about these various options we have across the top for when we hit a break point, this guy right here will jump us right back into our game. It's basically saying, hey, I'm glad you stopped the game. Thanks very much, but we would like to continue on in play. Let me just overlap this. Once again. It'll stop the game for us once again. Next up we've got this advance, a single frame. So then I'll just jump us over to the next node. If one is a not time-sensitive at all. Next up we've got this Stop button right here, which will do the same thing as pressing Escape. You're essentially quitting out of your game and you're returning back to your editor. I'm not going to press out right now. Next up over here, I'm going to skip over this guy right over here. We've got this locate the currently active nodes. So if we were on our Cast to ThirdPersonCharacter node like we are right now, that's the one we're evaluating. Then we decided to navigate somewhere random like this. If we were to click this button, that'll jump us right back to our currently active node. Next, we've got this step into node that has a hotkey F11 associated with this. I'm going to show this off in our next example. This is not a good example right here. Next, we've got step over to the next node, F ten. We'll do that as well. I'll press F2 to do that. And one thing to note here, as you are stepping through things, you can evaluate the various bits of data being passed along by mousing over these data pins. So e.g. I. Can see has key right here is evaluated to false. So I know that our script is essentially going to be ending right here because we're only gonna be do something off the true branch. We're not gonna be doing anything off the false branch. Now this step out of button, we will explore that in our next example as well because this is a good setup to show that off. However, something else I want to make note of. While we're here, you can visualize the orange pulse of execution up to this point, which is super handy when you're evaluating a script. And once again, it's not just about seeing which nodes are being stopped at and being executed, but also evaluating the data, getting passed along, mousing over these various pins and seeing if that data being passed along is what you expect it to be. Alright, now let's stop with this example. We're going to jump into our ThirdPersonCharacter next, going to click stop up here to show off another example. Now the reason that we are headed over here is because we have some customer made functions that we created earlier in the course. We can step into and step out of that we could not do in our last example. So let's go ahead and bring in our modify health function. We traded this in our functions section of the course and we're going to bring in a keyboard event. Let's right-click keyboard. Let's do something when we press the arrow key. So when we press the zero, Kayla's modifier health, say by 0.1. Let's drag out a fear print string, dragged backwards. Let's append. And let's append the word health, colon double-space with our current health. That'll bring in a conversion node going from float to a string like so. And then let me add a breakpoint to our event node here, you got to press F9. Now, if you do see a break point with an exclamation mark inside of it. That could mean that that is an invalid breakpoint. Not sure why this one is showing as such. However, if you are questioning whether or not that is a valid breakpoint, you can go ahead and compile here. I know that one is going to be good and it is. So let's go ahead and try this clicking play. You can make sure that you've got your ThirdPersonCharacter as your debug option to view this script firing off in real-time if you like. Let's bring in our play window once again. And when I press the arrow key, we are stopping our execution. We can step over. And now this is a function that we have some functionality set up inside of. So if I click this button right here, hotkey F11, we can step into this node. And now we can step through the nodes of the function itself. We can see that we have the Modify health function tab open along the top now and now we can step through this one at a time. We can see is that true or false? Let's step over one more time. And now, because we stepped into this node, I can step out of this notes. Let me step on out of this function. You can see now we are continuing on to our next node in the chain, which is our print string. So with the step into and step out of buttons, you can step into something like a custom-made function, see every step of that function, and then step out of it if you like. Now just a couple of notes there. The Step Into option, if it is a custom made a function or macro, it will drill down into that. However, if it is not a custom-made function or macro, it'll simply just go on to the next node. As for stepping out, if you stepped into a node, it will step out to the next node in the chain, in this case to our print string node. However, if there is nothing to step out two, there's no other nodes within your chain. It will simply resume the game. Now, lastNode, we can bring in our debug blueprint debugger option on as well. From here, we're bringing on this window. Once again, I'd like to dock it along the bottom leg. So I realize I'm still playing the game right here. Here are my breakpoints. You can see I could click on that to jump right to it. However, if you had noticed when I clicked on this debug option right up here, we have the ability up here to disable all breakpoints and delete all breakpoints. If you have a lot of breakpoints set up throughout your graph, it is a real handy way to clear them all out. And again, you can add break points and not just on event nodes like this, you can set them on a function as well. On this function as well. So if you set up on all three and you're like, Hey, I just want to get rid of all these. Just go ahead and delete all breakpoints, and suddenly they're all gone. And so there you have it. That's the lowdown on breakpoints. Breakpoints are an intentional pause or stop that you create within a script so that you can more closely assess your scripts step-by-step. Guys, that'll do it all for this video, we will see you in the next one. 106. Watch Values: Alright, welcome back. In this video, our goal is to learn how we can more easily monitor data values when debugging a script. Now this can be done through designating variables to watch inside of a blueprint by having an easy means of seeing and assessing data values inside of our blueprints, we can quickly see if data flowing through R scripts is as expected or not. Now for this example, I'm gonna be working inside of my BP rotating door, as well as my ThirdPersonCharacter here a little bit. So firstly, in order to watch variables more carefully, we're going to bring on our blueprint debugger. Now I showed you how to do this in the last video, but if you forgot or skipped over that video inside of any Blueprint are BP rotating door will do just fine. We can click Debug, blueprint debugger, and that'll bring on our blueprint debugger window. I do like to have this on a second monitor if I have it, but since I don't if you have a single monitor, I just like to docket right down here. Now note inside of our blueprint debugger, we can specify which blueprint we would like to debug. So even though we are inside of our bp rotating door, I could set this to be my ThirdPersonCharacter to debug if I wanted to. However, if you did that and you hit a breakpoint such as our zero key inside of our ThirdPersonCharacter. It would jump you over from this graph to your ThirdPersonCharacter graph. I'm not going to demonstrate that for you here, but just FYI. Alright, I do have this set to my BP rotating doors and I do have a breakpoint set. So now I'm going to set up some variables to watch. I'm going to watch this has key variable right here. And the way we can do this is by right-clicking and choosing to watch this barrel value. Now when I do this, you're going to see a little bit of a magnifying glass icon appear on this. But you're also going to see this window right up here that's going to output true or false whenever this information is requested by our branch node. Whenever this gets executed, we're going to find out if this is true or false and it's going to print it right in this bubble. I'm also going to set up a watch value on our rotator node right here, the return value, so I can see where we're at in that rotation going 0-90 degrees in the Ya, I'm going to right-click on this. We're going to watch this value. Simple enough. If I want to remove any of these watches, you can simply right-click on it. Stop watching this value. Or if you want to stop watching all of your watches, you can come under, Debug and delete all watches that can get rid of them as well. Now before I show this example, I wanted to make note that inside of my ThirdPersonCharacter here, ThirdPersonCharacter, I did set this has key boolean to true. So if you haven't already done that and you want to play along at home inside of BP. Thirdpersoncharacter, B has key Boolean. I set that to true, I compiled and Save. And here I am watching that variable. This variable lives inside of my ThirdPersonCharacter, but I can watch it right