Unreal Engine 5 : Getting Started with Blueprints

1. Intro (Course Preview): Hey everyone, and welcome to the Unreal Engine five, Getting started with blueprints course. My name's James, also known as the few studios. And I've been a marketplace creative for the last six years. And during that time I've provided support for hundreds of Unreal Engine beginners. And because of that, I've learnt some of the common things that people tend to struggle with when trying to learn game development. I'm ruined. Jing is one of the world's most popular game engines and blueprints is it's powerful, built-in visual programming language. Blueprints give us the ability to code simple or incredibly complex systems from within the engine without ever having to write any text-based code. And is a great way to get started in the world of Game Development. At the beginning of this course, we'll start off with the basics variables. These are used to store information like the player's location, health, or stamina will learn about the different types of variables and also how to manipulate them during gameplay. Then we'll move on to functions, macros, and events. These are used to keep your project tidy and efficient and make it easier to modify later on in your project's development. Then we'll move on to different types of Blueprint, likely Actor, Pawn, character, and Game Mode blueprints. Each one of these blueprints come with different built-in functionality that come with the engine that we can then use to create our games. We will also cover things like projectiles, which are often used for weapon bullets, traces which are often used for interaction systems and sometimes even Meli systems. And we'll cover Player inputs including the new enhanced input system. And this is what allows us to take a keyboard or mouse button press and run code depending on which key we actually pressed. We'll also be covering widgets now, which is how we create UI elements inside of them. Rule engine will learn how to create new widgets and how to add them to the players screen, as well as how to change the layout and attach widgets behavior, two different variables, functions or events, so we can control our widgets actually do. Then lastly, we'll use all of the knowledge that we've gained during the course to create some common gameplay systems. This includes an interaction system that allows our player to interact with other objects. A damaged system that will allow our characters to receive and send damage. A HUD that we can use to display information on our players screen. We'll set up a response system and a crouching system as well. The aim of this course is to provide you with detailed information about the different features that are included with blueprints. So that by the end of this course, you're able to plan and create your own gameplay systems. Thanks for listening, and I really hope you enjoy the course. 2. Intro (Overview): Hey guys, and welcome to the first lesson in this course. In this lesson, which is going to be doing a quick overview of what blueprints are, what they can be used for, and some common phrases that we'll be using throughout the course. So to get started, what are blueprints? Blueprints are a visual programming language built into Unreal Engine. They're often used to define things like character, weapon or even an MPC. Blueprints allow you to code in the engine connecting up different types of nodes which together create new functionality. The result of this could be a door opening and closing, or it could be a complex inventory system or combat system. The engine includes some template blueprints that start with useful existing code, like for example, our character blueprint, which if I bring into the level here, you can see over on the right-hand side of the screen, it includes built-in components, like for example, the Character Movement Component, which controls character movement. A mesh component which allows our character model to be visible in the game. A camera component, which when a player takes control of this character, allows them to see. When getting started with blueprints. Some common terms you'll hear is Blueprint Classes. Blueprint objects, or blueprint acts as an example of a Blueprint Class is our ThirdPersonCharacter down here. Now if we hover over it, you can actually see it says Blueprint class. But if we drag it into our level, you can see that it creates a new blueprint object and we can actually drag multiple of the same class into our level. Now these are two independent Blueprint objects. If we had multiple players, each player could be controlling a different character blueprint and doing different things. But all these blueprints are still using the same Blueprint Class, which is our ThirdPersonCharacter Class. If any changes are made to our ThirdPersonCharacter Blueprint class that will affect all of our Blueprint objects using our class. So for example, if I open up my ThirdPersonCharacter Blueprint, go to Viewport and I just rotate our mesh, say 90 degrees this way. Hit Compile, go back to our map. You can see that our characters are now facing a different direction. And if I go back and just rotate it back to the correct direction, hit Compile. You can see as again, updated, some Blueprint objects don't exist in the game level, but instead run in the background, storing information and running important functionality. For example, the game instance blueprint, which is used to store information between levels of a blueprints like the Game Mode do exist in the level, but are completely invisible to the player. The Game Mode controls things like which character blueprint class is created when a new player joins the game. And what happens when a player leaves the game. Blueprints are an incredibly powerful tool that allow for faster development, debugging and a very user-friendly. The next few lessons I'll be covering some of the basics to get you started. So you're able to create some of your own functionality, as well as be able to read other people's blueprints, which can really help accelerate your learning. 3. Intro (Creating Blueprints): Hey everyone. In this lesson I'm gonna be showing you how to create new blueprint classes. We're also going to be taking a look at the Blueprint editor. Before we get started, I'm just going to show you how to dock the content browser to our screen. By default, we have to click this content draw to open it. Personally, I prefer to have it locked to the screen. So I'm just going to click this doc in layout button here. And now we've got our content browser lock to our screen. This is personal preference. You can have your setup however you like, but this is how mine is going to be for the rest of the course. There's a few ways we can create blueprints and our content browser, we can right-click and select Blueprint Class up here. Can also go down to the blueprints, pop out and select the Blueprint Class option down here. That awesome additional classes here, but we won't be covering them in this lesson. Those will be in a future lesson. Another way to create blueprints is go over to our Add button here on the left-hand side of the screen. And you can see we've got our same menu. We can select Blueprint Class, or we can go to blueprints and select Blueprint Class here as well. So I'm just going to click Blueprint Class to open up our pick class window. Here we can select what type of blueprint we want to create. Gives us a few of the more common selection. So up the top here. So to start with, we've got actor. An actor is basically just any blueprint that exists in a level. Then we've got **** which has enacted that the player can actually take control of a character, which is also a ****. But it had some extended functionality so it can walk around and we can set a character model. We've got the player controller. This is the blueprint that tells our character or a **** what our player wants them to do. Game mode, which is how we set what type of player controller or character we want our players to start with. And then we've got some components down here, which I'll be covering in a future lesson. But essentially components can be added to other blueprints to give them additional functionality. And then down here we've got our all classes. And this basically allows us to select any other blueprint or C plus plus class and have our new blueprint use them as a template. So to get started, we're just going to create a simple actor so I can take you through some of the blueprint UI. It will start with just renaming this blueprint. I'm going to call mine video blueprints. And we'll double-click this to open it up. And we'll start in the Viewport. Here is where we can set our locations for new components in our blueprint. So for example, if I go to our components tab here and click Add, just going to search for cube and we'll add in a cube. Now, we can set our cubes position. If I press W, that gives us movement controls. If I press E, we can rotate it, or if I press R, we can resize it. Those options are also available up here. So if you want to use these buttons instead, you can. And if we wanted to, we could add additional components and set their location up in our blueprint as well. Now if I just compile this blueprint and I drag it into the world, you can see that the center of my blueprints at this point here, but my cube is over here. Now that's because we positioned it at that location from the center further away. You can see that it updates in the world as well. So that just gives you a basic idea of how to use the viewport. What is used for, I'm just going to delete my cube for now because we're going to move on to the next part of the UI, which is the My Blueprint panel. Now we're gonna be using this a lot where my coding. So starting from the top, we've got our graphs. I think graph. If I double-click this, it will take us to our main event graph. This is where we're gonna be doing a lot of coding, at least to begin with, before we start getting into functions and things like that. But you'll become very familiar with this as time moves on. It starts with some basic nodes. I'll be going into these in a future lesson so you don't need to worry too much about those right now. But you can also see that under our graph it tells us what events are in that graph. You can see that we've got these four events here. They're also listed under our event graph. So if I was to say double-click active begin overlap, it will actually take us to that event, which can be helpful if you're trying to find things. Next up, we've got our functions, macros, variables, and event dispatchers. Now, each one of these are going to have their own lessons because they're quite big systems and we'll be using them a lot. But this is where there will be listed. Any functions that exist in this blueprint will be listed under functions. The same with macros and event dispatchers and variables. If you ever want to create new ones, we can click the little plus button next to functions here. We can do the same with macros, variables and event dispatchers can also click this little Add button up here. We can select if you want to create a new variable, a function of macro and so on, we can create new graphs. And this is useful just for organizing things. Say you had you had a character and you wanted to have a graph for movement, and a graph for your guns, and a graph for health, for example. You could do that and that just gives you additional graphs that you can organize stuff into. Overriding functions. We'll be covering that in the functions video. So don't worry too much about that. But if you want to override a function, you can find those options in here. Next up is the search bar. We can just use this to search the functions, variables, and macros for a particular word. It's always a good idea to include key words in your variable and function names. That way, if, for example, we were creating a health system, we could just search for health. And that'll show all of our functions, variables that have the word health in their name. Next we're going to be covering the top bar. So to start with, we've got compile. This basically just tells us, is our blueprint gameplay ready? So right now it's got a little tick, which means everything's good. We're all okay. But if I was to say drag out and add a print string here and see that now we need to compile it. And this just basically allows the engines check the code, make sure there's no issues. If there were an issue and give us a little red exclamation mark. It also probably give us some compiler errors telling us what the problem is. Then we've got our save that just saves a blueprint. If we click Save and see the little dot went away next to the blueprint name because it's saved. We've got browser. If we click this, it will take us to the place that the blueprint is and our content browser. Then we've got diff, this is for source control. I'm not going to be going into that because source control is quite a big topic. So we're just going to skip over that for now. We've got find. This gives us the search window where we can search for, say, for example, a node. So if I search for print string here, will actually tell us, hey, there's a print string node in the graph. So if I double-click that, it will actually take us to it. This is really helpful. If your blueprints get quite big, you can forget where you've put things. So you can just search keywords to find where things are. Hi, unrelated just hides connections that aren't important at that moment in time. Usually I just recommend leaving this off, but you can have a play about with it if you like. Next, we've got Class Settings. These are kind of like the basic settings of our blueprint. You probably won't be doing too much in here. Most blueprints will have very similar class settings. You can also adjust the thumbnail angle. So you can change the camera angle for the thumbnail when the Content Browser, if yours had a phone. Now, we can also add interfaces which will be a whole separate video that will go into. But if you want to find the interfaces that are in class settings under here. Next we've got class defaults. Now this is where all of our blueprints settings are. So because we started off with an actor, actors have a bunch of extra settings that they come with. Four multiplayer replication for our tech, which is our techno down here, which runs every frame, we can make a few adjustments to that. We have collision settings, rendering settings and so on. We'll be going into these a little bit more in future videos. If you ever want to know whether a bit more detail, what things do, you can always hover over the name and it gives us a taut it. If we were to create a new variable, say I go to add and I just didn't new variable. Let's call this test. If we now go to class defaults, we find the, oh, we need to compile first because it won't show up until we can pull its class defaults. We'll scroll back up to the top. You can see on the default we've now got our test variable. And that's where we can see all of our variables default values. And those are the values that the blueprint will start with when it's created. So I can turn that on and off here as well. We've also got a search bar up at the top, which is really helpful, especially if you've got a lot of variables In your blueprint or you're using someone else's blueprint, you're trying to find a setting. You can search for keywords here to find the option that you need. Then we've got the simulation and play buttons. These basically just start the play an editor mode. If I hit the play button, you can see it's opened up the plan editor window. Next we've got the debug dropped down. Now, this is a really cool feature of blueprints. I will have a whole video that goes into debugging and some of the features the engine comes with. But just to give you guys an example of what this does, if I connect my print string here to the tech. Now this runs every single frame that the game runs. So if I go to our map, I'm just going to drag the video blueprint M. I hit play. You can see that the halo is running over and over again for every frame that's drawn. And if I go to video blueprint, because I've got video blueprints selected here. You can see that it's showing me the code that's running. It's all highlighted. That's telling me that the tech note is running and it's running the print string. And this can be really helpful when you have large blueprints, you can see exactly what code is running. For now we're just going to pause that will delete our print a string here. And it will also remove our video blueprints from our level. Just so we've got a clean start and we'll head back to our blueprint. One other thing I wanted to mention about the find results, actually, if we go back to find, you can see that we've still got our window open here. If we click this little button here, will actually search all the blueprints and our project for our search phrase. So if I click this, you can see that it's actually finding a lot of print screens. I'm sorry, Print String nodes around our projects. And these are actually blueprints that come built into the engine. So you can see it's searched all of the blueprints and it's telling us exactly where print strings are being used throughout our project. This can be really helpful if you're again trying to track down something. You can search all of your blueprints all at once. Next, we're going to take a look at the construction script. If I close my finding blueprints window and we can go to functions, you may have noticed the construction script that's there by default, it's built into the actor. So we double-click that will take us to our construction script. And here we can add code that will be run when we first drag our blueprint into the level. So this is great for if you're building sort of level design tools and things like that, maybe you want to randomize the color of something for every time you drag it into the level. The construction script is really useful for that. Now, if any of these windows ever go missing or say you close them by accident, it's not a problem. You can always just go up to the windows drop-down over here. And in here you can take on any of these panels that we've been looking at today. So you can turn off. So for example, if I close my components, I can go and I can just reopen the Components panel and I will just pop right back up. Now, the last thing I wanted to point out is the address bar that's up here on the top. This will always say which blueprint urine, I'm wearing that blueprint you are. This is really helpful if you're following along with tutorials or screenshots or anything like that, it's always worth taking a look, making sure you're on the right blueprint and also say the function name or the Event Graph name. So if I go to Event Graph, say event graph, that will tell you exactly where you are or if you're following along with a video or an image, you can see exactly where they are in those videos. So that's gonna be it for this lesson. Hopefully you have a basic understanding now of where thinkers and the Blueprint editor. 4. Intro (Event Flow): Hey everyone, In this lesson I'm going to be taking you through how Blueprint nodes run and the order that they run in. To get started. I've set up a few examples here in our ThirdPersonCharacter Blueprint. And I'm just going to be talking you through these and explaining what each one does. So to start with, we have the event begin playing. Now this is an event that's built into the engine and it will run whenever our game starts or when the blueprint is created. What will happen here is we have our event begin play that will tell our player a play, play a sound now to run. Now, this is a custom event that I've created myself. And if we go down here, you can actually see we've got the play player sound. So I'll begin play or x cubed. It will execute our play, play a sound node, and that will execute our play sound at location. And the sound that, that will play is going to be wherever our sound input is here. So that's gonna be the start sound. Then it will play that sound at the location we're providing. So that's the get actor location, which is going to be the location of our character. Then once i sound is played, our output of our play, play a sound. Cool. We'll run. That will happen whenever the execution chain down here has no more nodes to run. So what this will then do is we'll set our health value to whatever our starting value as code runs from left to right typically. And if we hit an event, cool, we'll run the code that's connected to that event. And then we'll resume executing the code with our original event. Next, we've got the event tech note. Now, this is a very commonly used node by beginners. And the reason is because it runs every single frame of your game. So every single time your graphics card draws a frame, this event will run. Now, the problem with that is people tend to attach a lot of code to this node. And that can start to slow down your project very quickly, because generally, most code doesn't actually need to be done every single frame. We want to use things like Player inputs, timers, and various other ways of running that code. Instead of just every single frame we run it because that's how you get poor performance in your game. But for this example, I've just taken some very simple code. I've got a number value. And then we're plotting one to that number value and then we're setting that number value. Every single time a frame is drawn of our game, we're increasing our number value by one. And then I've just got to print string node here. So that will take the number value, it converts it to a string, which is text basically. And then we print that value to the, to the player screen. I will be going into more detail about these events when we come to creating some examples. But for now I just want to explain the different types of events and how they execute code. So next we have the input action jump. Now, this is a node that will run whenever our player presses the jump input. So by default that's the space key. And the reason that is is because if we head over to edit and go to Project Settings, then I'm gonna go to Input down here. We'll go to Action Mappings. You can see that we've got an action mapping here that says jump. If I click the down arrow, you can see that it's got spacebar set here. So this is a default input for the ThirdPersonCharacter project. So that's why that's already here for us. So when I go back to our ThirdPersonCharacter Blueprint, That's why it says input action jump is because that inputs already been set up in our action mappings. And what this basically does is when I press Space, pressed will, will, will run, and that will cause our character to jump. And then when I release, that cools the stop jumping. Now, input actions is essentially how you take a player's input and we can run code using that input will be going more into impactions in a future lesson. There's also a new enhanced input system that comes with Unreal Engine five. So we'll also be looking into that as well. Another way to run code through Player inputs is using the input events nodes. So if I right-click and I searched for a keyboard name, say Enter. And we can scroll through these and under keyboard events we can find the Enter. Now, this is similar to our input action Jump. We've got Oppressed, which will run the code that's connected to it when the Enter key is pressed and released when code will be run, when the key is released. Now, these are more for debugging and quick prototyping. We will be using these quite a bit later on in the course just because they're quick itself than our project settings. But typically you wouldn't use these nodes. When setting up a game's final key binds, you would use the input actions that I showed you before. Next, we've got the, any damage nodes, which is up here. And this event is built into the engine. And it allows us to tell our ThirdPersonCharacter that it's taken damage from other blueprints. And those other blueprints can also supply a damaged value, similar to how we called our play play a sound event here, and we provided a start sound. Then our play, play a sound event down here, uses that start sound and plays a sound at a location. This is similar in that the other blueprint can call the enemy any damage of m, it can provide a damaged value. And now in our ThirdPersonCharacter Blueprint, we can use that damage value to subtract from our current health. Now are any damage event is calling a function called decrease health. Now, I've created this function myself. And don't worry if you don't know what a function is, we will be going into that in a future lesson. But essentially a function is one node that contains other nodes and that one node is reusable. So we can reuse that code in multiple places and our project. So if I double-click this function will actually take us into the function itself. And you can see that function contains all these nodes. Now, this will execute similar to our event graph. So it will execute left to right. And then once it gets to the end, the node will be finished. So to start with, we will take our current Health value and it will subtract the damage value that we got input from any damage of them. Then it will set our new current health valley. And then we're setting, or sorry, we're checking, is our current health less than or equal to 0? If it is less than 0 or equal to 0, then we run the Play play sound node and we're telling it to run the deaf sound. So as you can see, we're reusing our play, play a sound node. And this time we're telling it we want to play the deaf sound. Then after our sound has been played, we then tell the actor destroy itself, which basically tells the actor to completely remove itself from the level. Or if I hope is greater than 0, we're telling it, we're turning our play, play a sound node to play the hertz sound instead of the deaf sound. Now, if our Destroy Actor node runs or if our play, play a sound with the hertz sound runs, you can see that they have no more outputs. So what will happen then is our function is now finished. So if we had additional code connected up to the output of our function, that would then run. We don't. So this execution chain has just ended now with decreased health function. That's gonna be it for this lesson. Hopefully you now understand what causes blueprint code to run and the order that things generally execute. Don't worry too much if you don't fully understand functions or events yet, we will be covering those in separate lessons in the future. This was just getting the hang of how code actually runs and what causes it to run. 5. Variables (Overview): Hey everyone, In this lesson I'm just going to be explaining what variables are and what they're used for. Variables are basically just a way of storing information. And there's a lot of different types of information, so there are quite a few different types of variables. In the next few lessons, I'm just going to be taking you through some of the more commonly used variables. We'll learn how to change their values. And also we'll cover some basic examples of common things that there'll be used for. So to start with, we'll create a new variable. And to do that, we'll head over to our new Blueprint panel. And there's a couple of ways we can do this. We can click the little plus button next to the variables tab and create new variable that way. Or we can go up to the Add button here and select the variable button here, which will create a new variable as well. Now, once we've created a new variable, will be able to rename it. So for this variable, I'm just going to call it new variable. Here. We can also set our variable types. So the default is a boolean. A boolean is just a true or false variable, so it stores either a true or false value. Now, with our variable selected, we can add over to the Details panel. If you don't have the details panel, you can always bring it up by going to Windows and selecting the Details panel hip. So overnight Details panel, we've got our variable names so we can rename our variable whenever we want to. We can set the variable type. Now if I select the down arrow here, you'll see some of the more commonly used variable types that we'll be going through in future lessons. There are some additional ones and drop-downs. We won't be covering those in the course because there are lots and lots of them. But I'll be explaining what they are and what they're used for in a future lesson. Now, we have a default value down here. This is basically the starting value for our variable. Now at the moment it doesn't actually have any option here. It just says please compile the blueprint. That's because it's a new variable for that setting show up, we have to compile. So I'm just going to compile here. You can see that now we've got this tick box that we can turn on and off. And that's because a Boolean is a true or false value. So we can set where for this variable starts with a true value or a false value. Now there were also some additional settings up here. Don't worry too much about these at the moment, we will be covering some of these in a future lesson. Now a big part of variables is that we can actually get the information stored in them when we're writing code and we can change them. So there's a few different ways you can get your variables data. So we can either just drag it straight into our event graph from my blueprint panel drop and we get an option for getting new variable or set new variable. So we can do gap that will give us this get node here. Using this node, we can get the current value that our new variable is set to. Now we can also drag out and do set, and that allows us to change the current value of our variable. Now, these notes will sometimes look different depending on the variable type. So because this is a boolean, it's got little tick box here. We can turn on and off. But say if this was a variable that we're storing a number, we wouldn't have the tick box there. Now another way you can do this is when we drag our new variable in, if I press Control on my keyboard and let go of the left mouse button, just instantly create a node for us. And we can also drag out and hold down the Alt button and let go. And that will give us a set nodes. So instead of having to use this little menu, you can use some keyboard shortcuts there as well. Another way you can create the variables in our Event Graph is we can just right-click and search for a new variable and just hit enter. And we've got our get node and we can do the same thing with SAP. So I can just search for a set new variable. And you can see that's come up there and we can just create that as well. So it doesn't really matter which way you use to create your variables in the Event Graph, whichever is more comfortable for you, you can just use that. Now depending on how much time you've already spent in the engine, you may or may not know what variables can plug into other variables. So for example, if I create a new variable here, I'm just going to call this one of the variable. And I'm going to leave this as a Boolean, fight, drag that into our event graph and I'm going to get it. I can actually plug that other variable into my new variables set node. And I'll just move this one out of the way. And what this will do is it will take whatever are of a variable value is, and it will tell our new variable to be that value. So if we had this node running, say, on Beginning play, so I'm just going to begin playing Notre. Plug this in. Now, when the game starts, our new variable will be set to whatever our other value other variable is set to. So if I select my other variable, you can see that I need to compile my blueprint, so I'll do that. So if I set the other variables, default to true, and if I go to my new variable, its default is false. Now, what this will do is it will tell our new variable to now be true. And we can check this if I add a print string quickly, connect the output of my new variable set node into the string input. And this output is basically the same as a node. So just to keep your code clean or you can use that instead of having to create a new node. So now when the game starts, we would expect our print string to print true because that's what our other vowel, other variable is set to. So if I can pull and I hit Play, you can see that it's printing true. And if I was to change my other variable to false, you'll see that when we hit play, it reads false. So that's gonna be it for this video. In our next few lessons, we're gonna be learning about specific variable types and some nodes that are commonly used with those variables. 