from here. Alright, so let's go ahead and play our game. And I'm going to overlap that box component for our rotating door number two, that is this door right in our level that is rotating door number one. However, we are assessing rotating door number two. So here we go, clicking play, overlapping this door. Alright, we've hit that breakpoint. Now in the last video I showed you that you could step through things by clicking right here, F ten will do just fine. I can also advance one frame at a time. So that would stop me over in this case as well because this is not a time-sensitive node. However, note that down in your blueprint debugger, you have these same controls. So let's just show this off because we can, you can see down below, we have hit our rotating door. Number two, the breakpoint has been hit. That yellow arrow right there denotes that I'm going to expand this out by pressing this little drop-down triangle. Right away. We can see that we have watches setup in here for it has key and also that return value on that loop node right there. So that is denoting that we do have some watches setup. Note right now, this bubble does not say anything yet because it's information has not been requested yet. I'm going to advance over to the next node by clicking right here. That flow of execution. We're going to advance over one more. Now because we've hit this branch node, this information for the condition has been requested. So we can see that we are watching this value and now it is prominently showing that it is evaluating to true. Now I could just hover over this pin without the watch and find out that that information actually is true as well. However, by setting up watches like this, it becomes very obvious. It's a way to more easily see what data is being passed right along. Now, if I wanted to disable this watch, I could, while this is running here, we're debugging this. I could click on this little magnifying glass icon and turn it off. And I can right-click and turn it back on once again, Bye. Choosing watches value in it appears once again down here. Also, if I was to have navigated somewhere way beyond like this, if I was to click on that watch down here, that'll jump me right back to it. So that's pretty handy. Let's keep stepping right through, through this because we can see we have not hit our second watch over here yet. So pressing over. Alright, so now we are hitting a time sensitive node, this timeline, this is 1 s long. So if always suppress right here or f ten, it's going to jump me over to this next node right away. However, I could also advance one single frame at a time. So in doing so, I'm going to left-click. You can see now we've gone 0.01 s because we're just advancing one frame at a time. We can see we are watching this return value here. And as we increment this one at a time, one frame at a time are watched. Your value is increasing bit by bit. So, so we can see how this is opening up over the course of 1 s. Now we can go ahead and click resume right here to see the final result play out, that played out over the remainder of that timeline, that 1 s timeline. So we can see that value. The Ya, our door opened up 90 degrees. Maybe that's what you were expecting. Maybe not, but these watches help you identify if that is actually outputting the return value that you are expecting. And so there is a quick, simple overview of what watches are and how they can be set and utilize when debugging your script. Once again, if I was to stop here and remove these watches, stop watching. Stop watching. You can still see the output value of these data pins by hitting that break point. Let me just overlap this once again. Advance over, advance over by mousing over it like that. However, by setting up watches, it just makes it a little bit more prominent and easy to see. Let me just advance this all the way to the end. Once again, we can see that y'all red there is being outputted 90. But those watches, again make them more prominent and easy to see. Guys that'll do to offer this video, we will see you in the next one. 107. Message Log: All right, welcome back everyone. In this video, our goal is to show the role of the message log in debugging your scripts. While this is a window that can report out all kinds of info related to your projects, such as lighting results when building your level. Here, we're just going to explore its utility in ensuring our scripts are working as intended at runtime. So I have an example to show off in our third person character. So why don't you come under your third-person at Blueprints folder, find your ThirdPersonCharacter. By the way, a fun tip for you here. If you hold down Control and use that scroll wheel, you can make those thumbnail images bigger or smaller. We're going to double-click on it where I have some scripts already set up prior to this video. What we're gonna be doing is I'm gonna be pressing the one key. And then just onetime here, I'm going to spawn in the fire effect. And then I am going to promote this to a variable. So I have not done that yet, so I just wanted to show off. We can do that once again by right-clicking on this pin. We're going to promote this to a variable. This was a spawn actor from class node by the way. So if you're looking for the name of that node, it is spawn actor from class. It'll change it to Blueprint effect fire. Once you slot in that blueprint effect fire blueprint from the starter content promotes variable. We'll simply call this fire. There's the name of it right down there and we can see it is of the type Blueprints effect fire. And what we're gonna do down here is when we press the two key, we're going to destroy this fire that we've spawned when we press the one key. So I can drag this right on top of the target of our Destroy Actor function. That'll hook it up automatically like so. We're going to make our message log appear on something else I'm gonna do right away is after we destroy our actor, I'm going to set the reset of our do want snowed. And this is just going to make it so that I can press the one key once again to spawn another blueprint, effect fire. So that's what's happening here. We're going to press the one key and then we're going to just onetime spawn that blueprint fire effect at the location, the world transform, I should say, of our simulated hand, that is this component right here. That's just going to spawn it at that point in the world, wherever we are at that moment, we're saving out to a variable. And then when we press the two key, we will destroy that. Now, I'm going to compile here and save. And let's go ahead and run this. Set my debug object here to my ThirdPersonCharacter. Alright, so this is the tests we're gonna be running gear. So first I'm going to press one to create fire right here, and you'll see that script firing rate up above. So here we go. The one key there is that fire effect. Now I'm going to press two. That's going to destroy that fire that we created and set inside of that variable right here. So here we go, The two key, it has now gone. We've also reset this do once known. Now I'm going to press the two key again. So I'm going to try to destroy this fire. Now I pressed it and you can see it is executing. But now when I exit out of here, escape, watch what happens. We are presented with the message log. In fact, we have numerous errors. Now the reason I have numerous errors is because it is yelling at me that I tried to destroy this fire that did not exist. Now what was happening here is the first time I was pressing the one key, we repopulating this variable, this blueprint effect fire variable. With this spawned blueprint effect fire. Once it's populated, we compress the two key and then destroy it. Now, when I press the two key again, we had not yet reset the contents of this variable to be something. So this was an empty variable. This is a very common message that is spit out to you in the message log. Now the message log can spit out all kinds of different errors that occur with your script. But this is a very common one where it is yelling at you that the contents of some variable cannot be found. I'm going to drag and drop this along the top here. Let's take a closer look at our error message here. Now you can see that these error messages appear in the play in editor section of our message log. And it's repeated once again numerous times because I was pressing the two key numerous times to try to destroy the fire that did not exist. Now what's useful about this message log is that it has some hyperlinks that you can click on to take you to the location, the air. Now if you click on Event Graph here, I'll just click on Event Graph. It'll take us to the appropriate event graph. If we click where it says execute Uber BP, ThirdPersonCharacter, it'll click us over to the Event Graph as well. And if you click on BP ThirdPersonCharacter, it will also take you on over to that Event Graph. However, if you were to click where it says Destroy Actor right here, that is going to pinpoint exactly as to where the problem occurred. This Destroy Actor node was trying to find a valid target. However, this message log is saying that that was an invalid target. The target was not valid. And that was once again, because the first time we created our fire, we could destroy it. But the more we press two key, you can't destroy some fire that does not exist, that has not been set inside of that fire variable. So how can we fix a scenario such as this? Well, you can check to see if the contents of a variable are valid. And the way we can do this is by selecting our fire variable right here, that blueprint effect fire that's getting populated right here, that's getting set right up here. We can right-click on this and we convert this to a validated yet. Now note that once we do this, it's going to change this node from a pill shape looking node to a node that requires us to hook in, in execution wire to it. So now we can have a script like this. If we press the two key, It's first going to do a check. If this is valid, meaning that there is something set inside of this variable, we will continue on and destroy whatever wasn't set inside of it. However, if we press the two key and it is not valid, meaning there's nothing inside of this variable. We can do something else. In this case, I'll just drag out and print string. And I'll just say fired, not valid. Like so. So now if I compile and save, and we play once again, before I even press the one key. Let's go ahead and press the two key and look up here in the upper left of my window. It's going to say fire not valid and I can keep spamming it. Now it's not valid yet because we have not set the contents of this fire variable. It has not been populated with anything. Now if I press the one key, we have now set the contents of that fire variable. So now when I press the Tab key, it will be valid. So look right through here. It did fire through, that is valid. It destroyed the actor, and we are all good. Now this message log window will appear automatically if it catches an error such as that, it'll open it up for you. However, if you would like to have this message log tab open at all times, let me just close it out so that I can bring it back on. You can simply come under a window. And then right down here under the log category, you can choose to have that message log on. Alright guys, that is going to do it for this video on the message log window. We will see you in the next one. 108. Searching: Alright, so if you've watched every video up to this point in the course, you're becoming a pretty efficient with blueprint scripting. Now let's take your blueprint scripting to the next level by learning some productivity hacks. In this video, our goal is to explore several methods of searching for things while working with blueprints. We're going to search for a blueprint acids themselves find out where they reside here in our content browser, as well as search for things that may exist inside of a blueprint such as variables, functions, etc. Now you want to be good at this simply for work efficiency reasons. The faster you can locate assets, functions, variables, etc. The faster you can ensure you've traded quality blueprints that are free of errors. Now to demonstrate some of these concepts we're gonna be exploring here. I'm gonna be doing this inside of my ThirdPersonCharacter. You can do this from inside of any blueprint though that's perfectly fine. So double-clicking on my third-person character, the first thing we're going to learn how to do is browse to this blueprint asset. Oftentimes when I'm working with students, they have a blueprint open, but they have no clue where this blueprint is within the content browser. They may be off in some random folder. And if I ask them to locate their ThirdPersonCharacter Blueprint, they have no idea where it is. Well, there's a couple of ways you can find it. Way. Number one is you have some filters. You're in your content browser. You can click on a folder of your choosing. And you can choose the content folder because that folder contains all of the other folders. And click on Filters, Blueprint class, and already you are willing things down mightily. Let me just hold down Control and scroll wheel down. And immediately we can see our ThirdPersonCharacter is right there. To toggle off a filter. You can just click it off. That's with it off, that is with it on. Alright, so that is one way you can quickly locate assets is to filter for them within your content browser. But I want to talk now about how to find this asset if you are within this ThirdPersonCharacter itself. Well, you've got a couple of ways. Number one is across the top of your Blueprint editor here, you've got this Browse button right here. If you click on this, it'll jump you right to where this asset resides in your content browser, that's pretty handy. In addition, if you're inside of here and you just do Control plus b, that'll jump you right to it as well. So Control plus b, was that hockey, Alright, Next, inside of a blueprint, you should have a find Results tab open by default within your Blueprint editor. That is this guy right down here. Now this is awesome because you can find bullet tells you right down here. You can find things like functions, events, variables, all kinds of things simply by searching for it right down here. Now, again, this should be on by default, but there are actually four ways to access this panel. Again, the first way is it should be on by default, but let's assume that it's off. You can also bring this on from the toolbar by clicking the Find button right up here. They'll open up that tab. Let me just click it off once again, we can also access that by coming under the window option right here. And you've got the ability to turn on your final results panel as well. Also, if you have that off, you can bring that arm by using Control F, that is the hotkey control plus F will bring on that find results window. Now this is our search tool within the Blueprint editor that allows us to quickly tracked down a variety of things such as a node name, a pen name, a node comment, a property name, a property value. So let's demonstrate this. Shelly. I'm just gonna do a search for modify health, modify health, and press Enter here and we can see all of our different results matching modify health. So I only need to double-click on one of these options here to see what we find. There is a modifier health function places there in the graph. This is a modifier health function place there. And this will even jump us to the function in this case that we created called modify health by double-click here, That's my Modify help function. And once again we had a modifier help pure function we could locate by clicking right there as well. Let's try some more search results. Let's clear out this. I will type in the word spawn and look at all of these search results. Now it is worth noting, if you mouse over these different icons, It's going to tell you what they are associated with. So that's an execution pin. Double-click on that, Look at that. It's talking about these spawn execution pins right here. I can mouse over this. This is a spawn transform, struct, double-click on that spawn transforms. So it's finding that word spawn, and I can see it is a pen name right there. What else we got here? We've got a spawn sound attached. I can double-click on this, that is a function node right there. And it lets us know that it is a node. The fancy F equals a function. There it is. Lots of fines here in our find results. Option, alright, let's try typing in something like variable. Pressing Enter. And note that I have a comment results. So if I double-click on this comment, yes, indeed, I can even find comments that have that word inside of it. In this case, it is finding that word variable right up there. Let's try the word targeted because lots of nodes have the word target on them. As you can see, lots of function nodes have that word target on it. That one's looking for a character object, that was looking for a pawn objects. Once again, you can get a lot of information by mousing over the different search results and double-click on item to jump to it. Let's also try to find a property value. I'm going to type in the word five-hundred because I think I have that out here somewhere at where? 500? Yes. I said the max default walk speed or the max walk speed to a default value of 500 earlier in the course. So it can even find property value. So let me just double-click on that. That'll show me exactly where that is. So that can be handy as well. If you're like I put that value 500 somewhere. Where was that again? Now this is all well and good. Being able to search for things quickly and efficiently within a blueprint is in fact a key skill. However, it is a more powerful this find a results window here by being able to search across all of your blueprints. And yes, you can do that. The way to do that is by clicking on this button with the binoculars icon on it right over here, find in all blueprints. Now this becomes especially important when you are communicating from one blueprint to another. Maybe you have a health variable like we do inside of our third-person character here that is referenced in another blueprints such as our example pickup, that health pickup that we created earlier in the course. So to find out where this health variable may exist throughout your project, you can simply do a search for health. It Enter. Now this is where this is referenced within this blueprint. But if I click on this button right over here, it will find out where the word health is referenced in any of our blueprints. So we've got it referenced here in our WPP HUD. There is our example pickup or child pickup, et cetera. We only need to double-click on any of these to jump directly inside of that particular blueprint. Let me just double-click on this. Get Health inside of our bp example pickup that will open that up right across the top. We can see where that health variable from inside of our ThirdPersonCharacter is being gotten and then also set as well. Super handy trick. Alright guys, that is going to do it all for searching here in Unreal Engine blueprints. We will see you in the next video. 