6. Variables (Booleans): Hey everyone. In this lesson we're gonna be taking a closer look at Booleans. Boolean variables are used to store a true or false value, but they can also be used to control which code is being run in your project. And they can also be the result of certain tests. So for example, if we were checking is a greater than b, the result of that test would be a Boolean because it'd be either true or false. So to get started, I'm going to be creating some examples of how Booleans can control which code is being run. And we're gonna do this and need ThirdPersonCharacter Blueprint. So I'm just going to open that up. And in here we're going to create new variables. So in my blueprints panel, click the new variable button, and I'm going to call mine example Boolean. And mine is already set to Boolean, but if yours isn't, you can just click the drop-down here and select the Boolean type. And we're going to compile so we get our default values show up in the Details panel here. If you're ever missing any of these panels, you can always turn them on up and the windows drop-down here. We're going to leave the default value is false because we are actually going to be changing that using code. So we'll start by creating a tick node. So we'll right-click the Event Graph and search for tech and we'll create the tick event. Now, if you remember from our previous lesson, runs every single time a frame is drawn off our game. Next, we're going to get our example Booleans. And we're going to drag out from it and we're going to search for grunge. If we spell it right, there we go, we can search for brands and create that node connected up to our event tech. So now every single frame, this branch node will run. What a branch node does is basically just check the Boolean variable that's plugged into it and runs either true or false depending on if the Boolean variable is true or false. So it start with, we'll just create some prints strings. So we'll drag out from the true. We'll search for print string. And this is just a node that will print out some text on our players screen whenever it's run. So I'm going to say, I'm going to set this to true. And I'll copy and paste this and connect this up to the false. And I'm just going to set this to false. And that will just mean that when our true pin is run to run on the screen and when our false pen has run, folks will run on the screen. So I'll show you now, default value is still false. So we should expect folks to run when we plan, the editor will hit Play and you can see false is running. If we accept, we change our boolean to true and hit Play. You can see that true is running. The cool thing about blueprints is we can actually see this code running in real time. So if I go back to my ThirdPersonCharacter while the game is still running, you can see the debug drop-down here. And if I select the ThirdPersonCharacter, we only have one option because there's only one ThirdPersonCharacter Blueprint in the level. So we'll just collect that. You can see that we can see Arctic node is running every frame that's running our branch, which checks our example Boolean. And if we now save it, you can actually see it says true. So true is running on our print string is running and it's printing out true. So now we want to be able to actually change our Booleans value during gameplay so we can change which code is going to be run. So we'll exit out of our play mode. And we're going to create a new input node. And I'm going to search for it left mouse button. And this will be run whenever our left mouse button is pressed. And then the release will be run whenever the left mouse button is released, will drag out and we're going to use a branch node. Now, there's actually a few ways you can create branch nodes. One of them is to hold down B on your keyboard and then left mouse click and you can see it creates a branch node or you can right-click and search for if. That also brings up the branch node. Or you can search for brunch. And that also brings up the branch nodes, whichever you're more comfortable with. We're going to connect this up to the pressed. We're going to get our example Boolean and plug that into the condition. You can see I'm dragging it straight on and it will actually automatically connect it to us, to the branch node for us. And what we want to happen here is when our left mouse button is pressed, if our current Boolean variable is true, we want to set it to false. So I'm just going to plug that into false and see if I drag it onto true, it will just connect automatically. So we want it to be set to false if it's already true. And we'll copy and paste this connected sub to false. And if our current value is false, we want to set it to true. So it should look something like this. Will compile this. And now we can test it. And again, I'll hit Play. You can see currently it's true because that's our default value. If I press left mouse button, it becomes false. And if I keep pressing it, you can see that it's changing the print string. Now there's a few other commonly used nodes with Boolean. So I want to show you, if we head back to our ThirdPersonCharacter Blueprint, we take our example Boolean and we drag out from it and we search for all. You can see that we've got a few different or nodes. So I'm just gonna be using the OR Boolean node. And you can see that gives us two inputs for Boolean. And then one output I want to know does is basically check, is any of its inputs true? If it is, then it will return true. If they're all false, then it will return false. And we can add multiple inputs. So we could add additional inputs if we wanted to. So for example, our example boolean is ticked on true, but all of the others are false. So this will still run or, or, or Node or still output as true. So we can test this. You can see it's running true. But if I change my example, Boolean true, false. All of its inputs are now false. So we will now return false. You can see now it's returning false. A similar note is the anti-nodes. So if we delete our off now, we'll drag out from our example Boolean again and search for and we can select the Boolean node. And this works in a similar way. It takes multiple Boolean inputs and returns a Boolean output. And what this does is basically all of the inputs must be true for it to output true. So right now our example boolean is false and this additional one is also untyped, so it's false. But if I change my example boolean to true, now we've got one true and one false input. Now, the output will be false because that both not true. So we can test this, hit Play. You can see it's false. But if we accept and I tick this option on, now that they're both true, it will output true C. Now, these are notes that you'll be using very often with branch nodes and they can save you having to have multiple branch nodes if you're testing more than one variable. So for example, if you need free variables to be true before you want a branch node to run, you'd use an anode. Another commonly used node is the node. So if we drag out and we search for naught, we can use, Let's see, NOT Boolean. And this basically converts or changes or Boolean to the opposite of what it currently is. So if I connect this up, currently our Boolean is ticked on for tree, but this will reverse that and make it fox. So we can see is definitely set to true, but it's going to run folks. See, if we head back and we set this to false now are not node will actually convert that and make it a true while true code will run. Now, there's one other note I want to show you guys, and that is the equals node. So it will delete are not node now and I'll drag out, and I'll search for equals. Do one or two equals. I like to do too, because it usually just brings up the exact form we want. And that's r equals note here, you can see it's got two Boolean inputs and one Boolean output. If I connect this up to our brunch note here, this basically says that both of our inputs have to be exactly the same. So currently they're both false. So our example boolean is set to false and its second input is set to false. So this will actually one true because they're both exactly the same value. So we can test this at play. In C. It's running true even though our values are actually false. And if I was to set our example boolean to true, but leave this value is false. It will run false because they're no longer the same value anymore. And we can check this again. Hit Play. You can see folks is running. Now as a side note, as of you E5, if you were to create these nodes that I've shown you without dragging out from a Boolean, they actually wouldn't have these red inputs and outputs. So for example, if I search for r equals note here, you can see that it's got a Boolean output because an equals node is always going to return true or false. But these inputs are actually grayed out. And the wildcard, which mean they can actually be any variable type. A few ways to convert these into our Boolean type. So we can either just drag out from our example Boolean, connect that up and it will automatically convert it for us. Or we can right-click these grayed-out penta, go to convert pin. You can see we can change it to a lot of different variable types. But you can see we've got our Boolean option there, so we can select that. And it now converts our node into that Boolean type. So that's gonna be it for our lesson on Booleans. We will be using them a lot more in future lessons as booleans are pretty cool part of coding. Don't worry too much if you don't remember all the nodes we've used again, we'll be using those a lot more in future lessons. 7. Variables (Integers & Floats): Hey everyone. In this lesson we're gonna be covering the float and integer variable types. Now both the float and integer variables are used to store numbers values. The difference between the two is integers can only store whole numbers, meaning it can't have a decimal point value, whereas a float can store numbers that do have a decimal point value. Both can store positive and negative value numbers. So we'll get started by creating two new variable types. I'm going to create two new variables. The first one I'll just call example float, and the second one, I'll call it example into integer, will change the types so we want integer. Then for our example float, we'll select float on which compiler. Now with our example integers selected, you can see over in the default value we can set a number value. So I can set this to say 99, for example, but I can add a decimal point and add a decimal point value. Say if I tried to do that, when I press Enter, it gets removed because an integer could only store whole numbers. Whereas if I select my float variable and I go to the default value here you can see it actually really has a decimal 0. And I can set this to 99.99 hand, and you can see that the value actually saves correctly. Next, I'll show you how we can set and get our float and integer variables is very similar to how we were working with our Boolean. So I'll quickly go through that process. I'm just going to right-click and create a left mouse button input, like we did with our Boolean. And we'll get our example float star with, and we're just going to select Get Float from our pressed. I'm just going to choose the print string node. And that will allow us just to print string our current value. When we plug it into the string, it gives us this additional node. All that's doing is converts our flute value into a string value. And a string value is just text. And that allows our Print String nodes to actually print out the float value. So now when we hit play and I left-click, you can see it's printing out our default value. And the process is the same for our integer. We can just get that. I'm going to drag it straight into our string input. And you can see it's given us a different node, looks similar to the first one, but this convert an integer into a string. So I'll print string can display it. Then when we hit play and I left mouse, you can see that it's printing out are now integer value. Next we'll start changing our values. So what we can do is we can right-click and use a tick node. From this, we're going to increase our integer value. So we'll get a current integer value. We're going to drag out, we're going to use the plus. And this is an add node. And it works pretty much as you'd imagine. It takes the current value of our integer and add some value to it. So I'm going to set this to one. So output will be our current example integer value plus one. Then we need to set our example integer. So I'm just going to drag out, do SAP, plug this into our tick node and plug the input into our addition node. So now every frame, our example integer will increase and when we left mouse button, it will print out the current value. So it will compile and hit play. So if I hit Plus, you can see that it's already up to 249. And that's because our tick node is running every frame. So it's going to increase very quickly. And see as I click that value is going up a lot. Next, we'll do the same thing with our float value. So we'll go back to our character blueprint, and we'll remove this code here. And we will do the same thing but with afloat. So we'll drag out, do so. Connect this up to our tick node. Then we want to get the current example float plus. So we'll use an add node and we can add a decimal point numbers. So we could add say, 1.25 and connect the output to our example float. So every frame we take the current float value plus 1.25. And then the result we set now to our example float. And then we'll plug in back down here on our left mouse button, we'll have our print string display, our float value instead of our integer value. So now when we hit play, we can click and you can see that it's going up in decimal point numbers now because we're using our float. Next, I'm going to take you through some of the more commonly used nodes with floats and integers. Now the reason we're doing these two variables together is because they're both number of variables and they both use very similar nodes. And they can actually be combined together with some nodes as well. So if we head back to our ThirdPersonCharacter, will get rid of this code up here to give us a little bit of space. And we'll start with the basic nodes we've already been using. So I'm just going to get both float and integer. Now the first one is R plus node, add node. We can create that allows us to add the inputs together. And output the result. We can add new pins if we want to, to add multiple variables together. We can also create a new flow variables such as call this a float. Set this to a float. We can plug that of a float variable. So we can add multiple flow variables together. Now, since you were five, we can actually change these inputs two different variable types. So say I wanted to add my example float and my example integer together. We could do that. Now if we've got multiple pins and we want to remove them, we can just right-click them and remove them. So I'm just going to remove these two extra ones. So I want to combine these two values together. We can do that now. So we can right-click or extra pin, go to convert pin and select integer. Now we can plug our integer m. And now this will output the result of example float plus integer as a float. So we could set our example float to that value. Now, we can test this in game if we want to. We can put this down here. Connect this up to our left mouse press button, will plug the result into our print string. So now we're going to say add 1.25, 1.25. And we'll add to that. When we hit play, we expect it to be 3.25. And it's actually increasing because we're setting that float value. So every time we click, we are now increasing the value because our example float has been increased. Now this process with converting one of the pins to an integer can be used with most of the nodes that I'm gonna be showing you. So if we continue, I'll get another example, float hair. If we drag out and we do search for multiply, you can use this symbol here, or you can search for multiply. That gives us a multiply node. This works as you probably imagine. It takes the inputs, multiplies them together, and returns an output. We can right-click one of the inputs and convert it to an integer as well. Now, you may have noticed I'm doing it so that the output is a float. The reason I'm doing that is because if we did this the other way round, so if I copy and paste my integer here, and we created an ad node. If I convert this to a float, you can see that the output is actually now changed to a float even though it was an integer. The reason this is happening is because our, if this was a integer output, we would lose whatever value, whatever decimal point value or float variable might have. So it automatically changes that now to a float. So carrying on, we have multiply node. We can also do this with our integer. So if I delete this ad note here being dragged out, we can search for multiply, multiply node, and that will give us a integer multiply node. We've also got the subtract nodes. So if I just delete these notes it, we can use a subtract node. And you can search for the line symbol here, or you can search for subtract. It's up to you. And that gives us the same thing as our addition node, but there's subtracts the inputs and returns the outputs. Again, we can convert these inputs to a integer, or if we wanted to on an integer node, we could convert it to a float. And just like before, it's converted the output to a float again, because we've added a float input. So those are the basic ways we can manipulate our variables values. We can set those new values. But there's also ways that we can check our variables. So if we get rid of these minus nodes for now, There's also nodes such as the greater than node. So if I drag out from my integer, I search for greater than. You can see, we can either search for greater. So if I search for greater, you can see it comes up, or you can use the greater than symbol and create this node. And this gives us two inputs that are integer and an output that's Boolean. So this will basically check, is the a value, the top value greater than the b value or the bottom value. If it is, then it will return a true boolean. And if it's false, it will return a false Boolean. Again, like our previous nodes, we can convert the input pins. So if I do convert, we can change this to a float. So we can actually check to see is our integer greater than our float value. And that will return out still a Boolean value because this will always be either true or false. We can do the same thing with less than. So we can drag out from our integer and do the less than symbol or we can search for less. And that gives us the same node but reversed. So if a is less than b, then it will return true. If a is greater than b, it will return false. There's also greater than or equals nodes. So if I do the greater than symbol in C that we've got greater equal. And this just checks, is a greater than B or is it? The same as B. If it's greater than b, it will return true. If it's the same as B, it will also return true. And if it's less than b, it will return false. And then we have the same node, but with less sun as well. So we can do less than equal. And that does the same thing but in reverse. So a must be either the same as our bottom value or less than our bottom value. And that will return true. Now, because these nodes output a Boolean variable, we can actually use these to say Boolean variable like we were doing in our previous lesson. So if I create a new variable and call it Boolean, we can use these greater than nodes or less than nodes to set a Boolean variable if we wanted to. We can also use these nodes control a branch node. So if I search for branch and create a Branch node, like we did in our last lesson, we can control which code is being run depending on the result of our greater than or less than. Note. One other note that I wanted to show you guys is the equals node. Now, this works similarly to how our Boolean equals node works. If I drag out from my integer and I do the two equals symbols and see that creates us a equals node. And this basically checks, are these two integers the same and outputs a boolean that we can then use on things like asap Boolean node or a branch node. Unlike the previous nodes, we can also convert the input to a float if we want to. We can choose float double-precision because that's what our variable was. We can connect our example float into that. And this will check, is our integer exactly the same as our float variable? If it is, we return true, if they're different than it returns false. Integers also have another way that they can control which code is being run. So if I delete this code here for now, and I drag up our example integer. If I drag out and I search for switch, you can find switch on int. And this gives us a note that allows us to control which output is run depending on our integer value. So currently our integer values is two. We have a default pen. So what will happen if I'd left mouse button right now is just our default pen would run and nothing else would happen. But if we add a new pen, you can see it's added a pin that says 0. If I add a couple more pins, you see that we've got 012. Now if I was to press the left mouse button, the two pen would rum, because our integer is set to two. If I was to change this to 0, then our 0 pen would run in testis or by use a print string. We'll just set this to 0. I'll copy and paste this and we'll set this one to one and this one to two. Now, depending on what our example integer is run, the different outputs will run if we hit Play. And I left mouse, you can see 0 is running because I set the value to 0. If I set it to one, then our one will run and that will run our one print string. You can see one is now running. This can be helpful if you want to run different code depending on what value is. And if I was to say set this value to say 99, now there isn't a 99 pin output. So what instead will happen is our default pen will just run instead because there's no matching output for 99. Then if at any point we wanted to remove some of these outputs, we can just right-click the pin and we can do remove execution pen to remove those. Lastly, I want to show you how we can use a float to set an integer. Now, this is a little bit different from normal, as our float could have a decimal point value winner, and our integer can't store that value. So we have to either round up or down or float. So if we get our example float here, we set our example integer. We connect this up to our left mouse button here. We can drag out and plug straight into our integer. But that's gonna give us this node and this will round up, round down or float value. So if this is say, 1.25, it will round that value down to one, and then it'll say integer to one. So if I added a print string here so we can see what the result is in game. We expect this result to be one when I left mouse, which is, and even if I set this value to 1.99, it will still round the value down. So if I hit play again, you can see it's still rounding that value down to one. But there are other nodes that allow us to round off float to a different whole number. So if we go back to our character blueprint head and we delete the node. That's just the default node for when we drag from a float to an integer. But we can also drag out from our float and search for round. And we can use the round node, which would just round our float value to the nearest whole number. So if I connect this up here, currently our variable is 1.2. So when we left mouse button, we had expected to round down to one. So if we hit Play, you can see that it's printing out one. And if I was to increase this to say 1.8, we'd expect it to round to two. You see that that's working correctly. Now, we don't need this same conversion process if we want to set a float to an integer, because floats can display whole numbers just fine. So if I was to delete this code, we would set our float. And we got our example integer here. I'm just going to reuse this variable. If we plug that in, you can see that it just gives us this little note that converts it from integer to flow. And there's no rounding going on because our integer is a whole number. And our float can store whole numbers just fine. So you can see our integer, it's 99. When we left mouse button, it will change our float to tonight. So I'll just connect this into our print string. So when we hit play, you will see that it's printing out 99 because it's float as a point value, but it's being set to the correct value of our integer. Now, there are a lot of other maths nodes built into the engine that we won't be covering in this lesson because there are a lot. But if we drag out from our integer, you can scroll down and find the mass. You can find all sorts of nodes in here that you can play about with if you want to. Most of them are pretty specific, so you probably won't be using them too often. But what I've shown here are the more commonly used nodes. And you can do the exact same with the floats. If I drag out from there and we just scroll down, we can find the math. You can see that there's even more for floats because they're a bit more versatile as they have a decimal point. So that's gonna be it for this lesson. Just like the Boolean, we will be using floats and integers a lot more in future lessons just because they're kind of the core part of doing any math in the engine. So you'll be getting quite familiar with them in the future. 8. Variables (Names, Text & Strings): Hey everyone. In this lesson we're gonna be going over the name, string and text variable types. All these variables are used to store text and each variable type has some limitations and benefits to using them. First up, we've got the name variable type. Now, this is used to store texts at the player doesn't normally see. It's more for referencing certain things in code. So for example, when we want to get a bone or sockets location, we would use a name variable to tell the engine which bone or socket we want to get information for. So because of that, the name variable is quite limited. It doesn't need all of the nodes that strings and texts variables have access to. So we'll start off by creating our name variable. So I'm just going to create a new variable and I'll call this example name. We'll set our variable type to the name variable. And we'll compile. Once that's compiled, you can see we've got our default value here, and this is just a standard textbooks that we can enter text into. So I can put hello. This is a text variable that stores that information. Now as you would expect, like our previous variables, we can get and set this variable as well. So we can drag it in and get a get node, or we can drag in and get it a set node. Now the only different series that are set node has a textbox that we can also manually enter text into if you wanted to. So we can set hello. And if this node will run, it would sour example name2 hello. Of course, if we had another name variable type, we could plug this straight into our set node to set our example named variable to a different value. Now, because all of our variable types that we're looking at today are texts variables. They all store text. They can all be converted to one another. So if I was to create a new string variable, so I'll call this example string. The autosave exited my time. There we go. Example string. We can choose the string type. And if I get my string variable, you can see if I drag out and connect up to my text, it just gives us this conversion node and that will take whatever our example string is, it's texts value and set it to our example name. And we can do that and the reverse as well. So if we wanted to, we could set our string using the example name. And it gives us that conversion node the other way around. String variables are the most flexible of the texts variable types, they have a lot more nodes available to them than texts or name variable type stay. Because of that, it can be useful to convert say, a name or a text variable to string, edit that string, and then convert it back to our name or text variable type. As we can do a lot more editing encode with our string type. Lastly, we have the text variable types. So I'm going to create a new variable. I'm going to call this example text. And we'll set the type to text and we'll compile so we get our default value here. You can see like our previous variables, we get a textbox so we can add text to you. This is a text variable, for example, we can compile and that's now our starting value for our text. Now, texts variables are used for the texts that players tend to see. So if you had a dialog system or a menu system or anything like that, that the player actually sees the text values. We tend to use Text Variables for that. And the reason is because it can be localized, which is used for converting text to different languages, which unreal has a built-in system for. We won't be covering that in this lesson. But it's important that when you are building menu systems or any texts that the player will see, you use a text variable types so you can have access to that localization system which allows you to have multiple languages. So texts can be get and set the same way as we have done with our string and our name variables. So we can drag this out and get a get node. And that node, you can see that it's similar to our name on string. We have a text entry and we can set our node to another text variable. Or we can use say, a string. We can get our string variable. We can plug that straight into our texts and you can see that it gives us a different looking kind of conversion node, but it does essentially the same thing, whatever Example string is, it will convert that to text, and then we can set our example text. And the same thing for our name. So if I get the name variable, we can plug that straight into our text. You can see that we get this convert node automatically come up that converts our name text to a text text. And that allows us to set our example texts variable. Next, I want to take you through some commonly used nodes with these different variable types. And we'll start with the string because that has the most amount of nodes that can be used with it and is generally the more flexible texts type that you can use encoding. If we drag out one of the more commonly used ones is append. So if we search for append, we can bring up this node here. Now the append node allows us to take multiple string inputs and combine them together for one output. This can be useful if you want to say add additional text to a string without changing the original variable. Or if you had multiple string variables, you can plug them into append and then it will output those texts values combined together. So for example, if I set my example string to hello, and I set the B2B space, this is a test. The output of this node would be hello. This is a test all in one string value. And we could use this to maybe set another string if we wanted to or set example string as well. We can add additional inputs as well. So if we wanted to, we could have other variables plugged into these inputs, and they would all be combined together into one output. Another node that can be used with strings is the contains node. So if we drag out and search for contains, we can get the string, we can get contains. And this will search our substring. So it will check is the substring in this text. So if I was to say hello, it would search this string to see if the word hello is contained in it and then return a true or false value. So because our example string is set to hello, this would return true. Then we've got a couple of options. So we've got use case. This means is it case-sensitive? So for example, if I was to change our age to a lowercase h, The hello in our string has an uppercase. So this would actually return false because it doesn't exactly match our lowercase hello. We've got search from n, which basically just means that it will search from the end of the string to the beginning instead of beginning to the end. Another node we can use is the replaced note. So if I drag out from my string search for replace, we can create the replace node. And this allows us to set texts that we want to replace and what we want to replace it with. So if I select my example string here and I add, say the word test, I set the Fromm to test and the two to unreal. It will replace all of the test words with Unreal. And then here we can just set whether or not it's case sensitive and that will output the new variable. So we can actually set that to our example string. Okay, I take node just so we can sit and gain. Plug that into our set node, will create a print string and connect that up to the output. So now when we hit play, we'll see our example string say hello and rail instead of hello test, which is what it's currently set to. Now the last node we're going to look at is the equals note. So if we delete our replaced noted drag out from the string and we can search for equals. And we want, well, we've got a few different options here. We've got exactly equal. So this is a case-sensitive equals node. So if we create that and see that it's got three equal signs. And this will check, is both the inputs exactly the same, including upper and lowercase letters? If it is, it will return true if not false. Or we can use the equals case insensitive. So this will return true if the text values are the same, even if they have different upper and lowercase values. Then lastly, we have the not equal. So this will do the opposite. This will return true if the text inputs are different and it returns false if the text inputs are the same. So we're going to move on to our name variable now, if you want to find any of the other string functions are available, just drag out from a string variable, search for string. And you'll be able to find all of the string functions under the string category you can see here. So we're just going to delete this code now and bring in an example name get node like that. Now, our name variable is a lot more restricted than the string notes. There's only a few notes that can actually be used to that. If we drag out, we can search for the equals. This gives us the original equals node. You may notice this from our integer video, but we can't change the inputs. So if I right-click, you can see there's no convert options. This node, we're basically just take into named variables and check if they're the same and return a true or false value. We can also create a switch on NameNode. So if we delete this node and we drag out and search for switch, we can create a switch on namenode. Now this works similarly to the integer switch that we created in our previous lessons. We can add new output pins. And depending on what our input variable is set to, we can run a different output pin. So you can see over in the Details panel we've got pin names. So I can change these names to say hello. And we'll change the second one to test. Now, if our example name is set to, if we just change it to hello, when this node runs, our hello new pen would run. And if it was set to test, our test pin would run. And then if it was set to something completely different, just random letters than our default pen would run instead. So you can control which code is being run by a name variable using one of these, this node actually also works with our string as well. So if I just quickly drag out a string, we can do a switch on string as well. That works exactly the same way. We can create new inputs, change their names, and they will run depending on what our string input is set to. Lastly, we'll move on to our text variable. So I'm just going to delete these and we'll drag in a gap for our example text, like our string node, the texts can use an equals nodes. So if we search for equals in C, we've got the same nodes that we had for our string. We've got exactly equal, which means if both inputs have to be exactly the same, texts values for it to return true. We've got the case insensitive, so it just has to be the same text values. It doesn't matter if they're upper or lowercase and then return true. And then we've got the not equals, meaning both inputs have to be different for the snow to return true. Now, our text node cannot do switches. So if I drag out and search for switch, you can see there's no switch on text, so that's a limitation. It also can't do things like append. You can see those options aren't there like our strings is. But we can use format, format text, which is a bit more of an advanced version of the append node. Now, the format text node is really helpful for things like creating item descriptions or anywhere where you're going to have different inputs into your text. So what I mean by that is if we add a format, so this item's name is now we might be able to hover over our mouse over different items and we want this name of the item to change, but we don't want this original texts to change. What we can do is add these two brackets here, and I'll zoom in so you can see the bracket type. Now, whatever name we put in between these brackets, we'll add us a new pen. I'm going to call this item name. Hit Enter. You can see we've now got an item name input, and this is a wildcard so we can add, we can plug in a text if we want to do all, we can add an integer or a string or a name, whatever you prefer. And whatever we input, it will output this item's name is and then the input. So as an example, if I add a tick will drag out and do print string. We can just connect the result to our print string. And I will plug my example texts into item name, and we'll change the example text to Apple like that. So now when we hit play, we will see this item's name is Apple. See this item's name is apple. And we can extend this even further. So we could put this item does, and we'll do the brackets again, damage type and hit Enter and now create another input. And we could say use our string. We can drag that in, connect up to damage type. And we can put fire. And we'll add in damage after here. So now I will say this item's name is Apple and the item does fire damage, hit play, and you'll see that it's printing out correctly. If we wanted to, we could set these variables using other codes so that every time we hover over a different item, for example, the item name changes to the correct name and the damage type changes to say the cracks damage types. So if I change this twice, you can see now when we hit play, it says ice damage instead of phi damage. That's gonna be it for this lesson. Hopefully you now have an idea of what each of these variables would be useful. Just to go over it again, texts variables are the ones that we use to actually display texts to the player. That's where we're going to store things like an item's name, descriptions, things like that. Then we've got strings that are useful for editing in our code. But we don't tend to display that to the player because they can't be used for localization. And then we've got the name variable that's more used purely encode for referencing things like bone names, sockets, DataTable rows, things like that. 9. Variables (Vectors, Rotators & Transforms): Hey everyone. In this lesson we're gonna be going over vectors, rotators and transform variable types. Vectors or a variable used to define objects, locations. It's made up of free floats called x, y, and z. If I select one of my cubes here in the level, you can see in the Details panel we have a location and that has an X, Y, and Z location. And as I move the cube around, you can see that those values change depending on which axis I move the cube M. Rotators are similar to vectors in that they're made up of free floats. They have X, Y, and Z. They also have secondary names. So if we have our cube selected, you can see x is rho, y is pitch, and z is your. If I press E with my cube selected, you can see that we can rotate our cube and those values begin to change depending on the axis that we're rotating our cube. Then lastly, we have transformed. Now this location and rotation and scale variables are all actually part of one variable called a transform. Transform is used to define an object's location, rotation, and scale in the world. Now, the scale is actually just another vector that's made up of three floats as the same names as our location vector. We've got x, y, and z. And one means that the AXA is its normal standard size. If we increase this to say two, it'll be twice its standard size, as you can see here with our cube. So now we're going to take a look at how we can use and change these values inside a blueprint. So we'll open up our third-person character here. And just to start with, we're going to create a new variable and we're going to call it vector. And we'll change our variable type to a vector. And we'll drag that in and get the variable also dragging a set as well. So you can see what that looks like. Now. Our get node looks pretty much the same as our previous variables, but our set now has three inputs, and this allows us to set a value for x, y, and z. You may have noticed this is a decimal point number because these are just individual floats that we can set. We can set these in a few different ways. We can connect another vector up to this input, and that will just set our vector to whichever variable we plugged into it. We can set these individually manually. So I could set these to say 123. Or we can actually drag out and search for meat vector, the vector node. And that actually gives us this node, which allows us to plug in a float variable fee any of these x, y, and z values. Another way we can set this variable is if we delete our make note here and right-click the vector pen, we can split struct pen, and that actually allows us to set the floats directly onto the set node. So we don't have to have that make vector node. And if we want to recombine these back into the original pen, we can just right-click select recombined Struct Pin. And that will reset our SAT node. Now with our vector, if we select it, you can see we need to recompile our blueprints, so we'll just do that quickly and again, in our default values, we can set an x, y, and z value, and these will be our starting values for this variable. Next, I'm just going to take you through some common nodes used with vectors. So the first one is R equals. If we drag out and search for equals, then we've got equal exactly. This is a node that basically checks both these vectors that are input into this node exactly the same as the x, y, and z values are the same. If it is, it will try and treat. We also have a nearly equal. So if we use the equals note here, you can see that that gives us two vector inputs and then a float input. And what this does is we can plug two vectors, n. And we can say, we can give it an error tolerance. So we can set this to say one. And this will return true if the x, y, and z values are within one of each of each other. We can also use all of the standard maths nodes with our vectors so we can drag out, we can use the Add Node that gives us the ability to add two vectors together and return the result. We can use the minus node or the subtract node. That does the exact same thing, but it subtracts the two vectors from each other and returns the output. We've got the Multiply node, so we can search for multiply, and that will give us the most ply node. This will multiply the x by dx of the top value. The y value is y and the z by the top value C. And I'll put the answer. Of course we also have divide, so we can search for divide. And that operates the same way. Divides the top value but the bottom and gives us the answer. Now, like our previous maps nodes, we can change some of these inputs. So for example, I can right-click the bottom input here and convert the pin. We can change this to other math variables so integers floats. For example, if we wanted to say minus a certain float from all our x, y, and z values and our vector, we could change it to a float and do that. We can do the exact same thing of our Add Node as well. So maybe we have an integer this time we wanted to add an integer value to all our x, y, and z values. We can do that as well. The next stage we're going to look at is called the lap nodes. So we're just going to delete these notes here. We'll drag out from my vector and search for lap and create that node. And this allows us to take two vectors and give a vector output. And this alpha value is a float. And this is essentially the value between these that we want. So for example, if we had a value and a and a value and B, and we set this to 0.5. The output location would be exactly between these two input locations. Next, we're going to take a look at the break node. Now if you remember from our set node, we can drag out and search for make factor. We can also do the same with a vector get node we can drag out and we can search for break. And we can break that vector now into its x, y, and z float values. We can also right-click our vector, get node and select Split Struct Pin. And that gives us direct access to those values as well. And if we want to recombine it, we just right-click again and select recombine structs pen. Now we're going to actually use the vector to start effecting an object in the world. So you can get used to doing that. To start with, we're going to create a new access. So we'll go to the content browser, right-click and create a blueprint class. Then select axon. And we'll call this cube, open up our queue blueprint, and we'll add a new component called cube. That's just gonna give us a cube component, will compile and save this, and then go back to the ThirdPersonCharacter Blueprint. And we'll right-click and search for left mouse button. Then from press will drag out and search for spawn actor from class. And this is going to create a new actor in our level whenever we left mouse button. And we're going to set the class to cube because we want to spawn our cube. And we'll drag out from spawn transform and search for make transform. This works similarly to the make vector node. It just allows us to instead make a transform variable. So you can see we've got our vector for location or rotator for rotation and then our second vector for scale. And we're gonna be using the location to choose where we want our cubed spawn. I want my cube to spawn just above my character's head. So I'm going to use the get actor location load will create that. You can see the output is a vector and the input is an actor objects. And currently it just says south because nothing is plugged into it. So we're going to be getting our third-person characters act to location. If we drag out and we want to use an add notes. So I'm gonna do add. We're just delete our vector variable here for now. Now I want it to spawn slightly above my character, because if I plug this straight into location than a cube is going to spawn right inside our character, which will mess up the collision. So we're going to take the output, plug that into location, and will increase this by say, 150. So it's nicely above our character. So now we can compile and hit play. When I left mouse button, you can see a cube as spawn just above my head. If I move over another cube or spawn, they'll keep doing that as I move around the level. Now if I wanted the cube to follow me around, we can do that as well. So if I exit out and go back to our ThirdPersonCharacter Blueprint. So to have our cube follow us, we need to make a few changes to our code to start with, we're going to drag out from the return value here, and we're going to select Promote to Variable. What this will do is create a new variable that's the same type as our pin that we're dragging from. So will promote the variable. This will create a cube variable type that we'll call cube. And this is an act of reference variable which we will be covering in a later lesson. But essentially, this just allows us to tell our new cube what we want to do with it. Then we're gonna get our new cubed variable. We're going to drag out and we're gonna do is valid and create an is valid node. The bottom one here, we'll make a bit more space and we're going to connect this up to the pressed. And then the is not valid up to our spawn out to cube. And what this does is basically check, has r cube Admin created before. If it's not been created before, so it's not valid, will run, and that will allow us to create a cube. And if our cube has been created, then it's valid, will run, which won't do anything. So that just stops us creating more than one cube. Then we'll create a tick node. So we'll do event tick. And we'll actually copy these two nodes as well. And we'll connect the execute to the authentic. And then we'll drag out from our cube and we're going to use the set actor. Location node. This allows us to change our cubes location depending on our new input. We're using. This is valid just to make sure we don't get any errors. Because if we try and set our cubes location without our cube having been spawned yet, we'll get some errors. So we use the is valid, stop those errors. And we're going to set its new location to the same as our spawn locations. So I'll just move this a little bit higher. And we'll copy and paste these nodes. And we'll connect this to our new location. So now, just to run through this code, every frame cube will set its location to our current characters location plus 150 and height. And we can play this now. If I hit play and then left mouse click and see we've got our cube as following me around. If I spam left mouse button, it's not actually creating any more cubes as well. Next, we're gonna be taking a look at the rotator variable. So we'll exit out of play and head back to our ThirdPersonCharacter. Will keep this code here for now because we can use it to do some things with the rotator. Once I've shown you some of the commonly used nodes with the rotator variable. So we'll create a rotator variable just the same way as we have before. Create a new variable. We'll call this Rotate tool. And we'll set its type to the rotator type. Then we'll compile, shore up our default value. You can see here it's very similar to our vector. We've got an X, Y, and Z, and these are float values. We can get our rotator by dragging and selecting get. And we can sow rotator by doing the same with the set option in C. Again, like our vector, it gives us an x, y, and z. We can drag out and search, make rotator. And we can select the rotate option here. And that gives us those variables that we can use to then set our rotator. Or if we want to, we can right-click and select Split Struct Pin to get access to those directly. So we can use a float to set any one of these individually. Like our vector, we can also drag out from our rotator, get node and search for break rotator. And that gives us our x, y, and z values as floats if we needed to access just one of those. Now, unlike the vector, we can't use a normal maps now. So if our rotator variable, there's custom nodes that are used just for this. So if we drag out and we search for combined, you can see we've got a combined rotators node, and this essentially just combines a with the B values. So you could use this to minus or plus values to your rotator and then it will give you an output. We do also have access to the lab for our rotator. So if we drag out and search for LAP, see we've got lip rotator and this works the same as our love for our vector did. We cannot have two inputs to rotate or inputs. And we can set an alpha, and this is a value between 011 would be the output value would just be the b value and 0 would be the a value, and then 0.5 would be the value between these two values. Next we have the gap rotation x vector node. So we'll delete that node here and we'll search for rotation x vector. And this is important because it allows us to get the forward direction in a vector variable of an actor. So x is the forward vector for most actors. So if we go to our level here, I just drag in a third person template. You can see that x, which is red. You can see red is x is our forward. So this allows us to get the forward direction for our character at any time, for us to rotate it like this, I'll forward direction would now be over here. But you can see the world x-direction is still this way. We can use this node to get the direction that something is facing depending on its rotation. We can show you this in an example. If we go to our third person template and we're going to edit some of this code so that our cube actually spawns forward in a direction of our characters facing. So to do that, we're gonna get our characters rotation. So we'll do get rotation, will find the rotation. There we go, get active rotation. This gives us the current rotation of our character. I'm going to drag out and we're gonna do get rotation x vector. And now we're going to multiply this. So we'll drag out from the vector and we'll do the Multiply node. And we're going to change the input here to a float because we want to multiply it by a float value. And here we're going to set how far ahead of our character we want r cubed spawn, and this is in centimeters. So if I set this to 500, then we're going to plus this two are actors current location. So we're basically saying 500 centimeters in front of our characters current location. We want to spawn this cube. So we'll drag out from our plus note here and we'll do another plus node. And we'll add our times value here. Set this to the location. I'm going to just reuse this and plug this into our new location up here so that when we spawn our queue, but it follows us around, that location, will compile and save this. And that will play and game. So if I hit play, you can see I can run around and if I click inside the cube is spawned over there. And if I rotate the character, you can see that the cube is actually updating its location ahead of me. Now I haven't set it up to use the camera's rotation. So that's why when I look about, it doesn't change the cube. But instead when I rotate the character, you can see that the cube is now updating, is five meters ahead of us, but it's still keeping the characters location, so it's still following along with us. If I was to change that 500 value to say 200, than the cube would be closer to us because it's only two hundred, two hundred centimeters in front of us. So now you can see it's two meters ahead of us and it's still updates in the forward direction of our character. So now if we go back to our ThirdPersonCharacter Blueprint, there are a couple of other notes we can use with our rotator variable. So like we've got the set actor location note, we've also got the set actor rotation, node rotation, which does the same thing, but instead sets are rotation. And we can actually do some rotating if we want with our cube. So if we drag out from our cube and do set factor rotation at that, and say every frame, every frame we want to rotate our cube a little bit. So we need to get as current rotation and then add to it. So we'll drag out and do get to rotation. We'll do combine rotators. Would just plug this in here and we'll say, let's increase this by one and see how this looks. So hit Play. If I left mouse, you'll see that it's now rotating in that direction. If we were to change the values on our combined rotator node, we can add a one in the y as well, and we'll see it do a different rotation. Next, we're going to cover the transform variable type. Now, we've already covered a little bit in this lesson, but essentially a transform is just a variable that's made up of a vector for the location, a rotator for rotation, and then another vector for our actors scale. And we can access that variable the same way we have been our location and rotation. So if we head back to the ThirdPersonCharacter Blueprint now, we can create a new variable. We'll call this trans form. And we'll set its type to transform. Now, similarly to the other variables, we can get it and we can center. Now you can see it doesn't have the x y options because there's multiple inputs that are transform needs from our set node. If we drag out, we can do make transform. And this gives us access to set its location, rotation and its scale. And this is a vector, a vector and our rotator here in the middle. And we can set these manually if you want to, on this node. Or we can plug in vectors and rotators like we have done before. We can also split this node as well like we've done with the other ones. So if we right-click the pin here, we can do Split Struct Pin that gives us access to the location, scale and rotation. And we can actually split this further if we want to say, I just wanted to set this transform to X1 and I had a float variable. I could actually split this pen again. And you can see I can now set the x float value for our location all on this one node. And then if I want to recombine it, recombine and then recombine again, and it's back to normal. We can do the opposite with our transform get node, we can drag out, you can search for a break break transform and we can access our location and rotation and scale. We can also split this as well so we can right-click and do Split Struct Pin. And that gives us access to those as well. Now we can set an actor's transforms. So if we go back down to our code from earlier, you can see we've been saying the actor location and active rotation separately, but we could actually drag out and use the set actor transform node. And that would give us access to its transform, which of course is made up of its location and rotation. So we could do make new transform. We can actually be setting these without these two nodes. So if I delete these two, we could actually be doing that with one node. So I'll plug this into our is valid. Using a make node, we can just take our location from where we are getting it from before. So down here. Then our rotation, we put that into rotation and we'll leave scale as one. But if we wanted to, we could adjust that as well. Now, if we hit play, we can actually see that it still works exactly the same as it did before. We're just using that one node now instead of the two separate ones. Now, the last thing I wanted to cover in this lesson is the difference between local and world transforms will exhale play for now and we'll head to the ThirdPersonCharacter Blueprint and inherent. We'll go to the viewport. Now in the viewport we can add a component, so I'm just going to add a cube. So that's Saturday cube now into our blueprint viewport. And we can see we've got a location here and currently this is reading zeros are 0. That's because our cubes current local location. Is 0, the center of our character. If I was to move it forward, you can see that it's increasing in the x. And now if I can pull this and place this into, place our character into the level, you can see our characters now at this location. But if I select my cube component, you can see that it's giving us a different value from our actor. Now, that's because this value is a local location. So it's currently a 170 centimeters from the center of our character. But when we select our character, so when we select the full actor, it gives us our world location, and that's our actors location in the whole world. Now we can change both j components, world location and local location in blueprints. So to do that, I'm going to open up the third-person character here, which can delete a lot of this code. So we'll delete all of the codes connected to the tech and will delete all this code as well. So we're just left with our left mouse button of them. So now we're gonna go to our viewport and we're going to select our cube that we created. I'm going to reset it to 0, so it's just in the center of our character here. And then the event graph, we're going to drag it out from the components. And we're going to tell it to set its relative location. And we're going to set this to 0 on the x 0 and the y, and then 150 on the z. Now when we press left mouse button, it will move it to this new location. So if we hit Play and see currently it's just in the center of my character. But if I left-click, it goes above my character's head. The reason it's done that is because these zeros, zeros 0 location for my cube is right in the center of my character. So all I've done is told it to increase that by a 150 in the z. And now it's above my character's head. Now if we change this code to instead of relative location or set world location, and we'll use the same values. So x is 0, y is 0, and then z is 150. And if we hit Play, I'm not going to move. I've just clicked and see my cube. If I press F1 is over there behind the wall. Now the reason it's doing that is because that is 0 in the world, but plus 150 centimeters up. Now if I move, you can actually see the cube moves with my character style. And that's because the cube is attached to my character. But we've told it to move to 00150 in the world. So that's the difference between setting a local location and a world location. Now, if I press F free to go back to our normal lighting mode there and to access the wireframe. You can press F1. If you didn't know that. Butt press F3 and exit. We can get the same result with our set world location as we got with our set relative location, we just have to do get actor location. So we get our current character's world location. We drag out and we'll do plus plus 1 fifth to its current world location. And we'll set our cube to that. Instead, we're taking our current actors location in the world, placing 150 and then setting R cubed to that instead. So we can test this out. Now, if I hit Play, if I left-click, you can see we've now got that same result as we did when we use the relative location, because now we're adding on our characters wild location. So our cube now stays above our character's head. So that's it for this lesson. In our next lesson, we'll be taking a look at ACTA, an object variable types. We've used them a little bit in this lesson, but we'll be learning a lot more about those in our next lesson. 10. Variables (Actors & Objects): Hey everyone. In this lesson we're gonna be taking a look at object reference variables and how they're used in the engine. So I've set up a very basic example here. We've got a trigger and we've got some cubes. And when our player enters the trigger, one of our cubes all move up. And then when the player leaves the trigger, one of them will moves down. If I hit Play and I've run into a trigger, you can see the right cube moves up and if I leave the trigger, it moves back down. Now, this is happening because our trigger hair has a reference to that cube that you can see down here. This is an object or an active variable that set to our cube. And I can actually change this by picking the pick actor from Scene button. I can click one of our cubes so I can pick the cube on the left here. And now when we hit play and I run over the trigger is now changing our left cube. And essentially what object references allow us to do is tell the engine which specific objects we want to effect. Because all these cubes are exactly the same. They use our cube class from our content browser, but each one is an individual object. We may want to affect one of them without affecting the others. And object references allow us to do that. It will take a look into our trigger blueprint and see how this is working. So I'll just open that up. You can see that we've got our selected object variable, which is what we're using to control which cube we want to effect. So you can see this is called selected object and it's set to our cube. And we've got that up variable here. It's set to type Actor. We've also got some code in here which controls what we do to our selected object. So we've got active begin overlap, an event actor and overlap. These are some of those events are built into the engine. So these will run whenever something overlaps or trigger or stops overlapping our trigger. Now, you can see both of these nodes have these overactive pins and these are object references. They are telling us exactly which object overlapped or trigger. Now, this is a cost node. We will have a separate lesson on costs because they are quite important and there's a lot to them. But essentially what this is doing is it's taking an act of reference and it's checking, is this actor a ThirdPersonCharacter? And if it is, then it will allow our code to run an F naught. It will return cost felt. So we're essentially using this cost node as a check. We're basically saying, if an act to stop begins opening lapping us, is it a third-person character? If it is, then we can run the rest of our code. If it's not, then we don't run our code. And then the rest of our code is basically just taking our selected object that we are setting in the options here. And we're telling it to set a new location. So we're just taking its current location and we're plotting 150 and setting it to that location. Again, we're doing exactly the same thing down on the end overlap, but instead we're minusing a 150 from its current location and then setting it to that new location. Next, I want to explain what is an actor? An actor is any type of object that exists in a level. So everything you can see here is a type of actor. There are lots of different types of actor, like for example, the character blueprint here. If I drag that in, that is an actor, but it's a different type of actor, say character type. It can do everything can actor can do, but it also has additional functionality because it's meant to be used as a character. Like for example, it can be controlled by a player. It has a capsule and a character model as a camera. These are all things that are built-in to our character blueprint. These are all things that actors by themselves don't have, but our character does because our character is a specialized type of actor. Now, this is done through a process called inheritance, which can be a little bit tricky to understand. So I've created an image here to try and show you guys what I mean. If I bring this over, you can see that we've got a new object at the top. Now, essentially, every single object in Unreal is a U object. There are very basic type of object and everything inherits from them. Moving down the chain, we have actors. Now, actors are what we've been talking about. They inherit from your objects, meaning they have everything that you object can do. But then they also have their own additional functionality that allows them to exist in a level, have components and be visible. And you can see I've added the cube and our trigger blueprints that we've been using for the example. You can see that those inherit then from our actor. So these are actors that can do everything a normal actor can do. But because we've added a code to our trigger and a collision box is now its own type with its own special functionality. And then the same for our cube. We've added a cube component to it. So it's now its own type with its own components. Are characters the same? It just has some additional steps. So you can see that from actor a **** is created. Now, a **** is a more basic version of our character blueprint. It can be controlled by the player, but it doesn't really have any of the movement or. For our characters model to be visible, then we have a character blueprint which inherits from the ****. So it gets some of its abilities to be controlled by the player and some of its movement abilities. And then extends on that and allows us to have a capsule component and a character model. Now our character is still an actor. It's still can do everything an actor can do the same way. A **** is still an actor and can do everything connected can do. But each one of these steps just add some additional functionality to their blueprints. Now all ThirdPersonCharacter Blueprint would actually be the next step down from our character because our ThirdPersonCharacter inherits from the character blueprint, we've just added some more functionality to it. We've set a model and we've changed some of its settings. So now it's its own blueprint. That's a child of the character blueprint. Now, going back to our example, if we select our trigger, you can see that when I select the drop-down for our selected object, you can see I can select any object in the level. Now the reason that is, is because this is an act or variable type. And that's because everything in our level is an actor. If we wanted to, we could change this from cubed to even our sky. And if we select the sky sphere, you can see I can set this to a sky because our sky is an actor is just a special type of vector with its own settings and components. Now, if I wanted this to be more specialized and only give me cubes, for example, we would have to change the variable type from an actor to our cube type instead. What we'll do is we'll set this back to a cube, so I'll just switch so cube. And we'll select our cube blueprint here. And then we'll open up our trigger blueprint. And in here, we can select our selected object. You can see it's currently set to an actor object type. But if we change this, we can search for cube. For example, we've got our cube blueprint. We can select object reference. And when we change a variable type, it will give us this warning just telling us that we're changing a type. It may cause some problems. We're going to select Change variable type anyway. We'll close this search window and we will compile. So now when we select our trigger in the level and we click the Drop-down, you can see it's only showing me cubes now, that's because we've set our selected object variable type to the cube type. You may be wondering, why would we ever use the cube type when we can just use the actor type and select any actor we want. Well, you might have special code or variables in our cube that we want to get access to in other blueprints. So we'll open up the cube and I'm just going to create a new variable. And it's gonna be a Boolean. And I'm just going to call it example. Now we've created this variable in our cube. It's a variable unique to our queue blueprint and only the cube blueprints have this variable. So we'll go back to our trigger blueprint. Now, because our selected object variable is a cube, if I drag it out and I searched, for example, you can see I can now access that variable using our selected object. And this would give us whether or not our example variable is true or false on the cube that we have selected in the level. Now if we went back to our trigger and change the variable type for a selected object from cube to actor. Now if we compile, you can see the connections gone red. Now, that's because if we drag out from our selected object and search, for example, again, we can no longer find that variable because that variable only exists in our Coupa blueprint, not in the actor. And because this is an act of reference, it won't find variables that exist only in our cube. It will only find code and variables that exist in the actor. Now there are ways that we can access our cubes, variables, and functions from an act of variable type. But that would require casting, which we're going to go into in a future lesson. For now, I just want to cover some more commonly used nodes with object variable types. We've already been using quite a few of these nodes in previous lessons, in this lesson. So we've got things like the SAT ACT or location, SAT ACT or rotation that and set actor transform nodes. We've been getting our actor location with the great actor location node. There's also the get's actor rotation, which does the same thing, but it gets our actors rotation in the world and returns a rotator variable type. Next we have the Destroy Actor node. So if we delete our rotate here and drag out and search for Destroy Actor. Now, when this node is run, our actor will be destroyed. And we can use this with any apps or type in our level, and it will remove that actor from the level. Now another commonly used node is the is valid node. So if we take our, if we delete our get actor, note him. And I'm going to drag out and search for is valid. In C, we've got two options. We're going to use the bottom one for now. This gives us a note that checks is our selected object to actually set to anything. So if we go to the showcase level here currently are selected objects, sector or cube. But if I clear this is now set to none. None of the cubes will be affected when our character and over up. And if we hit Play and I run into the cube and then run out and I exit Play. You can see that I've got some errors now. Now that's because our trigger code is basically telling our selected object which isn't set to anything to change its location. And that's what's giving us these arrows. So what the is valid node allows us to do is check is are selected object actually set to something? If it is, then we'll run is valid. And if not, we'll run is not valid. So if we take these nodes now, I'll just copy and paste them. Connect them up to the bottom here. And we'll hit play. Now when we run into the box, even though we've got nothing selected, we won't get any errors. Now, as you can see, because that is valid, node is now stopping the code from running and giving us arrows. The other is valid node works in the same way. So if we search for it, it's valid. You can see this is a function and it basically does exactly the same thing. It just gives us a Boolean, so true or false value instead of this node with the outputs. So we could use this with a branch node for example. Lastly, I just want to cover how we can set object variables. So we can just drag them into our event graph, select the option here. And using the set node we can drag out from our object input. And because we're using an actor node, we can connect this up to any other actor variable pen. So you can see we can plug this into the other actor pin here or the output pin on our car snow just fine. But if we create another type of objects, say a character. So I'll just call this character, and I will set its type to character as well. So character and then object reference. And then we'll compile. If we drag in our character and create a set node. You can see if I drag out from the input, I can't plug it in to the output of our actor begin overlap. And that's because this is an actor output. Now all actors are not characters. So our actor can't connect to the input of a character set node. But if we drag out from our input, you can see I can plug this into our third person cost node. Again, we will be doing separate lesson on costs. But essentially, this node is taking an actor input and it's checking, is this a character? If it is, then we can output a character variable type. And we can use this then to set our character variable because both of these pins are now a character type. Now that's it for this lesson. Hopefully you now have a slightly better understanding of how object variables work in the engine. 