109. Bookmarks: Welcome and navigating blueprints quickly and efficiently is an essential skill to getting the most out of working in Unreal and bookmarks. Blueprint bookmarks are one of the things that you can utilize to help you become more efficient. In this video, we're going to learn how to set some blueprint bookmarks, how to locate said bookmarks, and then demonstrate why this is even a useful thing to do. So, what is a bookmark? You can think of a blueprint bookmark as a way of identifying a section of a graph. It could be within your event graph or the construction script that you'd like to navigate to quickly. Now this is sort of like placing a pin or a waypoint marker down on a map. And then simply by selecting that marker from a list, you can jump directly to that spot in your map or in this case, your graph. So prior to the start of this video, I created a bookmark called Overview inside of my BP ThirdPersonCharacter. And just to show you quickly how this works, if I double-click on my bookmark, it'll jump me to exactly where I placed this bookmark within this BP, a ThirdPersonCharacter Blueprint. Now let me just exit out of my bookmarks tab here and create a bookmark from scratch just so you can follow along with this process. Alright, so inside of any blueprint, you can create a blueprint bookmark by coming right under here. Alright? Now I'm going to zoom up to a given set of nodes here that Hey, maybe I want to create a bookmark right there. Alright, So maybe I am working on some script and I get called away and I'm like, You know what? I don't want to forget about these nodes right here. Let me go ahead and set a bookmark. So you come right up under here. We're going to create a bookmark and I'm just going to call this my health bookmark. Click Add here. Now, it is going to remember this zoom level as well as this positioning in our graph right here. Now I simply need to access my bookmark in order to jump back to this. If I happen to navigate away from this, like so. Now whenever I bring on this Bookmarks tab that is found under the windows menu right up here, bookmarks. And right here you can see your named bookmark. So if I double-click on health, that'll jump me to these set of nodes, that same zoom level. Now you'll notice also in this bookmarks window, we can see we have some common nodes. Anytime you create a comment node. And I'm talking about these common box like this attached Static Mesh to hand socket. They're going to appear right down here in the comment nodes section of your bookmarks window. So whenever you are creating a comment box, and once again, you can create a comment box by highlighting a series of nodes like this and then tapping the C key and then creating some comment right here. You can see as soon as I tap that CQI, it added this comment right down here under the comment node section. I'll call this my HUD creation. And so anytime you create a comment box like that, all you need to do, and as you can see, it did not update that. If you compile hover, it will update that. So if you double-click on that comment node right there, it'll jump you to that as well. So by default, by creating a comment nodes as well, these comment boxes, you are creating a bookmark of sorts. Now one last note here, you can create these inside of a construction script as well. Over on the right-hand side, it'll show where this bookmark is set. We've got these all set within our event graph. But if we had created these inside of our construction script, it would let us know that it is inside of our construction script right over here as well. Alright guys, that's gonna do to offer bookmarks here, we will see you all in the next video. 110. Palette / Favorites Panel: Welcome back everyone. In this video we're going to show where to access the palate panel within a blueprint, as well as how to add nodes to the favorites portion of this panel. So as you can see over on the right-hand side, I have the palette panel open. I'm within my ThirdPersonCharacter Blueprint. However, you can add this panel to any Blueprint. I've got my third person game mode open here as well. And you can see I have it open in there as well. How to access this panel? It is right under the Window menu here. That's how you can turn it on. So if it ever goes off, like so you can just bring it back on by clicking Window and bringing on your palette panel. This panel shows a non context-sensitive listing of all the various functions and events that can be used in your blueprint. And this panel consists of two sections. Starting at the top here we've got our favorite section. Now this is a little bit misleading because if we mouse over the word favorites, it says this is a listing of your favorite and most used nodes. Now you can define nodes as your favorite, and I'll show you how to do that in a little bit. However, it will detect which nodes you are using the most. And that is super handy because then instead of searching for those nodes in your right-click menu, you can just search right here under your favorite section. And if you're using something like get all actors of class commonly, you can just drag and drop it out into your graph like so. Now this list of your favorites is shared by all blueprints. So if I was to hop over to my BP third-person game mode blueprint. And you can see I've got my palette panel open over here. You can see I have this same listing of favorites nodes. Now, one thing that is a little bit of a bummer is that you cannot reorder your favorites by dragging and dropping them. That would be nice functionality, but alas, that does not exist yet. Down below we have our find a node section which is going to allow you to filter by class, you'll find a given event or function node. Now you could click right here to whittle down which class you want to look for. Or with this set to the all class, you can click in any of these drop-down triangles to see what's available, such as if I come under the characters section right here, you can find nodes like crouch and jump, e.g. now how to add nodes to your Favorites section right up here. There's a couple of ways of doing this in your right-click menu. If you were to right-click and search for a given node, and I'll just type in print string right over there. As you mouse over these different nodes, you see this tiny little star triangle off to the left. That is how you can favorite something. So note that once I click on this, it is going to show a filled-in star. And that will now show that in my favorite section right up there. Print string. Let's do print text as well. You see that appears as well. If you want to take them off, you can simply click right here to take them off. Or you could let me just click these back on. You can right-click on them here in your favorite section, and you can choose to remove that from your favorites. You can also choose to add notes to your favorites by coming under the find node section. And just like we could do with the right-click menu by starring those down here, as you mouse over a given function or events, you can favorite them by clicking on these stars as well. You can also right-click on them from them down here in the note section and choose to remove them from your favorites as well. Now, if there did happen to be a whole category of nodes you'd like to add to your favorites. You don't have to start every single one of these. You can simply right-click on that category and I'll choose character right here, right-click on it. We can say Add Category two favorites. And then you would see up at the top here, all of these nodes, jump, launched, character, et cetera, have been added to our Favorites section. And because this has listed all in alphabetical order, you might have to scroll up or down to see all the various nodes you can see on crouch, right down here as well. On crouch right there, stop jumping, stop jumping, et cetera. Now, likewise, if you wanted to remove all these nodes from your favorite section, you don't have to do that one at a time. You can simply right-click right here and remove that category from your favorites, and they will all get unstirred and removed from your favorites list. Other options of note here, if you wanted to remove a given node from your favorites, you can simply right-click on it. I'll right-click on my Les node here and remove that from our favorites. Another option you have here is to right-click and choose to clear all favorites. That'll clear everything out. Another option that you have here is to right-click and you could choose to load a profile. And if you choose default profile, simply get back all the