11. Variables (Arrays & Loops): Hey everyone. In this lesson we're going to be taking a look at array variables and loops. So to start with, we're going to create a new variable. So we'll just do that by clicking the new variable button. And I'm going to call this example name array. We'll set the type to name over in the Details panel, in the variable type, you can see we've got this little button over here. And here is where we can set what type of variable is. So currently it's a single variable. That's what we've been working with so far. But next we're going to select the array option. So do that and we'll hit Compile. And you can see that it's got a different icon now in the type that indicates that it's an array, you can see that my default value as now this different looking option here. Now an array is basically a way of having one variable that can store multiple values of that same variable type. Our name variable array here can store multiple named values just in one variable in our default values. If I click this little plus a few times in C, That's given me free entries here. Now, on the right-hand side we have our variable. So because this has a name variable, this is a name value. So I can enter names in here so I can put it say James, bill. And well, for example, now these actors normal named variables. If I was to quickly create another variable which I'll just do now, I'll call this example float array. I'm going to change the type here to float. And it's already set up as an array. But if yours isn't, you can just click the array option here. You see it now I've got a float and it's got that same icon to indicate it's an array. And when I compile in C, that looks the same here and my default value, but if I click the Plus, you can see that now on the right-hand side, instead of the names, we have float values instead. Because this is an array of floats instead of an array of names. And on the left-hand side you can see that we've got these index values. Now this is essentially how we can access these variables, which we'll be using later on. But basically these are the row that this variable is stored on. So for example, or James, name value is stored at index 0 or Bill value is stored at index one, and I will value is stored at index two. Now we can move around these values using this little indicator on the side here that allows us to reshuffle these. So I can move, say well to number two. Number one, you can do that with other variable types as well. So if I just set this to 12 and see if I drag those, I can reorder them. I want to remove any of these. I can click the little down arrow, select Delete. I can also duplicate them. Or if I click the little trash can here you can see it just deletes all your entries. And that's just the basic controls for setting your default values for an array. Next, I want to show you how we can actually access these variables in our code. So if I drag in my example name array and I can just select the node like we usually do with our variables. You can see that I've got a different looking variable. Now, I can't drag out and use this as a normal name variable because right now this output, any one of our values. To get one of those values we're going to drag out, I'm going to search for GET. We're going to use gets a copy. And that gives us this node here. Now as you can see, we've got an input for an integer and an output for a normal name variable. And if I drag out from this, I could use any of my normal name variable nodes. So I could do for example, the equals node. You can see that it gives me the equals note that we've looked at before. Just like a normal name variable. The reason that is is because this essentially does. It takes our array, gets the index 0 and then outputs its value. So for example, if I was to run these nodes, the output of our get node would be, well, because that's our index 0. If I was to change this to say too, the output of this node would now be bell. The same thing works with our float array. So if I get my example float array, and I drag out from that and I search for or get in C, gets a copy. And you can see we've got this green version now. We've got an input for our index and we've got an output which is just a normal float value that we can use a normal float value. So if I do say Add Node, you see I can use an add know just fine with that, because this is now a single variable instead of an array. And this is the same for all types of arrays. So we could create an array of transforms, rotators, vectors, integers, and the process would be exactly the same. We could set our default values. We could use the get node and then we just add an index that we want to access, and it will output a normal single version of the arrays type. It. Now I'm just going to go through a few of the commonly used nodes of our array. So we've used the gap note here, but there's also remove nodes. So if I drag out from my name example where and I search for remove, we can use remove index. And essentially when this is run, it will remove whatever index we input here. So currently this is 0. So if we were to run this node, our index at 0, which is currently well would be removed. Now, something to keep in mind with erasers when you remove an index. So if we were to remove index 0, I can do this. Now. You can see that all of the other indexes move up one. So now James is at 0 and Bill is at one, whereas previously they were. James was one and Bill was two. So this node is useful when we know which index we want to remove, but it's also another remove note that we can use if we drag out and we search for remove, we can do remove item. Now this allows us to tell it, give us a name value and have it removed that value if it exists in our array. So for example, if I wanted to remove bill from our array, but maybe I didn't know what index bill was app. I could just have Bill be the input. Then this node would check our array, check for the bill value. And if that bill value is in the array, it would then remove that value. And the output would just basically be true if the value was removed and false if it couldn't find that value in the array. And those are exactly the same for our float notes. If I quickly show you, we can do remove index and you can see that works exactly the same, allows us to remove an entry from our array output index. Or we could do remove item. And that gives us a float input to search our array for and then remove. Now we're going to look at how we can add values to our arrays using our code. So we'll remove this node for now. We will drag out from our example name, array will search for Add. Now, there's a couple of options here. We'll choose the top 1 first. Now, the Add Node essentially just adds the value that we set here to our array. Now because this is a name array, this value as a name. But if I was to drag out from my float array here and search for ad, you can see that that value is now a float because we're adding a float value to a float array. This ad note will essentially add our value at the first available index. So in our name array, that would be index two because 01 are taken. So if we were to say put this to Bob, it would add a bog value to index two. And it would output that index using this integer pen on the output. Now we've got the other ad note, the ADD unique. And this works similarly, but what this will do is it first checks our array to see if it has or if it already has an entry for the value we set. So if we add Bob again, when this node is run, it would first check our array. It would see that bulb is not a value that it currently has. It would add it at the first available Windex, just like our normal add node, then it would output that index using the integer pen hit. If Bob was already in our array, it wouldn't add a new bulb value, whereas the Add Node would just add a second bulb value. Now, next we might want to be able to change a value instead of adding or removing one. Say we wanted to change index one from Bill to Bob for example. Well to do that we would use a set M node. So if we drag out and we will set L, You can see set array. And that allows us to specify an index that we want to change and the value we want to change it to. So if I was wanting to change, say Bill, I could set this index to one because bills in index one. And I can set the new value. So Bob for example. So now when this node is run, it would change index one's value. So the bill indexer to Bob. And you can see that we've got a size to fit option here. Now this basically creates new entries if we're trying to set an index that isn't currently exist yet. So for example, if I was to set this to say four, we only have 01, so we only have two entries. What this would do if it was run would create a index 23 and then a four. And it would set index four to Bob. But the two indexes it created to get to number four would just be empty values. Now, there's a couple of other important notes that we can use with arrays. So we can drag out from our array and search for contains and use the contains item. And this allows us to just check does our array contains a particular value if it does return true and if not return false. So if we were to set this to say Bob, it would check our array. Does it currently contain the value Bob? It doesn't. So R contains node would return false. But if it did contain that value, if we were to add it, when this node was run, it would return true. We can use the find node. So if we drag out and search for find, find item Node, you can see here we can enter a value and then it will search our array for us. And if it does, if that value does exist in our array, it will give us the index that that value is currently up. For example, if I was to set this to bill, it would search our array for us when this node is run, and it would return that bill is at index one and that value here, the integer value would be one. Another useful node that can be used with arrays is the clear node. So if we drag out and search for clear. This when it's run, will completely kill it or array. So it'll be essentially emptying our array of all of its entries. So those are some of the more commonly used nodes with arrays. But if you do want to find any of the other nodes, you can drag out and search for array. You can find lots of different nodes here that will allow you to change and get values from your array variables. One other note that you might find useful as the length for node. So if we drag out and search for length, you can see we've got a node called length, and this will just count how many entries we have in our array and output how many we have. So if I was to add, say, three length node would be free because we have three entries in our array. Now we're going to move on to loops. So I'm just going to delete these nodes for now, and we'll just start with our name array. So if I drag out and search for loop in C that we've got for each loop that, that's what we're gonna be taking a look out for the moment. So we'll create that. Now essentially how this node works is it takes in and execute. And we'll run the loop body, however many entries we have in our array. So currently we have free. So our loop body would run three times. And the way I can show you this as if we drag out and we search for print string. And I'll add a big game play here. Now we have three entries in our name array at the moment. So when we hit play, we will see Hello print three times. So hit Play, you can see a lowest run three times. If we head back to our code and you see that we also have a complete pen. So once this loop body has finished running the number of times that we have values in our array. It will then run the complete pen so I can add another print string here. Let me just set this to say Done. And now what we'd see Hello print three times and then dumped would run like that. Now, if we x out of play and head back to our character blueprint, we've also got an array element and an array index. Now, these will be the values of from our array that our loop body will be running for. So for example, the first time this runs, the first time I loop body ones, sorry, the index will be 0 and the array element will be whatever our value is. So currently these are all set to none. But if I was to quickly replace these, I'll just say this is Bill Bob james. Now, the first time I loop body would run the value, the array element value would be bill and the array index would be 0. And then the second time that rare element would be Bob and the array index would be one, and so on. Now, what basically decides when the loop body is run is when it hits a node that doesn't have an output. So for us that's just going to print string whatever value we put here. And then that loop body is done and it will move on to the next one. Now if it's on the last loop body, so if it was looping, say for index to the array element was James, it would hit the end of this C. There's no more nodes to run. And because we're at the last index, it will then run completed, which is now are done print screen. So if I plug in the array element here into our print string, and I'll move these nodes. If we compile and hit play, we should see our names that we've got entertainer print out on the screen. So if we do that in C that those are printing out and then we have the W1 value being printed once the arrays complete. So that's the basics of how a loop node works, but we do have a few other types. So if we head back to our character now and we'll delete this for each loop. We'll drag out and we'll search for loop again. Now we're going to try the for-each loop with break. Now this works very similar to the last node, but it gives us an extra input that we can see here called break. And that allows us to stop our loop body running at a particular point. So for example, if we wanted to run our loop body until we got to the bob Name and then we wanted to cancel our loop body. We could do that. So if we make a little bit more space here, we can drag out from our array element to an equal snowed. We could say if our array element is equal to, I think it was Bob. Bob will say Bob. We want to check a branch node. And we want to cancel while loop if the value is Bob. So we can do that. We can drag from True and connect that up to the break input here. And if we double-click on the white line, we can create these little nodes that help us organize our code a little bit better. So I'll just do that like this. So now what will happen is when our loop runs, will check is the array element Bob. If it is, then we want to stop our loop running. So what will this cause us to do is run Bill and Bob will print on a string. But James won't, because we stopped our loop and completed we'll have run instead. We can try this out. I can hit Play. You can see Bill and Bob are running and then it runs done because our james value isn't being run anymore. If we were to change this name to say Bill, now, we would expect it to only run the bill name because once it gets to bill, it would cancel our loop. So we can try this now. And you see Bill, and then it's just canceling our loop and done is being run instead of the rest of our loop completing. We could also do this with our index if we drag out from our index and we do equals, instead of using the values, we can just use the index instead. So say I wanted to stop our loop index one, I can do that. I could just set this to one, plug this into our brunch and compile and hit Play. You can see we get that same result Bill and Bob are printing. And then the loops finishing because we've canceled the loop and then complete it as being wrong. Now, there's one other loop type that we can take a look at. So I'm just going to delete these texts. We don't need those anymore. But if we drag out, we can search for loop again. And there's the reverse for each loop. And this works the same as the first loop node we worked out. But instead of looping from the beginning to the end, it would loop from the end to the beginning and everything else is the same with this node. There are also loop nodes that don't use an array. So if we delete this for now and I just searched for loop, I'll scroll down and you'll see we've got four loop. Now if I click this, you see that instead of an array input, we've got a first index and the last index. This basically just tells a loop how many times is it going to run? So if I was to leave our first index at 0, but set the last index to say for this loop would run five times because it would run once for 0 and then again until it gets up to four. And as it ran through each loop body, the index would increase by one. We also have that same node but with a break if we wanted that, we could do a for-loop with break. And that again works similarly to our break node. It's just that instead of an array input, we can set again an index and the last index so far as to set this to 04, it would run five times. But during our loop body, we could cancel this loop by running the break input like we just did with the loop with our array. Lastly, I just wanted to show you how we can set a race so we can set them like normal values. So if we drag in, we can choose the set example name array. You can see that just gives us a normal set node and we can set this to be a number arrays values so far as to quickly create another name array. And we set this to name and change its type to array. We could take that and we can plug that into our example name array just like we can with normal variables. And this would just take our current, or sorry, It would take our name arrays values and it would set them to the example name array. So it would completely wipe our name array and then set the values to exactly the same as our name array. This is the same for our float array as well. And then any other type of array that you create, we can set those just fine. And we can take another array value. We could set that to that as well as long as they're the same type, like we've got our float plugged into our float array, name plugged into our name array. The same goes for all the nodes that I've been using. So our loop arrays, if I quickly show you, we can take our example float array, I can drag out and I can search for loop. And you see we've got those same nodes for I create a new loop node. We've got that array element, but instead of a name, it's just a float value because this is an array of float values. But our index stays the same because it's always going to have an index for each entry in our array. We can also make a race for our actor or objects references. So if I do that quickly, just call this the actors array. You can see that if I change the type to actor, we go to our actor object reference. You can see that we now have an array of actors. And this works again, the same as we've been using our name and float arrays. We could loop through an array of actors. And that will give us an actor output and an index that that actor is app in our array. Now the engine has some nodes built-in that actually output arrays. So an example of this would be the overlapping actors. And this essentially gets the actors that are overlapping our current blueprints. So I'm in the ThirdPersonCharacter. This would get or any app to as overlapping our character, outputs them as an array. We could use this just like we've been using our array variables. So I could, for example, loop through all of the actors that are currently overlapping my character. And we could do any sort of check we wanted to, we could say, maybe destroy them. If we wanted to, we could destroy those actors that are overlapping our character. And we can use this array element just like a normal variable, like we did in our previous lesson with the actor type, we can use this to say get their locations. Or we could use it to set their locations. Just like a normal act of variable. Of course, we don't have to use a loop node to do that either. We could use the get node and this will just get us the first index in the array of actors that are overlapping our character. If we wanted to get through, get say the second or the third, we could change this input value. And then we could use our get node to plug into any of these nodes that we can use with active variables. So that's it for this lesson, and that's it for the variables section of the course. In our next lesson, we're gonna be taking a look at functions and how they work and how we can create new ones. 12. Basics (Functions): Hey everyone. In this lesson we're gonna be learning about functions, how they're used and what they're used for. Functions are self-contained pieces of code that we can modify and reuse really easily. So to start with, in my third-person character here, I'm just going to create a new function. And we can do that by clicking the new function button here. Or we can go to the Add button and select new function that's going to create a new function for us. I'm going to call mine example. You can see that it's also opened up a new event graph for us with an input. And it's got the name of our function here. Now in here is where we will be coding our function if you ever need to get to a function's code. So you're in the Event Graph and you want to get your function's code, you can always just double-click the function name and it'll take you straight to your function. Now as you can see, we've got an input node and this will run whenever our function is run. If we go to the Event Graph and we drag out our example function, you can see that it's given us a new node called example. Now, whenever this input execution pin has run, the code inside our function will be executed. So as a quick example, if I add a print string to my example function here, in our event graph, I'm just going to create a begin playing node. And I connect this up to my example function. Now when the game starts, our example function will run, and that will run the code inside our example, which is this print string. So I'm just going to compile hit Play. You can see that our print string is running. So to show you how this could be useful, we'll exit out of playing, go back to ThirdPersonCharacter and we'll create a new function and we'll call this increase health. And we'll also create a new variable, and we'll call this current health. If yours is an integer, you can just click this and change it to an integer and we'll compile. Now, you'd think if we wanted to increase the health, we would go to our Event Graph, were dragged out from our current health to get health. And we would use an add node, add the mountain that we want to add to say one. And then we would then set the current health. But the problem with this is every time you want to change our health and our code, we'd have to write all these notes out. What functions allow us to do is basically take this code and put it inside a function. And instead of having to write this code out, we can just drag one function into the Event Graph or another function and have that code run. So if we take this code, we'll just cut it and go back to our increased health function. Will paste this in and connected up. Now currently, if we run the increase how function, all it's gonna do is add one health to our current health, which isn't particularly useful. We wanna be able to choose how much health is added to our current health, and we can't do that. So if we select our input node here, you can see over in the Details panel we have inputs and outputs. Now we can add new inputs by clicking this little button over here. And that'll add a new variable input. You can see that we've got an input here. And if we go to the Event Graph and dragging our increase how function, you can see that that variable is also available here as well. Now, we can rename this by going back to our function, selecting the input and we'll change it to mount. We can also change the variable type over here. So minus gone to integer by default. But you can change it to whatever variable you like. We'll use integer for now because that's what our health variable is. And we can drag out from our amount and plug that into the plus node here. So now what will happen is when our increase health function is run, it will take whatever the amount is plus that to our current health and set the current health. Now, I'll drag out from here and add a print string just so we can say if this is working, we drag out from the set node and plug it into the print string node here. Now, in our Event Graph, we want to run our increase health, say when I press a button, so I'll right-click and search for input event. Say why. We'll scroll through and find the y input of them. This will just run whenever I press Y on my keyboard. If I plug this into increase how fast I can set the amount. So I'm going to set to say five. So now when we compile and we hit play, every time I press Y, you can see that my current health increases because it's increasing it by five every time I press Y. Now we can also add outputs to our function. So if we go back and exit the play, we can go back to our increase health function here. If we select the input node, we can add new output. So I'm going to click the new output button here and you see it's created a new node for us now. And this is what we run when we want to output something from our function. So if I plug this into the anterior after I print string in C that I can give it a name. So I'll just put current health. And we'll take whatever our current Health value is and output that. If we compile and go back to our event graph, you can see that now our node on the event graph has an output called current health. And this output, whatever values we plug into it from our function. So at the moment, I'm just outputting my current health value. So we can access that in the event graph. Now we can also use functions inside of a functions. So if we go to our increase health function here, and in here, we, maybe we wanted to play a sound every time our health increased, we could create a new function that plays a sound at our characters location that we could also use another places if we want it to. So for example, we'll create a new function. We'll just call this play sound. Play sound player. Location. In here, we can drag out from our input and use the plates sound at location node will drag out from location and do get actor location. This will play a sound that we set at the current player's location. Now, we can add a new input for our sounds so we can choose which sound will play. A quicker way. We can do this as if we drag out from our sound input here and drag this to the input node, if I let go, you can see it actually just adds a new sound input for us and names that sound. If we want to rename it, we can, we just do that in the inputs here. And now, when we compile, if we go back to what increase, how function, we can now drag that new function we just created into our increased function. We can use this like we can in the Event Graph. So if I connect this up, now we can say sound because we added the sound input to our function. And whenever our increase how function runs and run the same code increasing our health by the amount. It will print string the current amount, and then it will run the code inside our play sound at location using the sound we set. Currently, I haven't set a sound. And then once that sounds played and this function is finished, it will then continue and return our current Health value in our Event Graph. And of course, the play sound at play location is just a function like our increase health. So if we wanted to, we could use it in the event graph as well and other places or inside of a functions. Now one of the best things about functions is they're reusable. So I've got my increase health function being run here on the y input. But I could also use the increase how function in other parts of my code if I wanted to, I can have as many as I like. And when everyone gets run, it will run the code as you would expect it to. Whenever we modify anything inside our increased cell function. So say we wanted to make a change in here or if there was a bug or something like that, we could make a change in one place inside or increase how function. And that will affect all of the places that we've used are increased health function node. Functions also have another feature called local variables. So if we open up the heart increase how function here you can see down in the bottom of the My Blueprint panel, we've got the local variables. Now a local variable operates pretty much the same as a normal variable, is just that. It only exists inside our function. So we can't access a local variable in the event graph from our increased health function, we can only access them inside our increased function. Another thing of local variables is once this execution or once our function is finished, variable will be reset to its default value. So as an example, if I create a new variable, hip and cool this example. And this is just a Boolean. So if we do a get node here, and we'll also create a print string. Now, when we run this print string node, I'm going to plug in my example to the string. It'll print out either true or false depending on what our current example value is. By default, it's set to false. Now, after that, if I set it to true, you'd expect the next time we run this code it to return true because we're setting it to true after we print string. But it will always return false as you can see here. Because every time our function has finished, that variable will be reset to its default value, which is false. Local variables are a great way to just temporarily store information inside your function without having to create new variables that can quickly add up if you've got a lot of functions going on. There were also quite good for organizing your function. So say you had a bit more code going on and you wanted to store variables just to keep things tidy. You could do that as well. Another useful thing you can use to keep your functions tidy as we have our inputs, say, for example, our MT input here. And that wire is going into our ad note. Now, maybe in the future you have a function that has lots of inputs. You'd have wires going off all over the place and it wouldn't look very tidy. So what you can do instead is you can right-click and such forget amount. You can see I've got access to the amount variable, but I don't have a local variable called amount. There's no normal variable called amount. This is basically just a shortcut to this amount output here. So instead of having the wire plugged in from our input of them, we can just drag this in here and we can get that value. And all that's doing is essentially just cutting out the wire and accessing that amount variable, kind of a shortcut. Now, functions do have some limitations. So for example, we can't use latent nodes inside a function. Now we haven't covered Latent notes yet, but we will in a future lesson. But just as a quick rundown, if we right-click and the event graph here and we search for today, we can create a delay node. Now, a latent node will have a little clock icon in the top right-hand corner. And basically what a delay node does is it gets an input and then whatever our duration is, it wait that amount of time before running the output. So it just allows us to hold up code. So for example, if I was plugging my play note here, and I'll just set this to say three. And then I plugged my increase health in here. It would begin play, would run, a delay node would then get executed, and it would wait three seconds, and then it would run the completed output. Now, because this is a latent node, we can't use it inside the function. So if I go to my increase health, fair, and I drag out and I searched for delay. You can see that that delay node isn't coming up because it's latent and we cannot use those inside the function. Next, we're gonna look at pure and impure functions. So if we go back to our event graph here, and I create a new increase how function. And over in the Details panel you can see we can change it to a pure function. So if I take this on, you can see this will also affect all of the other increase how functions, it changes it into this function. Now, the way these work is for every output connected to our output pins, this function will run. So as an example, if I take my beginning Plano tip and I'm just going to use a set current health. And we'll connect up to here, will increase the health by say one. And we'll connect this up to current health. So say I hope with 0 it would increase it by one and then output a new current health. So this would be one. And if I was to copy and paste this set node again, and we'll connect this to here. This node would be one, but then this node would run again for this set node, and this node would actually set it to two, and then so on and so forth. For every connection, we'd run this node again and increase I hope value. Whereas an impure function, if we select our function again and click on tech P0, if we connect this backup to begin playing out, this will always return the same output had when it ran. So when the game starts will increase our health from 0 to one. We'll set that value here. This value will be set to one. And then this one will also be set to one because it will only run once when it gets executed. And then it stores the values of its output in these pins. And then every connection we have for that will be the same until we run this function again. That's just something to remember when you're working with pure functions, is however many connections you have connected to that function is how many times it will run. If you have any sort of math going on or anything like increasing health, every time you drag out and set something, it will run again. So your value, your output values may be different each time it's run. Next, we're going to take a look at overriding functions. Now, if you haven't seen it already, I recommend going and taking a look. We've got a variable's lesson on actors and objects. In that lesson, I go into inheritance and explain a little bit about that. But essentially, any object that exists in the world is an actor, including our character. But then we have different types of actors like our character here. And we can access the act of functions or the functions that exist inside the actor through this override option here on the functions tab. So if we click that, you can see that we've got on the right-hand side it says actor. Now these are functions we can access that exist on the actor. And we have them because we're a character, but we're also an actor. If you go down a little bit more, you can see that we've got some that say character. Now we have access to these functions because our third-person character is a character. And if we go down even further, you can see that we've got **** ones as well. And we have these because our character is also a ****. And whenever we select one of these functions here, we basically tell the engine, we don't want you to run the code that exists in, say, the character blueprint. We want to take this function over and run our own code. So for example, we could click, can jump. And you see that we've now taken over that function from the character class. We can write our own code and have now not all functions will look like this, where we have a separate editor if we create or if we override another function, say the destroyed, that will actually create what looks like an event inside our event graph. And the reason it does that is just because our destroyed function doesn't have any outputs, but can jump does so it has an output here. And whatever we returned here will basically be checked whenever we try to jump. So currently if I tried to jump now, I wouldn't be able to because we've taken over the function and we're just telling it we can't jump with set this to false. So we could have our own code in here that controls whether or not we can jump, for example. Now, you may be wondering if we can override these functions. Can we actually go and find where these functions are and look inside and see what's happening like we can with the functions we've created. Unfortunately, these are C plus plus classes. Actor, character important are actually created in C plus plus and that built into the engine. There's no blueprint we can go to. We can first-person character, for example, and look at these functions. You can do it in C plus plus if you'd like to, but that's a little bit more advanced. Lastly, I just want to show you how you can call functions from one blueprint inside another. So if we go to our third person map here, I'll just create a new blueprint class quickly. There'll be an actor, call it trigger, will drag it into the level here. And I'll open that blueprint up. We'll add a new component and we'll call this box. We want the box collision and I'm just going to move it up. And we're also in the details search for hidden in Nin game. I'm going to untick this just so I can see it. And then we'll get rid of that search and we'll scroll down to the bottom. We'll do say on actually, we can go to Event Graph, which create new function. Sorry, event would do, begin to overlap. Now we've used this node before, if you remember in our previous lessons. But essentially this event will run whenever something overlaps our trigger and it will give us a reference to the actor that overlapped us. So we can drag out from this. And I'm just gonna do a cost to ThirdPersonCharacter. Now if you remember essentially what cost does is it checks, is this input object a character? If it is, we'll run the top x cube in here and it will give us access to that character is variable. Now again, in the future there will be a casting lesson, but this is just a quick example. If you remember, we can access variables using this. So we did this with our cubes. We can also access functions. So if I drag out because I'm casting to the ThirdPersonCharacter Blueprint and that's what we've been working in. If I drag it out and I search for increase health, you see I can get that increase how function. And if you remember, we set it to, if we head back to our characteristic, we set our increase our function to PO. So if I untick this and make it impure, need to disconnect this one because it will give us wanting otherwise. You can see that it's actually updated here. And using that we can access the functions that exist in our third-person character in another blueprint. This function will run as if we just run it in our third-person character. But instead we can actually now run that whenever our, say our character overlap. So I'll trigger, so we could increase its health by say five. Now, when we hit play and I run over that box, you can see that it's now printing out that increased health value. That's gonna be it for this lesson. Hopefully you understand a little bit more about functions now and then our next lesson, we're going to take a look at macros. 13. Basics (Macros): Hey everyone, In this lesson we're gonna be looking at macros. These are similar to functions in that they're self-contained pieces of code that we can reuse around our blueprint. We'll also be learning about when you might want to use a macro instead of using a function as well. So let's get started. We'll create a new macro. We can do that in the my blueprints panel here. You can either click the new macro button here or go to the drop-down and select macro. If we click that, we can call our new macro example. You can see that it's also opened up a new editor for us, like it does with a function. And we've got an input and an output snowed. Now, unlike a function, you can see that we don't actually have any inputs and our macro, and that's because we need to add them ourselves. So over in the Details panel here we can click the plus symbol and we can create some new inputs. Now, we can actually create execution pin inputs and outputs. So if we click the Create new output option here for the outputs, you can see now I've got an execution input and an execution output. And if we can pull this, go to the Event Graph, could actually drag this macro now into our event graph. And you can see we've got both our input and outputs and we can rename these as well, something a bit better. So rename this to say in this 12 out, just to make it a bit clearer. Now the cool thing with macros is you can actually have multiple execution inputs and outputs. So if I wanted to, I could add another execution output. I could call this a out to. And we could run some code and hair. And then depending on what that code does, we could run either one of these outputs. Just like our functions, we can also have variable inputs and outputs. So for example, I could add a new integer input and I could change the name to say amount, like we did with our function in our previous lesson. You can see that now we've got an amount input. If I head back to the Event Graph, you can see that we've got that in execution pen, and we've also got a input as well, and then both of our outputs. Now the way we use macros is very similar to the way we use functions in that we can have multiple of the same macro anywhere in our blueprint, we can use macros inside of other macros if we wanted to and if we make any changes inside the macro. So for example, if we added some code in here, it would affect all of the macros that we have created from that macro type. So all of these macros would get updated with the changes that we make inside our macro. So now we've set up our macro of a few different inputs and outputs. We can code in here just like we can in the Event Graph or in our function. So in our last video, I set up a health increase health function. I can do the same thing with macro, so we'll create a new variable, we'll call this current health. And we'll set it to integer if yours isn't already. And we'll drag that in a add node. And we'll add the amount. And we'll drag out from the output of our Add Node and we'll do set current health like this. Now, because this is a macro, we can have multiple output execution pens. So we could do a check, say, is our current health equal to say 100? If it is there, maybe we want to run a different execution pen. I use a branch node here. If it is at a 100, we'll run the top output, and if not, we'll run the bottom one. You can rename these, say max health for the top one and not max health for the bottom one. Because maybe we want it to have different code run depending on if we're Max Health or not. So if we then go back to our event graph here, you can see that both of our example note here I've updated, so they've updated the outputs. And that's because we've changed their macro. And we could run this now and increase our health value. So if I say put this to 50 and we'll add a new inputs event. And what would you use, say x, which find the x input of m. So when I press X in game will add 50 health. And then we can run different code depending on if we're Mac self or not. So I'll just use the print string because they're easy to see in game. So we'll call max health and we'll copy and paste. This will run max like that. So we'll component. So now we can hit play and see if this works. If I press X, you can see currently not max out. If I press it again, we now are turning max health. So that's just an example of how we can use macros to run different code in our blueprints depending on a value, for example, now the engine actually includes a lot of built-in macros. So for example, r is valid node if we right-click and such what is valid, and we scroll down to the is valid node. You might recognize this from one of our previous lessons. This is just a macro and it's built into the engine. So if we double-click it, it actually takes us to a blueprint called standard macros. And this comes with the engine and you can see that this is just a macro, just like our example macro. It has the same sort of layout and we can see the inputs as well. So if we go to standard macros, see over here the inputs. So it's just got an execution pin. Input and an object pin and then to execution outputs. And all this is doing is using the valid function that's built into the engine. Checks. Is the input object valid and then uses a branch to either run is valid or it's not valid. There are other macros that come with the engine that you can check out. They're all in these categories here. So if you want to, you can look through those and see how they work. But essentially macros are really useful for smaller, self-contained pieces of code that you can reuse a lot on your project. So for example, maybe you wanted to check, is the character dead? So instead of getting the health checking, is this less than or, is this less than or equal to 0? And then running an F node, you could actually just take all this code, cut it, and put it into your own macros so you could have is dead. We could chuck this in here. And if we actually drag from our execution pen to the input, and we can do the same with the outputs. So we can do like this. It just makes it a bit quicker than having to add them all in here. So now we've got a little macro here that we can use to check is our character dead. So we can just drag that in. And instead of having to add all those nodes. And every time we want to check is the character dead, we can just drag it in one little macro and it does that all for us. This is really where their strength is with macros, you can use them a lot. They can control which code is being run. And they're just handy little tools, especially for things like checking values, like we're doing here. Another benefit of macro says you can use latent nodes in them. So if you remember from our previous lesson, you can't use a delay node inside a function, but you can use them inside macros. So if I wanted to, I could add a delay node and here, so quite a delay. You can see I can add that in just fine. I can compile it. And if we go to our event graph, you can see now is that macro is latent because it's got the little clock there. And that's because inside it, we've added this delay node. And the reason for this is macros run as if they were code in the Event Graph. But instead they just compacted down into OneNote that we can reuse and edit really easily. They also don't reset functions do every time we run them. So they're much more similar to code that we have in the Event Graph rather than code that you have in a function. Now, some things you can't do with macros is you can't call them from other blueprints. So if you remember in our previous lesson, I create a trigger and we can do that again. If we create a new blueprint class, we'll sell it to an accent and I'll call it trigger, will open that up. And I'll create a new box collision component. And we just move this up a little bit and we'll set it to hidden in game will take this off so we can just see it. And in here we'll create a begin overlap node. If you remember, this just runs whenever something overlaps our trigger and then it'll give us the actor that overlapped it. So drag out from here and use the Cast to ThirdPersonCharacter. And this will take our actor output that overlapped or trigger. And it will check, is it a ThirdPersonCharacter for is, then it gives us access to that fire a variable and we'll run the successful pin here at the top. So if you remember, we can call functions via this. But go back to my character here and I'll just create a function. We'll call this say increase health. And we'll just compile. I won't add any code and we go back to our trigger. If I drag out, I can or I can access that function so I can go increase health. You can see I can call that function from my character. But if you remember, we've got r is dead macro. If I drag out and I search for is dead, I can't find that macro because it's not accessible from my Character Blueprint. I can only use it within my Character Blueprint. Lastly, if you remember from our previous lesson, we can override functions from our parent blueprints. For example, because this is a third-person character blueprint, that's a child of the character. I can override functions that exist in the Character Blueprint. But you can't do this with macros. Macros exist only in our blueprint hair. I can't override and take control of any of the macros from say, the character blueprint or the active blueprint for example. So just to summarize, macros are really useful tools that you can build that can just make your life a little bit easier. So you don't have to recode stuff all the time. And you can modify them just in one place and it will affect all of the places that macro is used. They can also control which code is being run really easily because we can have multiple execution inputs and outputs. 14. Basics (Structs & Enums): Hey everyone. In this lesson we're gonna be taking a look at structures and enums. So let's get started. Structures, or sometimes referred to as structs, are a way of storing multiple different types of variables all inside one variable. So to give you an example, I'm just going to create a new variable. I'm going to call it example straw. And we're going to set the variable type to a structure that actually comes built-in with the engine. If you want to find the other engine structs that come with it, you can just go down to the structure category. And here you can see all of the structs you used throughout the engine. Chances are you won't be going in here very often. Because these are just used mostly for engine functions and things like that. But we're going to use one as an example. So I'm going to create, or I'm going to set our variable type two named float. And we'll set our variable two names float, and then we'll compile. Now that we've compiled, you can see that our default value includes a float variable and a name variable that we can both individually if we wanted to. And they operate the same way you'd expect a name or a float variable to work. Now, this struct only includes two variables, a float and a name, but you can get struck with many more variables and different variable types as well. Now, we can get and set stroke sustained way we can with any other variable types. So if we drag in our example struct here you can see we can get it all. We can create a set node and it gives us these nodes that we've seen before with other variable types. Now, the cool thing about structures we can access these variables are stored in it very easily. We can just drag out from our get node and we can create a break node. Now because I'm using named float, it says break named float. But if we were using a different structure with a different name, it would say break and then that structure's name instead. So it will create the Blake break named float node. And you can see here that we can now access or float variable as well as our name variable. And these are just ordinary variable pins. Now if we wanted to, we could drag out from our float and we could create an add node, for example, or any other float Related node. And we could do the same thing of our name, variable output as well. If we had say, a float variable, we could set that float variable using this pen as well. We can also get the pins hair in a different way if we get enough, again, note it, and we right-click on the output pin, we can select the Split Struct Pin option here. You can see that now we can directly get the float value and our name value from the example struct variable. And if we want to recombine them, so it goes back to our normal default get node here, we can right-click the output pins and select recombine Struct Pin. You can see that it now goes back to normal. I will say however, with my experience in the engine using this Split Struct Pin option, instead of using the break node, this is a little bit more prone to breaking with engine upgrades and things like that. So personally I prefer to use the break nodes, but It's a personal preference. You can use the split pins if you want to. So now we know how to get information from our strokes get node. We want to be able to set information to our strokes, which we can do. So if we take our set note here and drag out from the input pin, will search for make. You can see that we've got an option for make named flow. Now again, if we were using a different type of struct, it would say Make and then that strokes name. So we'll create this note here. You can see that we've now got a float input and a name input. And this allows us to set off flow or are named variables in our structure. Now the one problem with this is say we only want it to change our float value and we didn't want to change our name value, we just wanted to leave that the same. This would actually overwrite our name value. So what we can do instead, if we want to just change one of the variables inside our struct, we can do is we can create a node, drag out, and search for set members. And you see we've got set members in the non struct name. So again, ours is called named float. So we'll say set members in named flow will create that node. And we get this odd-looking note here. In the Details panel. We can go down to this drop-down. Can you see that we've got a tick box for each type of variable that is inside our struct. So if I wanted to just change the float variable, we can take that on here. And you see that that's now added an input for our float. Now, when this node runs, we could set a new float variable inside our struct without affecting our name variable. Whereas with the set node, we would have to set both our float variable and our name variable. And of course, if you had a struct with more variables, those would be listed in here. You can take on multiple variables using the set members notes. So if I wanted to, I could have both of these pins here as an input as well. And we could change both of those values at the same time. This node automatically acts like a set node does. So we don't need to use a set node for these changes to apply. Just when this node gets run, it will change those values for us inside our struct. So, so far we've been using this named float struck that comes built into the engine. But we can actually create our own strokes and we can choose what variables are gonna be stored inside it. So to do that, we'll go to the content browser here. I'm just going to right-click and an empty space. Then we want to go to the blueprints pop out and we'll select structure. Now what if you name your structure is what the structure will be called and the variable types option. So I'm just going to call mine video struct like that. And we'll double-click it to open it. I'm just going to put mine up in the top here. You can see that we've now got an option where we can set our variables. So by default we've just got a Boolean variable that's called member underscore 0. We can add new variables up here by clicking the add variable button. And if we want to, we can remove variables by clicking the little trash can here to remove them. So we'll add a few variables. And you can imagine if we wanted to store information about say, an item, we could use a struct to do that and keep all of that information stored in one variable, instead of having to have hundreds of variables describing an item. So for example, maybe we wanted our item to have a name. So we would set the item name. We could call this name maybe a weight. So we will use float. We call this variable weight maybe a damaged value. So we could say an integer to damage, and then maybe a texts that we can say is the description. And we can save this. Now when we go back to our ThirdPersonCharacter, we can create a new struct. And we'll call this our video. And when we go over to the variable type, we can search for a video. And you'll see video struct. That's the name of our structure. If you called jaws something different than you will have to search for that. So we'll create this and we'll compile. So now when we go over to the default value, you can see that we've got all four of our variables that we created inside our struct with the right names and see if we can set name, a float, an integer, and a description for our struct. And just like before, we can access these with the brake note. So if we create a node, we drag out and we create a break video structure, you can see that the engine just automatically sets up for us so we can just create that node. And just like that, we've got access to our name, weight, damage, and description using our break node. Again, if we wanted to set those variables using the set members node, we can drag out, use the set members. And you see set members in video struct. And we can take on any variables we want, like we did before with our named float. But this is now our own custom struct. Now, we can also set the default values for our structure as well. So if we go back to our video strokes, you can see we've got a default values option here. So here we could just sat what the standard default values are for the video Struck type. So maybe I just want to say, say item name. We wanted the default weight to be say one and description which part? Item info here. And the damage will be ten. So these are now the default values if we save now and we go back to ThirdPersonCharacter. And I select my video struct or compile because we've made some changes to the structure, will have to compile. You can see that now it's using those default values that we set inside our struct. If we want to get back to being able to change variables, we can just click the Structure tab here and we can access those variables. Now, one other thing you can do in here is if we wanted to, we could reorder these so I could grab this little icon at the end here. We can change the order, so maybe I want the name to be third now instead of the top, we do that and we can hit Save. Go back to our character and we'll compile. See that now with our video stroke selected, that they're now in a different order. Now it's something that makes structs really powerful is that we can use them in arrays. So if you remember from our array video to set a variable to be an array, we can click this little drop-down here and select array. Now let's kinda break a few of our connections there because we can't plug an array into either one of these nodes. So I'm just going to delete those for now. But if you remember, we can drag out from an array variable and search for loop. We can select for each loop. Using this, we can now loop through our entries in our array. So I'm just going to compile here, so we've got our default values. So for example, we could use a struct to store lots of information about different items, maybe for an inventory, for example. So for example, if I create a few inputs here, you can see that now we have multiple versions of that struct stored in the array. And then we can loop through those versions of our struct using the loop node and then access their information using the array element. And then we can just use the break video strapped like they have been before. And we can access that information from our array. So that's pretty much the basics of structs. They're really useful for keeping things organized and storing big amounts of data. Like if you had an inventory full of items. You can use these to store lots of information about each item. And then we can put them inside a ray or we can use strokes just to keep things organized as well. Maybe you've got a set of variables that you've always used together. So you could store those in a struct and just access them through one variable. Next, we're going to look at unions. Now. Again, like the struct, the engine actually has built-in indium. So if you go down to the bottom, you can see the idiom category here. And there's lots of ones that come with the engine. Again, you won't really use these. They're just sort of built into the engine and use by nodes within the engine. But you can also create your own enums just like we did with our struct. Now, I'll show you how to do that. So it will compile this blueprint for now. And we'll right-click and our content browser will go to blueprints again. And here we're going to select enumeration. And we'll call this a video. Again, whatever you call this blueprint is what it will be called in the variable type option. So that's just something to keep in mind. We can open this up. You can see that it looks a little bit similar to our structure at the top, but there's some differences here, so we don't actually have any default values to start with. We'll click Add in numerator. You see that this gives us a new input here. Now all we can set a name, so we could say option one. And we'll add a couple more just so we can see it in the editor. So we'll call this option two, and we'll save this. Now, there's not really much more you can do in here. So we'll go back to our ThirdPersonCharacter. And I'm going to create a new variable. We'll call this a video. In it. I'm going to change the variable type here. I'm just going to change it to a single. And we'll click the drop-down and we're going to search for our video in you. Just like that. And we'll compile. Now you can see in the default value here we have this drop-down. You see that? Because I've got option one and option two that I sat up in my video union, that they're the options I have for my default value. Now, enums work the same as most variables we can get and set them. So if I drag out and I do a get node, you can see we can just get it like a normal variable. And we can also set it. So if I drag out and do set, you can see I've got a set node, but we can actually just manually set whichever option we want pair using the set node as well, or we can take an input if we wanted to. Now, enums are actually really useful at controlling which code is being run in your project. And the way they can do that is if we drag out from our get node, we can do a switch. You'd see switch on video. Again. If you're in humans called something different, it would say switch on and then that enums name. But ours is video indium. So we're going to create this. You can see that it's created a switch node for us and for every setting we have inside our indium, it will give us an output pin. So if we went back to our video in num here, I added a couple more options, so we'll add a couple more. I'll just set this to say test 123 and test 456. We save this. Now when we go back to our ThirdPersonCharacter, you'll probably want to compile just to make sure you get those options Update being seen. Now, we've got our two original options and it's actually added some additional ones. And using this, we can actually control which code is going to be run depending on what our enums set to. A good example of how this can be used as maybe you have items in your game and different items do different things when they use. So maybe you had consumables, medicines, things like that. You could have an option for each one of those different item types and then have different code be run depending on which item type it is. Now, we can also use a select note of them. So if we drag out, we search for select. We can actually select a variable depending on our enums value. Right now it's just grayed out because we haven't input any variable type. But if I was to create a new variable and we'll call this float, I'm just going to set it to a float. If we plug this float now into the select note, you can see that they all become floats. And this can allow us to select and output from this return value. We can select any one of these inputs depending on our Indian value. So for example, if we were to set it to option two, then whatever is connected to option two would be returned through the return value. Now, we can also do things like controlling a branch node using enums. So if I just delete these nodes for now, we can drag out and do an equals node. We can check. We can create this equals Ethereum node here. And we can check, is our immune equal to one if it's sharp options? And if it is, we can output a true value, and if not, it will put a false value. So we could create a Branch node him and control whether or not this is going to run true or false depending on our unions value. Now we can also use our indium inside our struct, so we can do that now if we wanted to, we could go back to our video struct here, add a new variable, and we'll call this say item type. We can set this to be our video immune. Just like that. Save this and maybe we wanted to change what our options were. So maybe this was food, drink, met, and weapon. So now we could use this video indium inside our struct to set what an item's type ID. So if we go back here and we get our video struct, we can say loop through our array. We can access all of the values in our structs so I could drag out, break our video struct. You can see that now we've gone past a certain number of variables. So we get this little drop-down option that we can use. And you can actually organize this further. So maybe you only need the weight value. So you could go in here and untick certain variables that only the Weight option shows. Now, just to keep things tidy because you might have a struct with lots of variables. So you can untick which ones you just don't need at that particular moment. This doesn't affect your struck in any way. It just tidies up the node. But we can also access that item type in him that we added to our struct. So if we drag out, we can use say, the equals node. We can check is this item, this particular entry in our array? Is it a food item, for example, if it is, then maybe we want to run a specific piece of code. Or if it was say, a weapon for example, we could have it run different code. As I said before, we could use that switch node. So we could run a switch on video. And now we can switch depending on what type of item this entry in our array happens to be. Now That's it for this lesson. Just as a summary, structs are a really good way of storing multiple variable types inside one variable. And then with arrays we can store lots of information that we can then really easily access. And enums are a great way of controlling which code in your projects that's being run. Or we can use them to select variables depending on the nums, fantasy. 