favorites associated with the default profile. Alright, so there you have it, the palate panel, it shows a non-contact sensitive listing of all the functions and events that can be used in blueprints. It also has this Favorites section right up here that it gives you easy access to your favorite and, or most used nodes. Guys that'll do to offer this one. See you in the next one. 111. Collapsing Nodes: Alright, welcome back everyone. In this video, our goal is to demonstrate how one can go about collapsing nodes within a graph for the purpose of graph cleanliness and readability. Now after a while a given a blueprint such as my ThirdPersonCharacter Blueprint right here. It might start to have a lot of nodes and node networks, making the readability of it's somewhat difficult. Now by collapsing nodes, you can keep your grass looking clean and condensed. Alright, so a way earlier in the course, we created this line trace script inside of our third person and Character Blueprint. And it was good. However, you might want to clean up sections of your graph, such as this, just to make the readability of it a little bit simpler. In fact, having all these nodes out here, it can tend to overwhelm the census from time to time. So is there a way that you can increase the readability of this at-a-glance, we know this all works. Crunch this node network down somewhat. Well, yes he can. What I'm gonna do here is I'm going to left-click and drag and highlight all of these nodes right here, except my zero key inputs here. So with all those highlighted, I can right-click over it and then my right-click menu. And I could have right-clicked on any of my selected nodes right here. I have the option to collapse nodes. So I'm gonna go ahead and do that now. And when I do, we're going to see that this whole network of nodes has been condensed down into a single node. Now we can name and in fact, it's prompting us to give it a name. So I'm just going to call this line trace, like so. And now we have a greatly simplified graph. We have crunched down all those nodes into a single collapsed node. In fact, it says it is a collapsed graph. If we zoom Obama here, now you can see as I'm mousing over this collapsed set of nodes, we have a little bit of a preview in our window there. So that is handy at a glance. You can sort of see what is inside of there, even though it is very small. But if you want to get the full view, all you need to do is just double-click on it and take a look at the top here you now are within a tab that says line trace. That is the exact same name as what we called that collapsed graph. And here is our node network. We have an input node. Here's all the inside of this graph, and then we've got an output node. Now, nothing is needed for this output because we didn't have anything that was necessary to pass along any data or anything of that sort. Now you may be wondering what the heck happened to our Event Graph. So I'd like to draw your attention over to the, My Blueprint panel right over here. And underneath our graphs section, clicking on this little down arrow, clicking under the Event Graph section, we not only have access to any of our event nodes that we've placed within an art event graph. But we also have quick access to our line trace collapsed set of nodes that we just created. Now up at the top here, I've also got this back arrow and is forward arrow. Now look at this back arrow. It is illuminated words. The forward arrow is kind of grayed out here. If I click on that, nothing will happen. But if I click my back arrow here, it's going to jump me back out of my line trace collapsed graph here, back out to my event grass. So once again, if I double-click on my line trace collapsed graph, it's going to change my Event Graph Tab to my Align trace collapse set of nodes. If I click back right here, that will set me back to the Event Graph. Now I could also just click right here on my Event Graph to get back. And now back over here in the My Blueprint panel, I can jump back into that line trace collapse set of nodes by double-clicking right here. That'll get me back there. And also I can jump back to my Event Graph by double-clicking on the Event Graph option right here as well. So just showing off different ways to navigate your graph right there. Now, if you ever wanted to do your collapsed graph here, all you would need to do, let me zoom back up on my line. Trace collapse graph is simply right-click on it. There you've got expanded nodes, so click on that. And that'll set all those nodes back into your graph, like you had it before. And you'll also notice that that collapsed graph now no longer exists underneath the, underneath the graft Event Graph section of the My Blueprint panel. Now, moving along here, we're going to demo collapsing nodes that have other nodes plug into and out of the collapse nodes. So I've got a setup right here. We're, if I press a to key, I would check this enums that I set up earlier in the course is health status enumeration, in which I have the possible values of super okay. And her badly. And depending on what this is set to, if it is super, I was going to change the character. Movement components. Jump z velocity that is controlling how high my character can jump to 1,400 if my health status is super, if it's okay, I'll leave it at 700. And if I had this set to hurt badly, I would set my jumps the velocity 2350. Now I'm just going to demonstrate here again what would happen if I was to collapse nodes that have other nodes plugged into and out of the collapse nodes. Now to demonstrate this, I'm going to simply select these three nodes right here. So note these wires right here, right here, and right here, and even right here, they need to have something to plug into. So when I collapse these nodes and even I've got something flowing into this selection nodes. So I'm going to right-click on this. I am going to collapse these nodes. And now check it out. My collapse node looks like this. I've got an input pin, but I've also got some output pins as well because we need to pass along this character movements information to this set jumps ie, velocity notice, and we also need to pass along those enumerators as well. So I'm going to name this particular graph, my collapsed health graph. That's a fine name. And now if I was to double-click on this and open it up, we can see that we've got one execution input pin, and we can verify this by jumping on back to our event graph. There is my one execution input pin. Let me double-click on this. Once again. Let me clean this up a little bit. But it automatically set up some output pins on this output node. So we've got three execution output pins and one character movement component, output pin as well. Now this does enable you to name these if you didn't like you, you know, new enumerator six, I could name this two super okay. And her badly. In fact, that would not be a bad idea just to make that clear, more clear. Okay? Okay. And we'll change this to hurt badly. So now if we were to jump back to our Event Graph, just seems to make a little bit more sense right there. Alright, so there you have it collapsing knows now this is something I usually don't recommend until you are in the final stages of your project. And you're happy with all your scripts and you just want to clean up your graphs a little bit, just for readability sake. Nice handy trick that you can take with you guys that'll do it all for this video. See you in the next one. 112. Custom Layouts: Alright, welcome back everyone. Well, after you've spent some time working in Unreal, you will no doubt come up with your own way of doing things, your own workflow, if you will, in your own way of laying out all these different informational panels, not just inside of a Blueprint editor like I have open right here, but inside of any of the editors in Unreal, that goes for your level editor, Static Mesh editors, material editors, all that kind of stuff. So then the question becomes, is there a way that I can save a customized layout that maybe I want to load in later. The answer to that is yes, of course you can. So to do this, you can find this option under the windows menu. If you come under Window in any of your editors here, window under the layout section, this is where you can create and save a customized layout. You can load that layout, you can remove that layout, et cetera. So we're gonna show how to do that in this video. Now want to point out here that while I am in the level editor, I have this option under the Window section right here. If I was to jump into my third-person character. So I'm in a character class blueprint and I come under window. I can see the layout options and I can create a customized layout right down here as well. And let's just jump into some other random editor as well. I don't know, I'm going to come under started contents maybe prompts that good old chair Static Mesh editor. Open that up. Sure. And under the window option right here, I have those layout options as well. So what I am going to do before I create my own custom layout is I'm going to bring on various window panels here and organize them to my liking. And I'll start off here in my static mesh and nurse will come under window. I will turn on, say my message log. Sure. I'll say I want to dock that