15. Basics (Events): Hey everyone. In this lesson we're gonna be taking a look at event nodes. Now we've already been using event nodes quite a bit in our previous lessons. If you remember the beginning play note for example, that is an event or events destroyed node is also an event. These events are called from code inside the engine. Code that's built into the engine runs these events when the game starts or when the actors destroyed. Now, we can also create our own custom events that we can run whenever we want to. Do that, we can right-click. We can search for custom event. And we can use the add custom event option here to create a new event node. I'm just going to call mine example event, event like that. And you can see that now it looks like our other events, but this event is actually never going to be called right now because we haven't called it anywhere. So if I wanted my example vent to run and see the code I connect to it, like print string to run, we would need to call our example event. So to do that we can use an existing event like the beginning plane note to call it. So we could drag out and search, for example, event. And that would now call our example event when the game starts. Now we can call events in multiple places in our code. So for example, if we wanted this example event code to run when the game starts and also when our characters destroyed. We could do that as well. We could just drag out at another example event. Cool here. And now when our game starts, we'll call this event, I'm running its code. And also when this actor is destroyed, we call the event and run this code. We can also add inputs to our events. So if we select our event note here, you can see there's an inputs option. So if I click the add input button here, we can see you've got a new Boolean input. And that adds an output to our event node and also inputs to our event cool nodes. So now we can control a variable using the core nodes. So for example, maybe we wanted our boolean to be true When the beginning play runs, but false when the destroyed runs. And then we could have maybe different code run, depending on whether or not that output value was true or false. Events are also used pretty extensively in coding for multiplayer. If we select the event here, you can see that it's got some replicate settings. These are for multiplayer. Now I'm not going to be covering this in this lesson because multiplier is a huge topic and really you need to know the basics of blueprints before you get into coding for multipolar, it moving on, another thing you can do with events is called them from other blueprints like we can with our functions. So if I can pull my blueprint here, I'm going to create a new blueprint. I'm just going to use an actor and we're going to sell it to trigger. And I'll open that up. I'm just going to add a box. Collision will go to the Event Graph and we're going to create a begin overlap. Event actor begin overlap. Again. This is just an event. You can see that it says event on the node. But this is called when something overlaps are trigger actor, that gives us an output of whatever actor overlap Todd trigger will drag out from this. We will use a Cast to ThirdPersonCharacter node. And if you remember from our previous lessons, this checks is the other actor that's overlapping our trigger, a third-person character. If it is, then it gives us access to its variables, functions, and events. So if I drag out from here and I searched for example, you can see that I can call my example event. And we also have access to that variable we added. And when an actor overlaps are trigger, would check, is it a ThirdPersonCharacter? And if it is, then we'll call this example event on that ThirdPersonCharacter Blueprint. And if we double-click this event, it will actually take us to our character blueprint. And that just takes us straight to our code so we can easily find what we're running. We can also use events with timers. So if we disconnect, I begin play note here and I'll just move it up here for a bit more space. If we drag out from my Begin Play and we search for set a timer by event. You can see that we've got an option called set timer by them. And that gives us this node. Now, if you can poll, you'll get an error. Don't worry about that because we don't have an event connected up yet. So there's a couple of ways we can do this. We can drag out from our event pin here, then search for custom. And we can add a custom event like we did before. And that gives us a new event node. Or we can just right-click and search for custom and add a custom event like we did before. And we can connect it up to the event input here. Now, one thing to keep in mind is if your event has any inputs, you won't be able to connect it up to this node. So for example, if I added a Boolean here and we can pull, you can see if I drag out from my customer vent here, I can't connect it up to the input. And that's because we've got an input variable for our move this and compile again, I'll be able to connect that backup. So now the timer event allows us to run an event depending on its settings. So currently on Begin Play, we want our timer to run, say, every 1 second, so we can set the time to one and we can turn on looping if we want this event to run every single second. So we could take that on. If we were to leave this off, the beginning play wouldn't run. It would run the set time I buy them. This would wait 1 second, and it would run our event once, and then that would be it. But if we have looping ticks on, it will run it every second. Now, timers are a really good alternative to using the tick event. So if you remember, if we create the tick event, this will run every single frame that our game is rendered. And a lot of beginners tend to attach a lot of code to this just because it runs continuously. The problem with that is, most code does not need to be run every single frame and you can very easily ruin the performance of your project by doing that. So a great alternative is using timers. Say if you needed code to run every 1 second, you can connect it up like this, instead of using a technique, for example. Now we can use a timer handler to control our timer. So if we drag out from this return value here, we can create new variable using the promotes Variable option, and that will just create some new variable is type is timer handle, and I'm just going to call it timer. Now this time a variable allows us to control our timer. So say for example, we wanted to run this customer then a number of times and then stop the timer running. We can do that. So we could add, say a new variable. I'll just call this number. I'll set it to an integer. We'll get our integer and it will just check, is it equal to say, five to five? And we will do an F node. So if it's not equal to five, we want to add one to it. We'll do that, we'll get it. We'll add one and then we'll sex the number value is at five. We want to stop our timer. So what we can do is we can drag out from R or we can get our time a variable here, drag out from it and search for clip and use the clear and invalidate time I buy handle. So now, the way this code would work is when the game starts or when the character has spawned in. Our timer will run our customer then every 1 second, we'll set its timer reference to the timer handle variable. So now when our custom event runs, we check is number equal to five. If it's not, we add one to it and set it. And then the next time this runs, after a second, we check again. And then once it is at five, we then tell this timer to stop. Now, using the clear and invalidates the timer by handled node will completely stop this time. You will have to run it again to start up. But if you want to be able to resume this timer, we can actually use a different node. So we can drag out and we can search for say, pause. And we can pause the timer handle. So we can run this instead. Now, this allows us say maybe we wanted to resume the timeout again later on. We could then use the un-pause node that would resume our timer running. Now we can test this out and game. So I'm just going to delete the un-pause noted. And I'll add in a couple of prints strings just so we can see what's running. We'll plug in our number two, I print a string here, and I'll add a print string up to my pause time of code. And I will set this to time-out. So now when we hit play, this all should run when we start the game. So we can check to see our time is running every second. It's increasing our number value. Once it's five, the port, the timeout is paused. Now if you ever want to find the events that come built into the engine, you can do that if we go to our ThirdPersonCharacter Blueprint here, click on Search for event. You can see a list of all of the different events that come built into our character. Now, because this is a character, it has some custom events that other actors don't have. Like for example, the landed, this will run whenever our character land from a jump. You can also do this in normal actors like for example, our trigger. If I right-click on search for event, you can see that it doesn't have as many events as the character did, but it does have some built and events that you can use to run your code. That's it for our events lesson. We will be using events in our future lessons as well, just purely because they're pretty core part of coding and blueprints. 16. Basics (Blueprint Inheritance): Hey everyone. In this lesson we're gonna be talking a little bit about Blueprint inheritance. Now, we've talked about this a little bit before in the actors and objects vary up the video. If you haven't watched that one, I'd recommend checking that out. But essentially, blueprint inheritance allows us to create a blueprint from an existing blueprint that it then uses that existing blueprint as a parent. And what that means is our new blueprint, which has the child inherits all of the functions, variables, and code from the parent blueprint. So first I'll set up an example here. If we just create any Blueprint, I'm just going to right-click and select Blueprint Class. You can see that when we actually select one of these options here, we're actually picking a parent class. Now, we've been using the actor for the most part because that's just the most basic object that can exist in the world. So we're just going to select actor again now. And by doing that, we inherit our new blueprint here, inherits all of the functions, variables, and abilities that an actor has. Now, if we open up our new blueprint, I can show you what I mean. If we just have this into the top PEP, if we go to our variables option down here, it looks like we only have our default seen route, which comes with our actor. Director actually comes with a bunch of other variables. We just can't see them because they're inherited. The way we can turn that on this, if we go to this little cog here, we can click on Show inherited variables. And you see that now I've got a ton of categories that have just appeared. Now. These are all variables that my new blueprint or inheriting because it's a child of the actor. All of these variables were created in the actor. Now we can use these variables just like we can with variables we create ourselves. So if I go to the Event Graph here, I can drag these in, I can get them. I can't set certain ones. So for example, only relevant to owner is actually disabled. I can't set that using code, but other ones I can, for example, if we scroll down, I can have can be damaged if I drag it and you can see I can get that variable just like our normal variables. And I can also set up. And this is the same for functions. We spoke a little bit about this in the functions lesson, but when we right-click and we search for say, set to transform, this set actor transform node is just a function that exists in the actor class that we have access to because our new blueprint is a child of the actor class. Now, we can't go to the Content Browser and find the act of blueprint because it's not in here. It's actually built into the engine and all of its variables and functions are all coded in C plus plus. So now I'm going to show you how we can set up our own inheritance system, like we inherit from the actor. We could have our new blueprint, have some code in it, some functions, variables. Then we could have another new blueprint inherit from our new blueprint and have access to those variables and functions. So we'll go to the content browser here, and I'm just going to rename my blueprint. I'm just going to call it the master, will call it BP Underscore Master. Now, to create a child blueprint, there's a few ways you can do this. We can just right-click on our bp master blueprint. You can see that there's an option here called Create Child Blueprint class. If we click that, you can see it's created us any new blueprint. It's giving it the name BP master underscore child, and this is now a child blueprint of our master. If we open it up, you'll see that instead of the parent class being the actor like it is in the master blueprint or master child is parent class is BP master. Now I'm just going to go to the Content Browser and rename this to child just to, so we don't get confused here like that. Now, another way you can create child blueprints is in the Create blueprint option. So if we go to Blueprint class, you can see down here it's got all classes. And if we search for BP Underscore Master, you'll see we actually find it. It's kinda hard to see because it's highlighted there. But that says BP master. If we click on this, we can click Select. And that will also create us a child of the mask. So you can see it's created a new blueprint. If I open that up, you'll see that the parent class is also BP master. Now I'm going to go back to my content browser and just delete this new blueprint because we've already got a child that we can work with. So now if we go back to our bp master and I'm just going to delete these nodes for now. I'm going to hide show inherited variables. So now we're back to our default view. I'm going to create any variable and I'm just going to call this say, example variable will create a new function as well. I'll call this example function. Now, this variable and function are unique to our bp master. So other children of the access, say for example, our character, which is actually a child of the actor as well. It won't have access to these variables because our character isn't a child of our bp master, but our child I'm sorry. Bp Child Blueprint is a child of the BP master. So if we go to the or if we go back to our master here and compile most save that as well. Then we go back to our bp child. We go into Event Graph. We can turn on that, show inherited variables. Okay, So the drop-down, you see that we've got all of the active variables because even though the BP master is our parent, the parent of the BP master is the actor. So our child still has all of the things that actors do, still has all of its variables are other functions. But then we add in whatever our parents got as well. So you can see our example variables that we can use that as if we had created it. We can set it just fine in our child BP. We can also use that function that we created in the master. So if I just right-click and I searched for example function, you can see I can create the example function and any code that we had inside our function here would run the same as if we had called it in our Event Graph master blueprint for we can access that in our blueprint. And if you remember from our functions video, we can override functions from our parent blueprints. So if we go to override in the functions tab here, you can see that we've got all of these functions we can override from our actor. But we've also got the BP master. And you can see we've got our example function here. If I click on this, we can takeover and change what code is going to be run whenever our example function runs, we also have this extra note here, and this basically makes the code that's in the parent blueprint run. And then we could have additional code if we wanted to. We could also just delete this node and completely run our own custom code for whenever example function as RAM. Now, code that's being run in the master blueprint is also going to be run for our Child Blueprint. So it's giving you an example. I'll go to the Event Graph it and I'm just going to delete these nodes. I'll delete these ones as well. They just come with new actors that are created. So you can see our child now has no code in it. We can delete that, override some just going to select example function here, delete that. That doesn't actually delete the function. If you see, I can still access the function that just deletes are Override of it. So any custom code that we might have added to the override is now gone and we'll just use whatever our master blueprint, um, has in that function. So if I delete that, you can see we have no code at all in our child. Bp will compile and save this. Now if I go to my BP master and I'm going to create a beginning play note. And I'll add a print string to this. So just something simple which leaves us hello. So now the only code that we have in both of these blueprints is this begin play and then a print string. Now, if I go to the third person map and I drag in my BP child, and I'll just place that in there. Now remember, our child doesn't have any code in it at all. But when I hit Play, you'll see that it's printing hello, even though it has no code there. Now that's because the child will still run the code that exists in the parent. So our parents says to begin play print string. So I'll child will do the same. Now, like our functions, we can override events as well. So in my child now, if I create a new begin play of m, I won't connect to anything up to this. I would just leave it like that. I'll compile. And now when I hit play and see that No Print String happens. And that's because we've, we're telling the engine our child overrides its parents begin play node. So no longer will this run for our child anymore. We'll run our own custom code so we can add another print string and we could say this, this, this is a test. And now this will be run instead of this being run. So if we hit Play, you see this is a test. And again, if I remove that, begin playing out from my child, you'll see that it'll start printing the hello again. Now, you might be wondering what the point of Blueprint inheritance is. Why wouldn't you just have all of this code and each one of the blueprints. Well, the main reason is because it's more difficult to maintain if you had all of this code and say 20 different blueprints and there was a bug with that code. You'd have to go through and change 20 blueprints. Or if you wanted to add a new feature, again, you'd have to go through all of these 20 blueprints and change the code. Now with blueprint inheritance, you can have one master blueprint that has all of the code you need in it. And then children blueprints that then inherit that code. And if maybe one of the child blueprints needed to do something special, but most of the code would still need to be the same. You could go to that child blueprint. You could override say, a function or an event and have custom code run only in that child without affecting all of the other children or affecting the master blueprint. A good example of this would be things like weapons. If you had 20 different weapons in your game, you wouldn't want to have all of the code for shooting, aiming, reloading in every single weapon blueprint because if you wanted to change any of that code or fix a bug or add a feature, you'd have to go through 20 or 30 blueprints doing the same thing over and over again. Whereas if you just had one master blueprint that had all of your aiming shoeing, reloading code. All of the weapons are children of that master blueprint. You can change it all in just one place and that will affect all of the child blueprints. Now, inheritance also covers the master blueprints components. So if we add a new component to our master blueprint here, I'm just going to use a static mesh component. You'll see that we've got a static mesh component. Now we can set a mesh. I'm going to set mine to a cube for example. And I'll just set a cube and compile. So now we have a cube in our master blueprint. We go to the Child Blueprint. You can see that we also have a cube in the viewport. Now, you can also find the state mesh in the Components panel. If we select that, we can actually change our cube smashed. So I can change this to say, a comb. So if I search for cone, I can set this to a cone. Now, our child has a different stack mesh from our master blueprint. We could do the same with multiple child blueprints of our most blueprint. Say if you had Meli weapons, for example, and you add one master melee weapon with all of the code. And you could then have child blueprints of it for say, a knife and acts a spear and so on. And you could change the stack mesh for each one of those and have them all still have the code from the master blueprint. That's gonna be it for this lesson. Hopefully you have a better understanding of inheritance in the engine and also what it's actually useful. 17. Basics (Casting): Hey everyone, In this lesson we're gonna be taking a look at the cost node. So before we get started, I strongly recommend if you haven't already watching the actors and objects variable lesson. And also our previous lesson on blueprint inheritance as casting kind of connects with both of those systems. So to get started, we're just going to create a new blueprint like we've done before. Just Blueprint Class, we'll sell it to an actor. And I'm just going to call this trigger, which is going to set up a basic box that our character can overlap. And we'll use those overlap events to run some casting notes. So we'll open up our trigger. And I'm just going to add a new component, and this will be a box collision component. I'm just going to move this up so that when it's in the world are correctable, be able to overlap it. And I'm also with our box selected. I'm going to search for hidden. And I'm going to untick hidden end game here, just so we'll be able to see our box while we're playing in the game. Then in the event graph, I'm just going to delete these nodes are right-click and search for begin overlap. I'm going to use the event begin to overlap. And if you don't remember from our previous lessons, this node will run whenever any actor overlaps our actor. So overlaps are trigger. This will run and it will give us a reference to whichever actor over lactose. So the output of our begin overlap node is an act of reference. And if you remember from that, we can use this to access any of our actor functions or variables or events. But maybe we wanted to access information that was in our character when it overlaps are trigger. Now to do this, we can use cost. So if I drag out from my other actor here and I search for cost to third person. You can see that we can cause to the BP ThirdPersonCharacter. So I'll click that and that creates us a new car snowed. And essentially what a car snow does is it takes in an object and it checks, is it the object that we're trying to costume? So taking our actor reference, which could be anything that exists in the world, this cost node will check, is it a third-person character? If it is, then our top output execution pin will run. And we can run code or the cost failed would run, and we can also run different code. It also gives us access to a third-person character variable type. Now, this will only be valid if the Cast succeeds. And what I mean by valid is we can only get information through this variable if the Cast succeeds. So if for example, maybe you had a vehicle when the level that run over our trigger, if it wasn't a third-person character than the cost failed would run. And if we try to get any information from our variable output here, using code that's being run from cost failed, we'd actually get errors because the cost had failed. So we can't actually retrieve any information from this ThirdPersonCharacter output. So an example of how we can access information from our third-person character using this variable output is we can go to our ThirdPersonCharacter. And I'm just going to create a new story that was an accident, a new variable. And we'll call this current health. And we'll set it to an integer. I'm just going to delete this new macro. And we will save this now and go back to our trigger blueprint. And if we drag out, we can now search for get current health. You can see that we can now access our current health variable through the output pin on our cost node. And if we add in say, a print string such that in a print string here. And notice I'm connecting it to the top PIM because we only want this print string to run. If our cost succeeds, we'll drag out from current health and just connect that up to our print string here. And I'll get back to my ThirdPersonCharacter, select my current health. I'm just going to set the current health to say 50. So now when we play and I run over my trigger, it will print string the value of our health. So hit Play. We're going over my trigger and you can see that it's printing out value 50. Now if you remember from our previous lessons on events and functions, we can also call those using our cost node. So if we exit the plane editor, go back to our character. I'm just going to create a new function or cool this example function. And we'll add something like which saddle them, print string and hair because it's easy to see and game example function. So this is a function inside our ThirdPersonCharacter Blueprint, and we can call it from our trigger. So I'm just going to compile, go back to my trigger here, will delete this code for now. We'll drag out from the ThirdPersonCharacter pin here and search, for example, function. You see that we can now access our function that even though it's in the ThirdPersonCharacter. And when we hit play, we went over our trigger. You will see that the code inside is actually being run as if that function was run inside the ThirdPersonCharacter. The same thing can be done with events as well. So if we go back to our ThirdPersonCharacter, then go to the Event Graph and create a new customer. Then I'll just zoom in here and call this example. And we'll just add another print string here. And we'll put the string two example event. Now when we go back to our trigger. We can delete the example function and we'll drag out and we can search, for example. You see that I can now access that example of them. And then when we hit play, run over our trigger, you'll see that it's now printing the example event print string. Now I also want to give you an example of when a cast fails. So to do that, we'll exit the game. And I'm just going to create a new blueprint class, which send it to actor. And I'm just going to call it EP underscore example. And we will open that up and just compile and save it. I'm going to drag it. So it's in the top tab here with the rest of our blueprints. And I'm going to create a new variable. And I'm just going to call this Test. And we'll compile. Next. We'll go to our trigger here, and we're going to remove these notes. The cost of the third-person character we drag out from our other actor output and will cost to our bp example blueprint. And we'll drag out from the BP example variable. And we do get test. I'm just going to run a print string. And we'll print string whether or not that value is true. So now when we compile and we run over our box, you'll see that nothing's happening. And the reason for that is our character is what's overlapping our box and it isn't a BP example. So our cost is failing. If we have to exit now, go back to our trigger and added new print string to the cost failed. You'll see that the Print String prints out. So if we run over it now, you can see that it's printing hello, and that's because the cartilage is failing. The input object to our cost node is not a BP example. So the cost has failed. Now, if I was to try and get information from our bp variable pin hair when the cast fails. So we're actually get an error and I'll show you what that looks like if we try and access our test variable here, when the cost fails, we hook compile and we'll run over the box. And gay, you can see that the print string node is still running and it's running false because that's just the default value for variables. But if we exit now you can see that I'm now getting an error. And essentially this is just telling us that our cost failed. We're still trying to access information from it even though it failed. So we know that we're accessing our bp example variable here, but the cost is failed. So that's just something to keep in mind when working with costs notes. I'm just going to change this back to our ThirdPersonCharacter so we can do a few more things. So the cost to third person, and we'll connect it up like that and we'll compile. Now, we may want to store a reference to the act that overlaps I trigger to use it later on with code. So there's a few ways we could do this. We could drag out from our other actor here and do promote a variable. And that will create us a new variable. And I'll just leave it called other actor and it's set to an act to type because that's the type of pin that this is. We could set this here. And then later on maybe we had some other code that we were running. Later on, we could then access our ThirdPersonCharacter by just getting our other actor variable, dragging out costing to the third person, again, to cost the third person character. And again, we could access those variables and functions and things we need it. But we could also just store the reference to our third person instead of the actor. And the reason for this is we don't really want to cast to our blueprint every single time that we need information from it. It's fine once or twice, but they can start adding up and affecting performance. So what we could do instead is we could get rid of our other actor variable here. Because I only want my code to run it if it's a third-person character anyway. So there's no real reason to store the actual reference. We can just store the character reference. So to do that, we can delete our previous variable. I'll just drag out from my ThirdPersonCharacter, do promotes variable. And we'll leave it called ThirdPersonCharacter and see that it's also set it to the BP third-person character variable type. So we'll just save that and compile. So now we can access all of the variables and functions using this variable. Now, we don't have to cost another time to access that information. So I could drag out and I could get my current health for example, or I could access those example function or event. Now, so far we've just been costing straight to the ThirdPersonCharacter Blueprint because that's what our character is. But because our character blueprint, there's also a child of the character types, so its parent class has character. We could also costs to character. So if I delete these notes here for now, we'll drag out from our overall actor and cost to the character. Will use a cost character note. And I'm just going to add another print string here to the top pen. And this will be if our cost succeeds, so I'm done. So I'll print screen dm will run if our cost succeeds, and fail, will run if our cars fails, and if we run over our box now in the world has character. You can see that Don is running because our character or our ThirdPersonCharacter is also a character and its walls and our character is also important. So we could go back to our trigger again and replace this with a cost to ****. And just like before, I'll connect the successful up to W1 and the failed up to the File Print String. And you'll see when we run over the box again, that it's succeeding still, because our character is a child of the ****. Now if we go back to our trigger and we try and access, say, our health variable from the **** cost here. So if I drag out and didn't get. Current health, you can see that we can't access that variable because that variable doesn't exist in the **** class. It only exists in our third-person character. So we can't access any of that, any of those functions or events or variables that we created in there via the ****. And that's the same for our character costs. So if I drag out and cost character again, again, we will only be able to access variables and functions and events. They exist in the character class, not anything that exists in our ThirdPersonCharacter. And this is useful because maybe you had five different characters in your game and they all had their own individual blueprints. You wanted your trigger just to check, is the character overlapping me, instead of having to have a cost for every single possible character blueprint that overlaps, you can just do one cost node, say is it a character or does the blueprint that's overlapping us? Does it inherit from a character? If it does, then great, we can pass it succeed. We can set variable, and if we need to later on, we can even use this output. We could set it to a character variable. And then later on in our code, if we needed to, we could then cast to a more specific blueprint so we could cause till the ThirdPersonCharacter and we could access all of its information like we did before. So we could do get current and we can connect this up to our print string. So now when we overlapped a box, it will check, is the object a character? If it is, we'll set that as a variable. Then we'll check is the character that we've overlapped. Is it a ThirdPersonCharacter? And if it is great, then we'll print string at its current health. So when we overlap the box, you'd expect that their current health will print out. So casting allows us to cost or have children Blueprints cost to their parent blueprint and the cost will still succeed. So I can give you an example of this. We could right-click our ThirdPersonCharacter and do Create Child Blueprint Class. I'm just going to call this third person, actually just keep it that name. I'm going to open that show Blueprint Class up. I'll select the character mesh it and I'm just going to change it to say, the money simple here. So we can tell the difference between the two different characters or compile. And also we can change the current health value as well. So if I search for current, will change the current health value to 25. And we'll go into our level here, and I'll go to the windows. And we want the world settings. And this will just allow me to change which character we're using in the game. So I'm just going to change it from ThirdPersonCharacter to ThirdPersonCharacter child. It's now when we hit play, you can see that we're now using the child character instead of the original character. And if I run over that box, you can see that the health is still printing out even though we're not using the ThirdPersonCharacter. And that's because our ThirdPersonCharacter child is a child of the ThirdPersonCharacter. So in our trigger, when it gets to our cost ThirdPersonCharacter, it will succeed because our ThirdPersonCharacter child is still a ThirdPersonCharacter is just a child of that ThirdPersonCharacter. So all of its costs will still succeed. And if we wanted to, we could even add custom code and variables to our Child Blueprint. Then we wanted to access those. We would then have to cast. Or we could cost from our other actor here, we could cost to the child blueprint to access those variables. As an example, if I go to my third-person child here, I'll add a new variable, variable, not a macro. And we'll set this to, set it to a float, and we'll call this damage. Now when we compile and we go back to our trigger, if I just disconnect this code for now, if I drag out from my other actor and I do Cast to ThirdPersonCharacter. We've got our original ThirdPersonCharacter note here. If I drag out and I try and get that damage rally, you can see that I can't access it because that variable doesn't exist in the ThirdPersonCharacter, only exists in the ThirdPersonCharacter child. So if we've needed to access that variable, we'd need to cost to our ThirdPersonCharacter child. So it will cost to ThirdPersonCharacter child. And from that, we can get damaged valley like so. We can also access that current health value because our child inherited that value from the third-person character blueprint. Now, another feature of costs. Notice we can change them to be pure. So if you remember from our functions lesson, we have impure and pure functions. And essentially if a pure function is run, so this, sorry, an impure function. This is an impure function. The calculation will only be done when it's run, and then it stores this kind of reference in the pen so we can access it multiple times, and this node will only run once when we actually execute it. Now if I disconnect this node from here and I right-click, and I do convert to pure cost. And you see that it becomes a node that doesn't have execution pins being in, plug-in or other actor here. So now, whenever any information has gotten through this cost, this cost will be run again. If I was to do print string, we print string the current health, and we print stringed the current damage. This cost node would actually run twice for every output pin that's connected to it. Whereas if we convert this back to an impure cost, like so. Now our costs note will only run once. It will run once when we execute it through the execution pins. And then it stores that reference to our ThirdPersonCharacter child in this pen. And even though we're using a print string twice, this cost node will only run once. So that's the difference between pure and impure costs. Most of the time you'll be using NPR just because they're a little bit more optimal. And you don't really want a cost to be running for every single pen that you've got connected to it. Don't forget that you can always just promote your output pin to a variable. That means that it's only going to be run once. And then you can access that blueprints variables in the future without having to cost. So that's it for our casting lesson. We will be using causes quite a bit more in future lessons just because there are pretty cool part of coding and the engine. In our next lesson, we're gonna be taking a look at event dispatchers. 18. Basics (Event Dispatchers): Hey everyone, In this lesson we're gonna be taking a look at event dispatchers. So if you were following along with our last lesson, I had quite a few extra blueprints and I was changing some things in the settings. So all I've done for this lesson is create a new third person template. So we've got a fresh start for this lesson. So to start with, Event Dispatcher allows to cool code on Blueprints without actually having to know the specific blueprint that we're calling the event on. I'm going to set up an example here so we can try this out. So I'll start by creating a blueprint class. I'm going to set this to an actor and I'm going to call this trigger. And we're also going to create another Blueprint class, and I'm just going to call this. So we'll open up our trigger. And like we've done before, I'm just going to add a collision box component and we'll compile. Then I'm going to move my collision box up a little bit so we can run over it and the game. And I'm going to search for hidden and untick hidden in game. Then we're going to go to the Event Graph. And I'm just going to delete these nodes, right-click and search for event begin to overlap. Like before. This event runs when something overlap. So I'll trigger and it gives us access to the actor that overlapped us. Now, we're gonna go to our cube that we just created. So open up the queue blueprint. And in here I'm just going to add a new component and I'm just going to search for cube. We'll add a cube. I'm just going to move it up a little bit like that. And we'll go to our event graph and just compile. Next, we're going to create a new variable. I'm just going to click the new variable button. I'm going to call this trigger. And we're going to set the variable type to the trigger blueprint we just created. So for me that is the trigger option here. I'll select that and compile them. We're going to select our trigger variable and we're going to take on instance editable. And if you remember, that will allow us to change this value when we select our cube in the level. So we'll compile again, go to our third person map here. I'm just going to add in three cubes, so I'll draw those in like this. And I'm going to add a trigger as well. So I'll put this here. Now I'm going to select each one of my cubes and you can see that we've got our Trigger option here. Now. That's because when we selected our trigger, we ticked on instance editable. So if yours isn't that you need to make sure that that's ticked on and then you compile. So now we can select a trigger. I'm just going to click the drop-down and select our trigger here. So that's the trigger blueprint here. I'll do this for each one of our cube blueprints. And all we're doing is we're just setting that trigger variable in our cubes to this specific trigger. Now we're gonna go back to our trigger and actually create a new event dispatcher. So if we go down here and they might blueprints panel, you can see we've got event dispatchers and we can either click the New Event Dispatcher button here or we can go to add and select Event Dispatcher. So I'm just going to click that. I'm going to name this example dispatcher like that. And we'll compile. Now, we're going to call our Event Dispatcher whenever a character overlaps or trigger. So I'm going to drag out from other actor. I'm just gonna cost to character. And that will allow us to check is the input object or character. If it is, then we can run the rest of our code. And I'm going to drag out from my Event Dispatcher here. You can see that we get a few different options. I'm going to be checking, Clicking cool. And if we click that, you can see that we get this node and this cause our Event Dispatcher. Now, I'll compile and go to our cube in here. I'm just going to delete these two, note it and I just want to keep the beginning play node because we will use that. I'm going to get the trigger variable here. I'm going to drag out. I'm going to do a sign. We'll scroll down and we want to find the sine example dispatcher. I'm going to click that. You can see that this creates a couple of nodes for us. So it creates first and then assign node. And it actually creates us a new custom event. And I'll connect this up to the beginning play. So what this essentially does is on Begin Play, we assign, well, we use our trigger reference here to assign our event to be run whenever the example dispatch it is called. And if you remember in our trigger, whenever a character overlaps or trigger, we call that Event Dispatcher. And what this will do is now our cubes, all three of them will run this event when the event, the example dispatcher is called inside the trigger that we selected. So I can run some code here. Say we could do set location, location. We want Sac location will do get mapped to location L plus some value to it. So we'll do an add. Now I'd say a 100 in the height and connect up to news location. It's now when we enter our trigger because we've binded this event. Two example, dispatcher or trigger will cool and fun example with dispatcher and our cubes will move up, so we'll hit play. Now, when I run over my trigger, you can see that all three of those cubes have moved up. Now, this is helpful because our trigger doesn't actually have to tell each one of these cubes to do something. All our trigger is doing is calling example dispatcher. And then our cubes are actually set up to do something when that specific trigger runs the example dispatcher. So that's the basics of how event dispatchers work. Now, if you remember when we were in our trigger here and I dragged in my example dispatcher, we've got a few different options. So we've tried the cool node. That's what runs the Event Dispatcher and runs any events that are assigned to the example dispatcher. We've also got binds. So if we create that in C, this is actually the same node that we had in our cube. It's just hasn't created the event for us. So maybe we already had a customer event that we just want to plug into it. We can use a Bind node. If I drag it in again, you can see we've got unbind. This allows us to connect to an event and actually tell it that we don't want that event to be run anymore for our example dispatcher. So for example, if we compile again and I hit Play when I run into this cubing and see them move up. And if I run into them again, you can see it's adding the height. Now, maybe I only wanted that to run once. And then after that, if the player runs into the pupa, they won't move up anymore. And I can do that. So I can go to my cube and I can drag out from my trigger and do unbind. We want to find unbind all events from Event Dispatcher, or we can use unbind events. So we'll use unbinding of them. And we can say we want this event to be unbound from our example dispatcher. So now this will only run once and then it won't run anymore. So if I run into it now and I go back and I run back, you can see that now our event is no longer bound to our example dispatcher. So even though it's still being run, that event is no longer running. Now going back to our trigger, we can drag out again. And there's also an unbind all option. Now that pretty much does the same thing. The only difference is we don't specify event. So if I drag out and I do unbind all, we can unbind all from our example dispatcher here. You can see that there's no event input. This will just unbind all events in all blueprints that are bound to this example dispatcher. Now, event dispatchers can also have variable inputs similar to functions and events. So if we go back to our trigger blueprint here, and we select our example dispatcher in the Details panel. I'm just gonna get rid of this hidden search. You'll see that we've got inputs. And if we click the New Parameter button here, we can add new variables. So we could add floats, booleans, any variable type you want. I'm just going to add a float and I'll set this to be called, say float. We'll compile. You can see it's giving me an error here and it hasn't updated the variable name. Sometimes this can happen with event dispatchers. Don't worry too much. You can just right-click the node and we'll do the refresh nodes. And you see that it's now changed the name to what it should be and we can just compile. And now we have no errors. Now that's added this variable input to our cool dispatcher. If we go to our cube now and compile, you can see that it's actually automatically added that float variable to our event here. Now, whatever we set in our Event Dispatcher is what will be output here in our event. So if I, for example, wanted this to be five, and I went to our cube, I'm just going to do, I had a print string. So I'll just add a print string here. And we'll connect the print string to the float value, which moves these along a little bit. So we've got a bit more space like that. Now, when this event runs, it will print out whatever value our float value is, and that's set by our Event Dispatcher. So if I compile it play and I run into my cube, you can see that all three of these cubes are running the code, so it prints strings 53 times. Now, the cool thing about event dispatchers is we could have lots of other blueprints that are also using this Event Dispatcher that we've just set up. So that maybe when a character enters a room, you have a trigger that they walk through. And maybe you wanted that room to change in some ways. You wanted some objects to disappear. You wanted some objects to move, maybe, maybe a sound to play. You could have all of that stuff happening using just one event dispatcher that runs when your character overlaps a box. Now heading back to our trigger blueprint, if you remember when we select our Event Dispatcher here, we also have an option called copies signature from. And if I click that, you can see we've got a few different options. Now, essentially this just allows you to copy the input variables of another event dispatcher. So there's a big list of them here because the engine actually comes with a bunch of event dispatchers built-in. So this is just useful if you wanted to, instead of having to manually add variable inputs. Say you had an event dispatcher already with the same inputs that you want to use. You could use Copy signature from and just add those straight away. Now, to give you an example of some of the event dispatchers are actually built into the engine. We can right-click and search for bind. And if we scroll through it, you can see that we've got some built-in bind events. So for example, we've got some for mouse inputs, we've got some for damage, and we've also got some for collision. You can actually see that there's a Bind Event to on actor begin to overlap. That's the same as our event here. So we could actually set this up differently. So if I click Bind event too. On acts or begin overlap will get a game play node. Connect this up to here. Now we can actually delete this event and create our own custom event that will run whenever an actor overlaps, I'll trigger using this Event Dispatcher. So I can right-click or I can actually drag out from the event here, search for custom. You'll see that it's just made an event for us and it's actually added those overlap actor and other actor here. So I can call this, say. And now we can connect this up. We can take the other actor pin, plug this into our character check. So now essentially what this code is doing is on Begin Play, we bind an event, which is our overlap event here, to when an actor begins overlapping our trigger. And then when an actor does overlap, I'll trigger or overlap event will run. It will give us the other actor. We can check is that other actor that's overlapping, I trigger a character. If it is, then we call it our example dispatch up. We can test if this is working, so we'll just compile and save, hit Play. And now when we're going over our trigger, you can see that that code is actually still running like before. But instead we're now using an Event Dispatcher that's actually built into the engine. Now, so far I've only actually been using the Event Dispatcher to cool events on another Blueprint. So for example, a cube here runs this event When example dispatcher is rum, but we can also use our Event Dispatcher within the same blueprint. So maybe I wanted an event to run when I call my Event Dispatcher, actually inside my trigger, I could do that as well. So I could drag out my Event Dispatcher. I could do, if we click Assign here, it does the same thing as the Bind event, but it also creates our custom events. So if I click assign, you see that it's created our Bind event and the customer vent. Whereas if I drag out and do bind, you can see that it just creates the bind. So that's just a click away, basically creating the two nodes together. So we can do that. I can connect this up here. And I'll move my this event up here in c that gives us a float output. Because if you remember, we have a float input on our example dispatcher. Cool. And we could run some code inside our trigger, and that will run whenever our example dispatcher is called. So I could add a print screen here, say hello. Now, when we run onto our cube, you'll see that it prints the five values for R cubed. And then it only runs once. Hello, because we only have one trigger and that code is being executed inside our trigger. Now, something to keep in mind with these events, dispatches is, if I have a custom event already, say I'll create a custom of them, and maybe it has different inputs. So I'm just going to add a float input. If I tried to connect this up to the Event Dispatcher for on actor begin overlapping and see that I can't actually plug it in. If I disconnect this, you can see that I still can't plug it in. And that's because this custom event doesn't have the inputs or the outputs. This binds node requires. So any customer event that we plug into has to have these two variables. So I can't connect this to this. I can connect it up to our example dispatcher like this, because it's got a float value and that's what's required, for example, dispatcher. So normally the easiest way if you just have a Bind event, say like this, is to just drag out, search for Customer them. And it will create a custom event for you. And it will add any of the variables that you need it to have to be able to connect to that dispatcher. Now, as you can probably imagine, if you had a lot of these, you'd get these long wires going all over the place and it could be a bit messy. What you can do instead of having to run the wire to the event here, she can drag out and you can search for Create event. And you get this little note here that allows us to select another event. So we can click this and you can see that it's only giving me the option for customer vent underscore 0 and example dispatcher underscore event. And it's only giving me those options because they're the only events that have our float value. And I can say select will select our example dispatcher of them like that. Now you can see that our red wire isn't connected up to this event anymore. But I'll hello string watch, they still run because this Create Event note here basically connects the Event Dispatcher to the event up here without actually connecting a wire. So if we compile it play, I'm running into our trigger here. You can see that our Hello print string is still running even though it's not directly wired to that Bind node. Now that create an event node actually allows us to use functions with event dispatchers as well. So if we click on the drop-down option here, you can see that we can set it to none. We can also create a matching function or event. If you click matching event, it will just create a new custom event down here. And it will add the appropriate variable outputs that the Event Dispatcher needs, and then also just automatically set it to that new event. So now when the events batch runs are accustomed to event will run. But we can also create functions that it will cool. Instead, we can click Create a matching function and that creates us a new function. This is just a normal function like we've used before, is just that this one will now run whenever our example dispatcher runs. So you can see that it's automatically added a float for us. This will run like a normal function one. So we could add some code to this if we wanted to. I had a print screen. Now to put this to function, we know that it is this print string that's running. And now when we hit play, I run over my trigger here. You can see that keeps them moving as printing those five values. And it's also printing function because that function inside our trigger is now being run because it's set to be bound to the example dispatcher. So that's it for our event dispatchers lesson. There are a great tool for being able to call one event and a blueprint and effect lots of other blueprints and different ways without having to specify each blueprint that you want to effect. 19. Basics (Interfaces): Hey everyone. In this lesson we're gonna be talking about the Blueprint Interfaces. Blueprint Interfaces allow us to call functions and events on other Blueprints without having to cost to that blueprint type. Now you may have noticed that I've still got the cube and trigger blueprints from my previous lesson. I'm just going to keep those because I'm going to reuse them for an example a little bit later on. So to get started, we're going to create a new Blueprint Interface. If I right-click here and go to the blueprints, pop out and we'll go down to Blueprint Interface. I'm just going to call mine BP on score example interface like that. And we'll double-click it to open it up. And I'm just going to drag mine and add it to the tab up here. So as you can see, we've got a new user interface. We've got this large event graph that we're actually not going to really use it. We can't make any edits here or add any code is just a preview of the functions that we add. And you can see we've got our functions tab over here where we can create and delete functions. And if we've got a function selected, we can add inputs and outputs. So we'll start by renaming the default function that comes with our example interface. So I'm just going to rename mine to decrease health like that. And we'll compile and we'll come back here in a moment. But I want to show you how the decrease health function looks in our character blueprint. So we'll go to the ThirdPersonCharacter. I'll right-click and I'll search for decrease health. And you can see that this comes up or decrease health message node. Now, because we've created this in our example interface, this will appear in every blueprint if we right-click and search for it. So if I create this, you can see it looks a lot like the cool node that we use with the events. With a couple of differences. We've got this icon in the top right hand corner, and we've also got the target input, but it doesn't say self next to it. We actually have to provide a target. And this is just the, the blueprint or the reference to the blueprint that we want to call our decrease. How function on. Now, if I was to run this node now, so if I get the Plano and I connect this up to a decrease our function, nothing would happen because we haven't provided a target. But if we drag out and do self as a target, nothing would happen still, because we haven't actually implemented this function into our third-person character. So to do that, we need to just compile first, we'll go to class settings. And under Implemented Interfaces, it says no interfaces currently, but we can add a new one. So we'll click Add and we'll search for example. And we'll select the example interface there. And then we'll compile. Now if we go down to the interface is option a, you can see that we've got decrease health. Now, if we double-click this, it will actually create a decrease health event. Now, when we run, when our Begin Play runs and it runs this decrease health cool node with our self as a target. This event down here will run. I'm just going to move it up closer to our beginning play node here, which move up here like that. So we can test this quickly. I'll just run a print string and we'll hit play and see that that print screen and we've just added is running. Now we can also add inputs and outputs to our interface functions. So if we go back to the example interface, select our decrease health. I'm going to add an input first, so I'll add a new input. I'll leave it as Boolean. And I'll just say this is, we'll just call it a test for now. You can see that the preview is updated. It says test will compile and get back to our ThirdPersonCharacter. And you can see now that our cool note here, the decrease health interface function recall node has now got a test input and our event has a test output. So whatever our test input is, that will be the output for our event node. If I take this on and I plug this into our string here, when we hit play, you will see it will print string true, true. Now, we can also add outputs to our example Interface function. So if we go to that, I'm just going to press escape to accept the plan editor will select decrease health. And down here, we can add a new output. So I'll add an output. There's a bug right now where right now it's all gone, grayed out. I have to compile, then select the decrease our function again, you can see that I can now rename it and access this information. Maybe by the time you're following this lesson, that will be fixed. But for now that's what you have to do. Four outputs. I'm just going to name this current health like that. And we'll set it to an integer and we'll compile this. Now adding outputs to an interface function will actually cause some changes in our character blueprint. So if we go back to our character, you can see that our event node has now got a warning on it and it's actually converted itself to a customer, then it's no longer an interface events so far as to hit play now. And you can see that our print string is no longer running because that event isn't actually being cooled. And if we go to our decrease health care and double-click it, you can see that it's actually taken us to what looks like a function. Now, it hasn't added our output node. We can add that just by right-clicking and doing return. We want add return node. And you see that it's now giving us an output execution pen with our output current health. Variable. You might not have to do that. It might just automatically add the returned node for you, but sometimes it doesn't. So if it doesn't, then you can start it yourself. So now this function will actually run on Begin place because we're still calling the decrease health interface function. So if we connect this up to our output, now, maybe I want it to output a current health value. So we'll create a new health value. Health. We change this to an integer. I'll compile, I'll set this to a 100. Now because this is a decrease how function I've called it will make it decrease by some amount. We'll do subtract and we'll do Set Health. Now. We'll subtract five from our health and then we'll output the current health value. As you can see, you can just write code in here like a normal function. It behaves just like functions that we've used before. So now if we go to our event graph, if you remember on Begin Play or decrease health, interface function is gonna be cooled. We've got tests ticked on, but we're not doing anything with that and decrease how function, as you can see, it's not plugged them. And then we want it to return a current health value. And I can add a constraint to this, which started print string here. Now are decreased health function that we had earlier. This isn't doing anything anymore. It's just been converted to a normal customer, then we can actually just delete that now. And if I can pull and I hit Play, you can see that our current health has gone down by five. It started at a 100 and that's now 95. So you might be wondering what the point of interface is. We're just using these normal events and functions. Now, the cool thing about them is we can use them in other Blueprints without having to cast to say first-person character. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go to my trigger here. And I'll go to the Event Graph now, this code is from the previous lesson, so I'm just gonna highlight and delete that. Also going to delete this function as well. And we'll just compile. Now normally if I wanted to say decrease my health value and my ThirdPersonCharacter, we would create an event, begin overlap or begin actor overlap. And that runs whenever something overlaps, I'll trigger and it gives us access to the actor did overlap our trigger and we would cost to the ThirdPersonCharacter like we did in our casting video. Then we would either get our functions, say I decrease health function, or we would get our health variable. Then we would decrease it and set the new value using our car snowed. But what Blueprint Interfaces allow us to do is instead of having to cast, we can actually just drag out from other actor and we can search for a decrease health interface function and create that and that'll be our target, whatever overlaps I'll trigger, we'll call the decrease health function in that blueprint. And this will only actually run in that blueprint if we've implemented the interface like we did in our ThirdPersonCharacter. You remember, we set the interface and here, if an object that doesn't use RPP example interface overlap, so I'll trigger, this code will still run, but just nothing will happen. We won't get any errors, we won't have any problems. This will just be ignored and then the rest of the code will run. Now because our ThirdPersonCharacter does use a decrease how function when we do overlap our trigger, it will be run. So if we go to our third-person character here, I'm just going to open up the decreased cell function and I'll add in, or actually we'll go back to our trigger here. We'll add a print string and here instead, so I had to print a string and we'll print out our current health. And because our characters, what's going to be overlapping or trigger it will be decreasing their health in our character and then we'll get our characters current health so we can compile it play. Now when we run over our trigger, you can see that our health decreases. Now the good thing about this is we're not limited to just doing this in our ThirdPersonCharacter. If we wanted other blueprints, say a vehicle for example, when it hits this trigger, we want to reduce its health as well. We can do that. So if we open up our cube blueprint here, for example, I'm just going to delete this code from our previous lesson. We add a health variable. We'll say it to an integer as well. And we'll set the value to say 50. Now, right now, if our cube was to overlap our trigger hair, nothing would happen because our cube doesn't have the example interface implemented. So we'll do that now. We'll add the example interface and we'll compile. Now, as you can see, decreased health function is now in the Interfaces tab here. But if I was a cube was to overlap our trigger, now, it's still wouldn't do anything because we actually haven't added any code to the decrease health function inside our cube. If we open that up, just by double-clicking up, you can see that we've got our return node and r note here. And we can run code. So if I wanted to, I could do health. We'll do minus. And we say, well minus five. And then we'll set and we will return the current health here. So now when our cube overlaps are trigger, this function will run. It will take the current health value minus five, set the current health value, and then return it. So if we hit Play, if I run over it with my character, you can see it's still decreasing our health value. But if I press F8, which basically stops me controlling my character and allows me to move about freely. But the game is still running. I can select my cube if I move it into the trigger, you can see that when it enters the trigger, it's actually printing out its health value and it's also decreasing it. So hopefully that gives you an idea of how Blueprint Interfaces work. They essentially allow us to create functions that can be run in different blueprints without having to cost to those blueprints. And that's useful in use cases like our trigger here where if you want a Trigger box to damage anything that goes in it that has health, then you can set that up using Blueprint Interfaces. 