up next to my panels right up here. I'll then come into my ThirdPersonCharacter Blueprint. Let's bring on another window. Let's see, I will bring my output log. Sure, I'll dock that down here. I'm going to put my level bookmarks next to my blueprint panel. Like so. I will take my palette panel and I'll also put it next to my components. Sure why not? You have the benefit of pause by the way, so you can see and remember where I am placing all of these panels. And then I'll come into my level editor. I've got my Levels window open from earlier in the course. I've placed that back on. I've also got my world settings on. How about I bring on the place actors panel as well. And let's see what else do I got here? I will bring on, Let's bring on world partitioner. This is if you're working with landscapes. So I'll have that open up over here as well. Okay, so with all of these layouts, customize how I quote unquote, like it. I'm gonna come under my window option here. And I'm going to come under save layout. And I can save my layout as it will bring up a little dialogue here. And I'll just call this my costume layout. And for my description here, of course it is optional as it says, I'll just call this my example layout. I'm gonna go ahead and click Save. Let me know that it has been saved to that directory right down there. And now what I'm gonna do is come under a window. And in my Load layout options, you can see my custom layout. But that's what I currently have in place. So I'm going to default this back to the default editor layout. Now when you do this, it's going to close out your engine and default, all of your window panels back to where they were by default. So this is my static mesh editor, my third-person character. I've got my details panel over here. You can tell it that palette panel is all gone. Where are my windows down here? They're all gone. And back here in my level editor itself, I'm missing my levels tab over here. Where's my content browser? I'm missing my world settings, world partition. It's all back to the editor defaults. Now, I go back under a window. I can load that layout. And wallah, you can see that my palate panel is back on right where I put it in. My bookmarks panel is back right over here. Everything is right back to where I had it. Level editor, place actors, panel, levels, tab world settings, world partition, et cetera. So it is worth noting here that when you go to create your own custom layout, once you go to save that layout, you're saving the layout for not just the current editor you are working within. In this case, this would be my level editor, but you're saving that layout for all of the other editors as well. Including in my case here, these static mash editor and the blueprint editors as well, to remove allow, you'd simply come under Window remove layout. There is my custom layout. When I select this, I'm going to get a dialog pop up here saying, Are you sure you want to do that? Now if you click Okay, now, you'll notice that nothing happened to my custom layout because that is the layout that I am currently using. So it's not going to remove the layout that you are currently using. So if I truly wanted to remove my cousin layout, I'd have to first go back to another layout. In this case, I'll go back to my default editor layout. And now if I was to come under our window option, under the layout section and I was attempting to load that layout. You can see it no longer exists. Now while we're here, I also wanted to point out that you could import an existing layout or you could, when you are saving a layout, you could look to export a layout as well. I'm not going to demonstrate that here, but wanted to make you aware of that. Highly recommend that you create your own custom layouts as it will help you improve your workflow. Guys, that'll do it all for this video. See you in the next one. 113. Tips & Tricks: Welcome. In this video, the goal is to arm you with additional tips and tricks to help you work more efficiently with blueprints in Unreal, not a show off these tips and tricks I'm gonna be working inside of Maya, BP ThirdPersonCharacter. However, note that you can be working in any of your blueprints. Alright, with our ThirdPersonCharacter open, I wanted to draw your attention to these two arrows right up here at the top of my Event Graph. They are back and forward arrows like you see in any sort of internet browser. What this allows you to do is to move from graph to graph. Now, right now is grayed out. And if I tried to click on them, nothing happens because we just open this up. However, as I click on different areas of my my Blueprint Panel or my bookmarks area that I have open right here under Window bookmarks. As I begin to click on some of these things, as I say, jump around to where my zero input key is. I come into my turbo run function. Or I navigate to one of my Blueprint Interfaces here, Let's go The interact function, or one of my macros on fire, or jumped to one of my bookmarks here, I'll go to my health bookmark or even my overview bookmark. Now you saw me click on a variety of things there. So now I've built up a history, and now I can use these back and forward buttons to navigate to those things that I had clicked upon. So if I go back here, I'm going to jump back to my health bookmark, back again, to my macro here, Maia on fire, macro, back again to my interact interface back again. And as you can see, it works like any of the Internet browser, back and forward buttons, forward, back, forward, back, et cetera. Now, as you mouse over it, it's going to say you can right-click to see a full history. I know at one point in time this was working. However, if I try to right-click right now, I can't see that full history. I got to imagine that functionality is going to find its way back. Alright, next up, I wanted to show you how to copy and paste values in unreal. Now this is something I know, you know how to do through so many other computer applications. Control C to copy, control V to paste. But this is one of those tricks that for whatever reason escapes a lot of people's minds as even being possible. What I'm gonna do here in my components panel, and I'm going to jump over to my viewport here because this is going to be a little bit visual in nature. I'm going to add a brand new component. I'm going to add a nice Agora particle system. This is gonna be attached to my Capsule Component. I'll leave that Niagara name. That's going to be just fine. I'm going to set a Niagara system asset here. By clicking this drop-down, I'll set one of these magic ones. Sure. Now currently it is appearing right at the center here because this is at the 000 location relative to our Capsule Component. This is attached to my counselor component. But let's say I wanted this particle to appear right at the location of my simulated hand component. Well, this would be as simple as copying this location. This is a relative location. This components relative location relative to our Catholic component. And to do this, I can simply right-click right here on location, right-click Copy. You can see shift plus rice. Right mouse button is the hotkey for doing that here. Then I can come over to my Niagara particle, right-click right here, and I could paste it. So for whatever reason, that is a super handy trick that escapes people's minds as even being possible. But trust me, I used that tip all the time. Next, I'd like to draw your attention over to the My Blueprint panel where we've got this gear icon. And if I click on this, what I want to talk about is this top most option showing inherited variables. Currently I have this checked on. Now if I check this off, you're going to notice that a lot of variable categories here are going to go away. And the reason that those go away is because those were inherited variables category there were inherited from our parent class of character. Now the reason that this is important to even know about is because if you're creating some base class and then you inherit from that class, you may be wondering like, Hey, where all the variables that I set up in that base class, where do they even exist? Now to help drive home this point, I'm going to open up another blueprint here. Earlier in the course, we created this child character blueprint, this one inherited from my third-person character. So let me just open this guy up really quick. This is a child. If you ever see this, you can open it up the full blueprint editor by clicking right here. You can see that the parent class here is my BP third-person character. Now if we look over in the variable section of the child. Like wait a minute, where all the variables inside of my parent class here, I created all of these variables. I hit actor variable, a sock, and a variable. These are variables that we credited throughout the course. Where are they? Well, if I go into the child and I click on this gear icon in the My Blueprint panel and show inherited variables. And we open up our variables category here. Now we can see all of those various variables that we had set up within our parent class. Next, I'd like to draw your attention to a gear icon that's located in the far upper right of our Details panel. If you click on this, you're also going to see a variety of options. I'm going to talk through some of these that I really like using, such as show only modified properties. If you check this on, you will whittle down your details panel to showing just the properties that you modified. That is super handy for knowing like, Hey, what in the heck did I actually change about this component? I find this especially useful for something like the Character Movement Component because the Character Movement Component contains all sorts of properties. So if I want to find out the just the ones that I have modified, I can click right there and show only the modified properties versus if I check this off, this huge laundry list of properties that I'm presented with otherwise, some of the other options that I like to explore within that menu, we've got to show all advanced details. What the heck is that? Well, in any of these given categories, we've got some advanced properties that are lesser known, lesser use, et cetera. You can click and show these like so manually. However, if you didn't want to do like I'm doing right now, and exposing them all one by one. You can simply go into that gear icon and show all advanced. And it'll turn all of those advanced categories on right away so you don't have to click them all on. That's handy. Let me just turn that back off. Something else that I like to use here is in this category, I can collapse all categories or expand all categories. Once again, I've got my character movement components selected over here. There's a lot of different categories here. Character movement, jumping, falling, component, tick character movement, networking, a lot of different categories. So if I want it to collapse them all, I could just simply click on that and see all of the individual categories so that I can open up just the ones that I'm interested in. And of course, I can do the opposite, which is to expand all categories. So that's an easy way of opening them all up without having to do it one by one. Alright, Next, I'd like to talk about what this hide unrelated button does along the toolbar within a Blueprint editor. Now that really see this working, you need to be within your Event Graph or your construction script or function or a macro, something with some nodes. I'm going to highlight my capsule component within this node network. And I'm going to click on this button. This is like an on-off toggle button right here. When it's blue, it is toggled on. When it is gray, it is toggled off. Let me just toggle that back on. What this has done is it has grayed out. Any nodes is ghosted them out. Any nodes that are unrelated to the one that I have selected, one or ones that I have selected. So why are these all illuminated yet? Well, my attach actor two-component nodes right here, they are reliant on the capital component because they are plugged into the parent input. These spawn actor from class nodes right here. They are reliant on the world transform that we're getting from the Catholic component. So those are illuminated as well. Now if I was to zoom on back here, you can see that all the other nodes are ghosted out as well because they are not related to the one that I currently have selected, this Catholic component. Now this is extremely helpful if you have a tangle of wires, it's hard to make heads or tails of what your script is doing. And you're really trying to shine a light to focus in on just a given subset of nodes. Now I also wanted to point out here that right to the right of our hide unrelated button here we've got these three dots. If you were to click on this, you have the option to lock node state. Now, if I click and turn this on, and we can now see that it's on with that checkmark. What that's gonna do is it's going to keep all nodes in their current state highlighted or doses. So that means if I was to click elsewhere and click on another node, it's going to keep all the other nodes still go sit out. And the ones that I had locked to being illuminated, they will stay illuminated until I unlock them. So that is good to know. Alright guys, there are some tips and tricks for working within Unreal Engine blueprints. Hope you'll find them useful. We will see you all in the next video. 114. Productivity Hotkeys: Alright, welcome back everyone. In this video, our goal is to summarize all of the productivity boosting shortcuts built into the Blueprint editor so that you can construct and navigate your scripts more efficiently. Now for starters, I'm going to show you where hotkeys are set inside of Unreal so that you can customize your productivity boosting hotkeys for all areas of the engine, not just inside of blueprints but everywhere. So where can you customize these hotkeys? Well, that is done in your editor preferences. You can access your editor preferences by coming under the Edit button right up here. Editor preferences. And with this tab open, I'm just going to open it in along the top right, up here. Along the left-hand side, you've got keyboard shortcuts. You click on here. And this is where all of the various hotkeys are set for every area of the engine, every editor, Blueprint editor. Here's where we see some hotkeys such as compiling F7. You've got backspace for going to a parent graph control plus F is going to bring up that find menu, etc. Now this is obviously great because if you find yourself doing a given action again and again, you can create some hotkeys for yourself. Also, you can customize the hotkeys to your liking. And in fact, that is valuable for me to do here because the F7 key, which is currently bound to compile is also the hotkey I had bound to my OBS recording software for starting and stopping my playing. So if I wanted to change this out, I could just simply click this right here and say I want this to be the clicking that space will go F8. And you can also add a second binding. So I can say, sure, F9 is gonna do that as well. Now there's no Save button or anything here. So if I was to go into my ThirdPersonCharacter Blueprint and make some kind of change like just snipped this wire, then hook this back up again. Now you can see it's asking me to compile. So if I was to press F8, that'll compile it. But let me snippet once again and hook it back up again. And if I was to press F9 and obviously you can't see me pressing those. You're just going to trust it. I'm doing it. F9, That's going to compile it as well. So real handy way to customize you're hot key bindings for various areas of the editor. Alright, so with that out of the way, I'm going to show off how to perform a bunch of hot key commands within blueprints. These are gonna be specific to blueprints that you should know about. Now, gone through a lot of these throughout the course. But this is going to serve as a great summary. So back in my ThirdPersonCharacter, just find a selection of nodes, if you will, to play along at home. If you want to select any node, it's as simple as left clicking on it, that'll select it. If you'd like to add to a given selection, you can simply hold down the Shift key. I'm gonna hold down Shift and left-click like so. If you would like to toggle a selection, you could hold down the Control plus left-click. Like so. To create a marquee selection, you can simply left-click and drag and you're gonna get this little dotted line box. And whenever this touches, that is what you're going to be selecting that the marquee selection left-click and drag. If you'd like to add to your marquee selection right here, you could hold down Shift and left-click, and then you can add some nodes to it like so. If you would like to remove selections from your marquee selection, you can simply hold down, Control, left-click and drag, and that will remove whatever your marquee selection touches. So those were a blueprint selection commands. Alright, navigation commands you should know about. You've got the right mouse button holding this down. We'll drag you around the entire graph. You've got this hand icon to drag around like so. If you'd like to zoom to selection, you can simply press the home key on your keyboard and that'll zoom in on whatever you have selected. Frame it up if you will. If you'd like to zoom in and out on your graph, that is simply scroll willing in and out like that scroll wheel up and down. Now if you would like to zoom in Beyond scale 1.1. So right up here is your zoom level in the upper-right Zoom one, colon one, if you'd like to zoom beyond that, hold the Control key, and then you can actually zoom in Passat up to a zoom level of plus seven. Alright, let's see some generic commands you should know about control plus b. That'll jump you to wear this asset. In this case, the ThirdPersonCharacter lives within the content browser. Let me jump back inside of there. You have control plus S that will save your blueprint. Then we have generic sort of computer commands here where if you were to do something like Control plus y, that will redo something, Control plus z that will undo something. So let's explore that by simply moving this node down a little bit. I'll do Control Z to undo that, Control Y to redo that, to find something in this blueprint you can do control plus F. I also have this fine results window open right down here. Let me close this out. So if I was to do control plus F, that'll bring in my final results. If I was to try to find something like say My anything related to health, I could search for it. They're just within this blueprint. However, if I wanted to find something in any Blueprint, I would do Control Shift and F, that'll bring on my find in any blueprints menu here. And if I was to type in health now and press Enter, I can find out where the word health is referenced within any sort of blueprint. Thirdpersoncharacter, my WPP, HUD example, pickup, et cetera. Now, as you remember from earlier in the course, F7 is the default hotkey for compiling your blueprint. I did change it for me personally, in my editor preferences, I changed it to F8, F9, but F7 is the default way to compile your, alright, some variable actions you should know about. Let me just go to some empty space. I'm just going to quickly bring on an ad node. Operators, Add a way to get and set a variable quickly. If you're going to be plugging it in on the input side, you can simply left-click and drag on top of a pin like that to get the contents of that variable. However, if you're going to drag and drop on the output side of a node, left-click drag on top of that pin and you will automatically bring in a center of that variable. You should also know that if you hold down the Control key and left-click control plus left-click and drag this into a graph and drop it anywhere. You can get that variable if you hold down the Alt key and left-click and drag, you can bring in a center of that variable. And if you're not sure what you want to do with that variable, you can left-click drag and then you get that menu for getting or setting. And that's a way that you can decide on the fly what you wanna do with that. Now, something a lot of people are not aware of with variables in the My Blueprint panel, you can reorder these by simply dragging them around. So if I wanted to place all of my float variables near one another, I can simply left-click and drag. So whichever one you're going to kind of drag on top of, it's going to jump that right above it, like so. So you could do something like that to organize your variables, all nice in your myvariable section. Next, I'm going to show off at various node actions you can take. And I'm going to delete out a few of these getters and setters right here. I'm going to leave this add node right here. I'm going to also right-click and bring in a custom events. I'm going to leave that at a generic name right now. I'm also going to bring in one of my custom-made functions, my Modify health function as well. Alright, first we've got node specific context menu. If I was to right-click on a given node, I will bring up a node specific contexts Menu things that I can do with that given node, I could add a breakpoint or toggle a break point. Those are two very common actions. Breaking node links is a very common action. Refreshing a node is a very common action. Obviously, you've got your copy and cut, duplicate, all that kind of stuff as well. Note, however, this was my right-click menu for this function node. If I was to right-click on this addition node, check out one of my options that I have specific to this node. I have the ability to add a pin. I could add a pin specific to this node, that one is not available. If I click on this function node right here, however, different nodes may have different node actions such as this addition node right here. Now some nodes do allow you to double-click on them to go to that associated node or a graph. This is a custom made functions. So if I was to double-click on this function that I created earlier in the course that will open up that given function tab to show me what is all inside of that function. So that's good to know Timeline nodes. You can do that as well. To open up the Timeline Editor, move a note around, you know that you can already left-click and drag it around like this. However, you can also use the arrow keys on your keyboard to nudge it up and down, left and right, et cetera. To delete a node, you can simply have it selected like this and press the Delete key to rename a node such as a custom event. Note again, this is not available on all given nodes, but custom event where you can name it. You can simply left-click on the title right here. And that will allow you to rename it my costume events. Press Enter. Alternatively, you can press F2 with that selected, and that'll allow you to rename it as well, renamed custom event. Other commands here, let me just delete these out and bring on a few fresh nodes are going to right-click bring in the seven key, will say seven key. We will modify some health. And let me just go back here, accidentally double-clicked on that. I'll bring in a delay node as well. So you should know by now that if you select the node and press the F9 key, you can add a breakpoint for that, and I can do that for each of these. So each of these has a breakpoint on it. To clear all breakpoints, I can do Control Shift and F9, that'll get rid of all of them right away. To cut a selection, I can simply do Control X. Obviously control a V is to paste that. To copy a given selection. I can just have a couple of nodes selected like this control C, control V. You should know that from just about any sort of computer application. Let's see to duplicate a selection. So I'm just going to select these and do Control plus D, and that will duplicate them. And lastly, you should know by now that you can add a comment around a selection by simply selecting the nodes that you want to create a comment around. Like all these three, press the C key to add a comment box, my comment box. And again, once you have created a comment box in your bookmarks window, which is accessed by Windows. Bookmarks. You should then be able to find that comment box somewhere in there it is right down at the bottom is known as Comment. However, if I compile, now update to my comment box, if I was to navigate away from it, I could double-click on it to jump to my comment box. Alright, various pin actions you should know about. Let's bring on a couple of nodes here to help facilitate this discussion. You know what, I'm going to bring on a spawn actor from class node because that's a good one to demonstrate with. If I was to right-click on a given pin, like my spawn transform right here. I'll bring up a menu of different pin actions that I can take, can promote this to a variable that's a very common pin action. You can see that on just about any pain here promotes a variable also with a spawn transform or a vector or a rotator pin. If you right-click on this, you can split the Struct Pin because a transform consists of location, rotation, and scale data. So foster right-click on this. I can essentially expose the given components of that pin, the location, the rotation, and the scale data of that transform. If I bring my Add Node back on here, I'm going to right-click, bring in that add node. If I was to right-click on these gray pens, these are wildcard pins. I could right-click on it. And I've got different pin actions I can take here as well, even though these aren't listed underpin actions, I consider them pin actions. I can convert the pen to a given datatype. So if I know I want this to be an integer plus say, a float pen, I can change those accordingly. Now sometimes as you begin to create some spaghetti code, you've got wires going every which way. Sometimes you just want to emphasize a connected wire just so it's easier to read, so to speak. So if I was to hook up one of my wires here, let me just take any float here health, going to drag it on top of there. If I was to mouse over this pin, you can see how it illuminates that wire right there. And it works both ways. It doesn't matter which side of the wire here I'm mousing over, but you can see that gradually that wire gains in strength and illuminates a little bit more. So that can just help for readability purposes. Now let's say that I wanted to connect this variable to a different pen. I could snip the pen by holding down Alt and left clicking on the Pen tool snippet like that. However, if I wanted to move it, I could hold down Control left-click and drag it to another input as well. And again, that works on both sides of our connection here. So if I wanted to move this pin as well, I could hold down Control, left-click and move it. Or if you want to snip that wire, hold down Alt, left-click, and that'll snip that wire. Alright, And finally, let's show off the hotkeys for adding some of the most commonly used nodes to your graph. We've got holding down the B and left clicking. We'll add a branch node. If you hold down the D key and left-click, you'll bring in a delay node, use those all the time. Hold down the S key and left-click that brings in a sequence node, the GT, and left-click that brings in a gate node, the M, M as in Mary, and left-click, they'll bring in a multi gate node. If you hold down the F key and left-click, you bring in a for each loop. If you hold down the N, N as in Nancy key, you left-click and that will bring in a do n node. If you hold down the 0 key and left-click, I do want snowed. And if you hold down the P key and left-click, you will bring in Event Begin Play if it has not already been added to your graph, I use those hot keys all the time. Well guys, that is going to do it all for this video. We'll see you next time.