20. Basics (Components): Hey everyone. In this lesson we're gonna be looking at the component blueprints. Now if you're following along with the previous lesson, all I've done here is just create a new third person template. So we've got a fresh start for this lesson. So to get started, we use components to add new functionality to actor blueprints. So for example, in our level here, if I select the ground, for example, and over in the Details panel, we have the components tab that shows us what components this actor has. So we can see that it has a static mesh component. And that's what allows us to actually set a static mesh to display in the world for this actor. Now, there are a lot of different types of components. So if I go to my Character Blueprint for example, and we go to the viewport. You can see over in the Components panel we have a few different types of components here as well. So to start with, our character has a capsule component, which is this capsule shaped collision area. And that's what stops our character from just falling through the ground or being able to walk through walls. Then we've got an arrow component, which basically is just set up to point in the forward direction for our character. We've got the mesh component, which is a Skeletal Mesh Component. And that allows us to set a skeletal mesh. And the Skeletal Mesh is just a mesh that can be animated. Then we've got our camera boom, and camera that's attached to the camera boom. And the way it works is if between the end of the camera boom and the start of the common brim, There's an object blocking that it will get shorter. And because our camera is attached to the end of the camera, boom, that will bring our camera closer to the character. If there's an object blocking our camera, boom. Then we have our camera. And our camera is just what allows us to choose the perspective that our player sees when they're controlling this character. Now, all of the components of explained so far are seeing components. These are components that can exist in the world. They have a location and sometimes they have a visible objects to them. But we also have a different type of component which is purely just code. They don't have a location. Then example, if this is our Character Movement Component here, which comes built into the engine and built into our character blueprint. And if we wanted to, we could add this component to other blueprints as well. And this is what handles our character's movement. The important difference between a sink component and a standard component is that a standard component doesn't exist in the world, doesn't have a location and can't be visible to the player. Whereas seeing components can exist in the world. They have a location on a rotation. And some of them like our mesh component, for example, does have a physical object in the world. Now, the reason we use components instead of just putting all of this code and functionality straight into a blueprint actors blueprint is because we can reuse components on multiple blueprints that can save us a lot of time having to write code over and over again or copy and paste it when we could just do it once in a component, then reuse that component in multiple blueprints. Similarly to how functions are useful, because we can change code in one place and it affects it in all of the places that function is being used. If we change the code inside our component blueprint, the blueprint that's using that component will also be updated and get those changes. We can create our own Blueprint Components. All of the ones we've looked at so far are built into the engine. If you click out, you can go through and see all of the components actually come with the engine. But if we want to create our own, we need to go to the Content Browser. We'll right-click and go to Blueprint class. And then here you can see at the bottom we've got active component and sink component. Now if you remember from full scene components can exist in the world. They have a location, whereas active components don't. They're purely code. We'll start by creating an active component. I'm just going to call this VP to underscore actor component like that. And we'll double-click it to open up. Then I'll just drag the tab up here to the top bar with the blueprints. Now, you may have noticed this UI looks a little bit different from our normal blueprint editor. And as you can see, we don't have a Components panel because components can have their own components. Only actors can. We also don't have a viewport because this is an active component. It doesn't have components of visible parts to it. So it's purely code. So we only have access to the code relevant UI. Pass those differences. There isn't much different to coding and a component then computing and coding in a blueprint. We have our beginning play node or node, for example, these are just here by default, but we can access most of the events and functions that we can in our normal active blueprint inside a component. Now, because this is an active component, I can't do something like say get location and we can't find getLocation node because this actor, this sorry, component, doesn't have a location. So I can give you an example of how we can run code and I component. Now, if I drag out from my big in play here, I'm just going to add a print string. So I've added some code to my component. And if I can poll and hit Play, you'll see that nothing happens. Now, that's because I haven't actually added my new active component to any blueprints that exist in my level. So that code isn't gonna be run. But if I go to my ThirdPersonCharacter here and I go to add, and I search for actor component. You can see we've got our BPR, its component, that's when we've just created or add that. And you can see that it's actually added it to this second half of the panel along with the character movement. That's because these are both just active components, not seeing components. But now if I compile and we go back to the play and editor, you can see that now that code inside our component is actually running because it's now attached to ThirdPersonCharacter and its begin play will run when the third-person character is spawned or when the game starts. Now we can also access functions, events, and variables from our active component inside the blueprint that we added them to. So if we exit out of play an editor and I go back to my active component here. I'm just going to add in, say, a new variable. We'll just call this Test. I'll create a new function as well, and we'll call this example function. And I'll also create an event or create an event, I'll just call this example. So now we've got our event, function and variable, and these are all inside our actor component. Now if I go back to my third-person character here, I can access those variables and functions really easily just by dragging in my BPS component from the Components panel. Drag out. And I can just search for test, for example. And I can get all set that test variable if I want to. I can also access the functions so I can drag out and search for example. And you can see I can access my example function and my example event. Just like that. Now a good example of a system that you might want to put in a component is something like a health system. And the reason for that is you may have multiple actors in your game that you wanted to have a health system. Now, instead of having to add a variable and functions that affect their health to every one of those actors. We could just create one health component and add that health component to the multiple actors. Then, because we can just access the functions and variables from our component easily inside any blueprint we add it to. We could then use that health system without having to recreate all the functions and variables inside the blueprint. Now, we can also access and actors components from other blueprints. So if I quickly put together a trigger blueprint, I'm just going to create a new blueprint. There'll be an actor. I'm just going to call it trigger will open that up. I'll add a box collision component. Box collision. We go, I'll move this up a little bit. And I'll turn off hidden in game. And then we'll go to the Event Graph and delete these nodes. And I'll create a begin over lap. If you remember, this node runs whenever something overlaps, I'll trigger and it gives us access to the actor that overlapped us. So we can access our component from our ThirdPersonCharacter and a few different ways. If I drag out from other actor and search will cost to the person. We've now got our costs node, which if you remember, we've done a separate lesson on. And if we drag out, we can access this. Or I'll third-person characters, variables, and functions. But we can also access its components. So if I search for actor component, we scroll down that usually at the bottom here you can see I can get our active component that allows us to access any of the functions and variables from our x-component through our ThirdPersonCharacter. If I drag out when I search for tests, for example, gets test, there we go. I can access that variable. I can also access if I search, for example, you can say I can access my example event and my example function. Now, there's another way we can access our actors components without casting. And we can do that using a node that if we drag out from our actor, will search for component by clashing. See up here, if I create that node. Now essentially what this does is it takes an actor input and we set a component class so I can search for actor component. And I will set this to the BP act component. That's the one we created. This will check, does our actor input have this component? If it does, then it will output a reference to that component here. And if I drag out, I can search again just from my test variable. I can also access those events and functions we created. Now, if r does not have an active component, then this reference won't be valid. So what we do whenever we use this node is just make sure we use and is valid node like that. So now, when an object overlaps are trigger, this event will run. It will check, does this actor have our bp act component? Then if it does, we'll output a valid reference. So R is valid, would run valid. And if it doesn't, then is valid node would run, is not valid. Now we can actually have multiple of the same component in the same blueprints. So if I go to my third-person character here and I add the BP underscore app to component. Again, you're going to see that I now have two of that component in my ThirdPersonCharacter. Now we may want to access those using a node like this. So we can delete this node instead, we can use the Get component by class. And that is a node that works pretty much exactly the same as our previous node, but instead of a single variable output, it's an array. Now, if we were to search for BP unschooled actor component, this would return every single component that matches our component class from our character. And it returns it in an array. And if you remember from our arrays video and re just allows us to store multiple of the same type of variable all in one variable. And if we wanted to access one of those variables from our array, we would need to drag out and user get node. We need to supply an index. So this is which variable within our array we want to access. And then from our get node we can just drag out and search for, say, gets test. And because this pen here is a BP act component pen, we can get our test variable or we can get those example function and event we created earlier. So that's just a few ways that you can access a actors components using these nodes. Now another cool feature of components is we can actually set their variables for each blueprint we add the component to. So if we go to our app component blueprint here, I'm just going to create a new variable and I'm going to call this say max health. Like that. We'll set it to an integer. Now if we compile this blueprint and go back to our ThirdPersonCharacter Blueprint. I'm just going to delete this extra active component and I added was like the first one. And you can see over in the Details panel, we have a default category. And then here we've got our test variable. That's the Boolean we created at the beginning. And we also have our max health variable, and we can use these to set those starting values will be for our app component. So I could set this to say a 100. And maybe I had a second character blueprint. I'll just use the trigger as an example. So if we add another BP underscore, BP, BP act component, you don't need to use underscores. And here you can see if I use an underscore, it doesn't find it. So if I do BP x component and we get rid of this searcher, and I select that component. You can see that we again, we have our test and max health variables here and the default category. And you see that it's defaulted to 0 by default because that's what it's set to inside our x component. Then in here, we could set this to be say, a thousand. Now, if we set up on Begin Play, we'll print out our max health. For example. We put our trigger and the level and we hit Play. You can see that it's printing a thousand and that's our trigger doing up a 100, and that's our characters act component doing that. Next, I just wanted to show you how we can quickly create a sink component. So we'll just exit out of the planets to right-click and create a new blueprint. And instead of active component, we're going to click seen component. I'll just call this BP underscore seen component. And we'll double-click that to open it up. Now as you can see, it's pretty much the same as our active component blueprint. The only difference is in our class default. So you can see that we actually have a location, rotation and scale. And if we go to our ThirdPersonCharacter here, add a new component and then we'll add our bp seen component. You'd see that we have a location in the, in the Viewport here. We can move it around. If we select the component in there, you see I can move it around, I can position it, we can rotate it and scale it. And if we go back to our sink component, because it's the same component, we can access its location so we can search for gets wild location. You can see we've got our Get World Location node. We also have our get's world rotation. If I spell it right, rotation that we go get world rotation. And these work the same as our nodes in our active blueprints. It just gets the location and rotation of our sin component. Now, so far we've only been adding components using the Components panel here, but we can also add components during gameplay using code. So if I right-click here and my ThirdPersonCharacter Blueprint, I search for begin play. If we drag out from parents, search for add and then the name of our components. So BP, you can see that I've got options for BP x component and our BPC and component. So if I click our x component here, we get at this node. And this essentially means that on Begin Play or when our character spawns, it will add a new BP act component to our character. We can use the return value here like we could with if we drag in a reference like this, we can just drag out and search for, say, get, test for example, we can access our variable. We can also access those example function and the event that we created earlier. And if we wanted to, we could create a variable to store this reference. So if we wanted to access this new variable later on in our code, we could do that. We're just promote a variable that creates us a new variable that sets a BP acts component type. We can name this to say new computer. And that allows us now to access that new component we created later on, then we can use it. So it gets a maximum value. When selecting this add BP actin, HE can actually see that we get access to it starting variables. So we could set our max self to whatever we wanted to say 99. And now when that act has created its max helpful, benign. And lastly, we can also destroy components during gameplay. So if I drag out my active component reference here, just going to delete this code. Now to destroy component, we need to do is drag out, search for it, destroy. You can use the destroy component node and that will completely remove the component from the blueprint during gameplay. Of course, it doesn't actually affect the blueprint here. So it's not like you've deleted it, it just destroys the component during that game-play session. So that's pretty much it for components. Hopefully you have a better understanding of how they work and what they're used for now. 21. Basics (Player Controller): Hey everyone. In this lesson we're gonna be taking a look at the player controller blueprint. Now at play controller, blueprint is created when we hit play and start the game. And it's created for each player that exists in the level. And the purpose of a player controller is to take control of a blueprints like characters or vehicles, and provide them with the inputs that the player is pressing. Now the player controller stays the same for each player unless a new level is opened, in which case the old controller is destroyed and a new one is created for when the new level is opened. Now in the third-person character template that we have opened here, it doesn't actually include a blueprint controller. And that's because by default it just uses the built-in player controller that comes with the engine, which is coded in C plus plus. So you won't find the player controller in our blueprints panel. If we open up our game mode, we can see where we can actually set our player controller. So if we go down and the classes, you can see we've got the plague controller class currently that's set to play controller. And that's our C plus plus player controller that's built into the engine. You can also see we've got the default Pawn Class down here, which is set to our bp ThirdPersonCharacter. And essentially what a game mode does is it tells the engine we want to start every player off in the game with this player controller, which currently is the C plus plus player controller. And this character, which is our ThirdPersonCharacter that we've been working in, in previous lessons. But we can actually create our own player controller blueprints. So to do that, I'm going to close my game mode for now, and we'll right-click the content browser and go to blueprints. And we're going to select player controller. And we'll name this BP example, control like that. And we'll double-click it to open it up. And I'm just going to drag the top here up to the top with our other blueprints. Now, I'll play controllers. Blueprint looks pretty much like an act of Blueprint. And that's because it is actually an actor is just a child of the player controller as well. So in the Viewport here you can see that, but we don't have any visible objects. Typically you won't be adding things like a mesh or anything like that to a player controller's viewport. We also have a camera here. Now, this camera is only used when we're not possessing another Blueprint. So when we possess are third-person character, for example, we actually use the camera that's included with that. If we want possessing any blueprints, Then this camera is used. There is also a few additional settings in the class defaults exclusive to the player controller. So we've got things relating to the mouse cursor and touch events for mobile, as well as some camera management tools up here as well. And if we head over to the Event Graph, you can see that we've pretty much got the default layout that you would expect. Now what you might be wondering, what is it that we actually use our player controller forum, what would we code in here instead of just coding inside our character? Now, because I'll play controllers stays the same no matter what character we're controlling, we can store information in here that we want to keep the same for controlling different things. So for example, if you had a mission system and you wanted your missions to be available all of the time, no matter if you're possessing a character or a vehicle or some of the thing, you would probably want to store that information inside your controller, either directly by creating the code inside the controller or by adding components to that controller. Another thing that controllers are useful for is adding inputs that you want to stay the same no matter what character you are controlling. So an example of this would be if you had, say, an escape menu in your game where all your settings and controls, or you'd probably want that button to work no matter what character you are controlling. So instead of doing or adding that code into every single character blueprint, we can add at once and the controller, and that way input will always be available to the player no matter which character they're controlling. So to give you an example of what I mean by the information stays the same no matter which character we're controlling will create a new variable. And I'll just call this mission one done. And we'll leave it as a Boolean. And I'll compile. Now, I'll go back to the content browser and we'll create a trigger. This trigger will set that mission one Boolean to true. So we'll just create an actor. I'll call it mission trigger. Like that. We'll open that up. I'm going to add a box collision just so we can overlap our actor her. I'll move it up. Now set it's hidden in game to false so we can sit. And then in our event graph, I'm going to use the actor begin overlap. And if you remember, this will run when something overlaps our trigger and it will tell us which actor overlapped it. So it will drag out from here, I'm gonna do a cost to character. And from that, we can drag out and do get controller. And this gives us access to whichever controller is controlling this character. Now, this will either be valid or not valid. So if a character isn't being controlled, this will return and not valid pen. So we want to create an is valid node. This way, if a character that isn't being controlled, overlaps are trigger, we won't get any errors. So then from our controller, we need to get our mission done variable. So if we drag out and research would get the mission done, it won't work because this is just a controller object reference, not a reference to our actual example controller. So what we can do is because our example controller is a child of the controller type we can drag out, we can cast to example, controller will connect this up to is valid. And then from that we can drag out and we can do set mission, one done. And we can set this to true. So just to go over this, when an actor overlap. So our trigger, we check is that Act where a character, if it is, then we get as controller and check, is it valid? So we basically check, is this character actually being controlled by something? If it is, then we check, is this controller a BP example controller? If it is, then we set that BP example controllers mission one done variable to true. Now we want to be able to access information to see if our mission has been done. So we'll go to our ThirdPersonCharacter and then the Event Graph. I'll add a new inputs of them which search for input event one. And this will just run whenever I press one on my keyboard. Now, we can get our controller the same way we did in the mission trigger. So I'll search for it, get controller. And using this node, it will check self for a controller. So we're in the ThirdPersonCharacter, the self-employed as a **** and our character is a poem. So we can check ourselves if we have a controller will do cost to the BP underscore example controller. And from that we can get our mission one done. And we'll just print a string whether or not it is done. We'll use a print string node and connect this up to in string. Like that. I will just compile this. Now we'll go back to our third person map, and I'm just going to add the mission trigger into our level. I'll make it a little bit bigger, so I'll just use the re-scale tool here we go. And there's one last thing we need to do before we test this out, and that's change our controller. So currently in third person game mode, if I open that up, you can see that the player controller is still set to player controller. We need to change this now to our bp example controller. Now, because that controller is a child of the player controller, it will do everything that that player controller does by default. Bell also now have our new variable that we added. So if I hit Play, if I press one, you can see that it's printing out false. But if I run into my trigger, now, when I press one, you can see it's printing out true. So this is how we can set and get information from OCT players controller. Next, I'll show you how we can actually change which character we're controlling. So to do this, I'm going to create a second trigger blueprint. So we'll right-click and do Blueprint class would do an actor, I'm going to call this carrot change. Character. Trigger. Will open that up and we'll do the same thing. We'll add a new collision box, will move this up. I've set this to its hidden in game to false. And we'll compile it and go to the Event Graph. I'm going to use the beginner actor overlap here. So to start with, we'll control another character that I placed in a level. I'll go to the third person map here, and I'll just drag in a ThirdPersonCharacter. I'm over here. Then we'll go back to our change character trigger here. And we'll drag out from other actor and we'll cast to character again. From that we want to get its controller will do get, gets controller. Then we're going to drag out from Get Controller and search for possess and use the process node. Now, you notice I'm not casting to my BP example controller. And that's because we don't need to, because this possess event exists in the player controller that is the parent of our example controller. So there's no need to cast to it. We can already access it. And we'll connect this up to our cost node. Now, this allows us to take control of a pump. So what we'll do is we'll drag out from input and will promote variable. This will create a new **** variable for us. And with that point variable selected, just gonna get rid of the searcher. And we'll take on instance editable. So that way when we select our character, change it, change character trigger and then level will be able to select a point control. So it will just do that. Now, I'll drag in my change carrots trigger. I'll put it over here and I'll make it a little bit bigger as well like that. Now, in my details panel over here, under default, you can see in ****, I can select a point control and I would just pick our ThirdPersonCharacter. So that's the character over here, like that. And now we can go back to our change character and make sure that's compiled. Now we can test this out, so we'll hit play. So we've got our normal character like before we can run around. If I run into my mission trigger and I press one, you can see that this is now returning true. But if I run into my change character, you'll see that now we've taken control of this other character over here. You see our old character over there still running around. If I press one, you will see that our mission variable is still true even though we're controlling a different character. That's because our player controller is still the same blueprint. It was. When we are controlling that character over that. Now we can also take control of characters that have been spawned during gameplay. And to do that, if we go to our change character trigger here, we're going to delete this poem variable for now, because we're gonna be creating a newborn using the spawn active from class node. Now, we'll go more into detail about using this node in the future. But essentially, it allows you to create new actors and the level during gameplay, we get to class. So this is the blueprint that we'd want to spawn. So for us that's gonna be the ThirdPersonCharacter. And we get, say, a spawn location. So I'll drag out and search for make. We don't want that one, sorry, we want make transform like that. And that allows us to set a location and rotation. We need to provide a location for our characters to spawn up. So I'll just do get back to location now. We'll drag out from that and do an add node just to add some distance between our character spawn and change code to trigger. So I'll add say 200 and the Z and maybe 400 and the X like that. So that tells our character where we want it to be spawned. And then we have this return value and this gives us a reference to the new character that we've just spawned. Now because our character is a child of a character type, and characters are children of the pawn type. We can plug this straight into the important option here. So now when I compile and hit Play, we can run into our change character trigger and you'd see it spawns, I say new character in at their location. We said we've taken control of that character. So that's how you can spawn new characters in and take control of them with your player controller. Now what you may want to destroy that leftover character that when I no longer controlling. So what we can do is go back to the character trigger, an inherent. We need to do a few more things. So first we need to store a controller variable reference. And the reason for that is if you remember, this is a pure function. Pure functions will run every connection they have. Now, if we try and destroy our character before we spawn a new one and possess it, what will happen is when we try to possess it or get controller node will run and it will use the target of a character. But if we've destroyed that character, then it will no longer have a controller for us to use to possess the new character. She's a little bit hard to get your head around, but we'll, we'll drag out from get controller and will promote it to a variable. We'll call it overlap controller, like that, which connects up to here. So now we're just storing a reference to the controller as soon as we overlap it. And we can actually disconnect the target now from over here. Then from our overlap controller we can just drag out and do get controlled ****. This note just allows us to get a reference to whichever pawn our controller is controlling. So we can drag out from that and we're going to destroy it. Because this is still a reference to our old character that we no longer one. So we can do that. Then we take our overlap controller variable and plug that into the target of our possess. So your code should look like this. And we can compile this. So now when we jump into the level and hit Play, if I run into my trigger now you can see that I've spawned a new character. I've got control of it, but old character that we run into the box width is gone. And if we do it again, you can see that we spawn another character. That old character has gone again. So that's the basics of how you can spawn in new characters and destroy old ones. Now, there's one other note that I want to talk to you about and that's the unprocessed notes. So if you go back to the change character trigger here, I'm just going to delete this code now because we don't need that anymore. And we can actually get rid of this overlap controller because we don't need that either. Now when we drag out from the controller, you remember this The possess node. There's also the unprocessed node. So if we create an unprocessed node, it's essentially just tells the controller to stop controlling whatever character, vehicle, any **** that it's controlling. So if we connect this up now, when we hit that collision box, we're going to lose control of our character. So when I run into that, you can see that my characters stuck running on the spot. I can't control it. I can't move my camera. And that's because we've no longer controlling this character or any character in our level. That's gonna be it for our player controller lesson. Hopefully you have a little bit of a better understanding of how they work. 22. Basics (GameMode): Hey everyone. In this lesson we're going to take a closer look at the Game Mode blueprint type. So essentially the Game Mode is what tells the engine which controller we want each player to start with, as well as which character we want each player to start with in our level. So if we go to the third-person game mode that we have in our content browser hip and open it up. You can see that we've got the class defaults open here, and it gives us a few different options under the classes. Now, we're just going to be focusing on the controller and Default Pawn class for this lesson, because those are the main ones that you'll be changing. We will be going over the other settings in a future lesson. But for the player controller class, this is the player controller blueprint that will be spawned for each player that joins the game. Now currently it's set to BP example controller from our last lesson. But if we wanted to, we could click this and change this to another controller. If we wanted to. Then we have the Default Pawn Class. Now, currently it's set to the BP, third-person character because that's the default value. This is the third person template. But if we wanted to, if we add another character, say a vehicle, for example, that we wanted to start with. Instead, we could select that here in the drop-down. Now, because this blueprint doesn't actually have any code in it, It's given us this view. But if you want to get to the main full blueprint editor, you can always just click this option up here to open up the main photo editor. And that gives us access to all the settings you would expect, the components, the Event Graph and so on. Now the game mode does exist in the level, is a child of the actor types, so it can have components. We can also write code in it like any other blueprint. We can also create our own game mode. So if we go to the Content Browser and just right-click, go to Blueprint Class. And we've got an option for Game Mode base here, but that's a little bit more of a cut down version of the game mode. So if we go in all classes and search for Game Mode, you can see that there's a Game Mode option here. I prefer to use this one just because it comes with a bit more functionality built-in. So we'll click Select to create a new blueprint using the game mode. And I'm just going to call this BP example Game Mode. If we double-click that, we can open up. And I'm just going to drag the tab up to the top here. Now, other than being the blueprint where we can set our starting controller and pawn classes, we can actually add code to our game mode. Now, typically, you would add code to the game mode that moves the game along in some way. So for example, if I'm begin play, you wanted a timer to count down and then the game to end or a new map to open. You would typically do that inside your game mode blueprint. Now a useful thing about the camo blueprint is you can pretty much access it anywhere. So an example of this is if we were to go to our ThirdPersonCharacter hip. Now I've got some leftover code from our previous lessons, so we'll just delete this. And if we right-click and search for it gets game mode. We can use this node to get a reference to our current game mode. And currently it's a game mode base output. So what we can do is we can just drag out on cost to our example game mode. And the reason we can do that is because our example Game Mode is a child of the game mode. And the Game Mode is a child of the Game Mode base. So we can use that cost node to access our functions and variables from our example game mode. So if I go back to my game mode here and I create a new variable, I'm just going to call this game name. And I'm going to set mine to a name type. And I'll set this to say def much for example. We can pull this. If we go back to our ThirdPersonCharacter, we can drag out and search, forget game name. We can access that variable. If I add in, say print string, we can just print string that out when we press one on our keyboard. And we'll compile. Now, if we were to hit play right now, this wouldn't work and there's a few reasons flat. We haven't actually set our game to use our example Game Mode yet. And also we haven't set our game mode to use our third-person character. So if we go back to our example game motor, and then the cost defaults, we can set our default controller class and our default **** class. So I'm going to set the default **** to the BP ThirdPersonCharacter. And we'll set the controller class. We can change this to our controller from our last lesson or just leave it as player controller. I'm going to leave mine as player controller for now. We'll just compile. Then we need to go to the project settings. So if I go to edit up here on the top and we go to Project Settings, I'll just drag this across from my other screen. Then we need to go to maps and modes. Now, maps and modes as well, we can set the default game mode for our gang, and this will be the game mode for every map that we create. So currently it's set to third-person game mode. If I change this here, I want to select my BP example game mode. So now when we create new level or we hit Play and our current level, it will use the example game mode instead of a third person game mode. Now, from in here, we can also set our default **** class and our default controller if we wanted to, personally, I prefer to just go to the blueprint itself. So go to our example Game Mode and change it in there. But if you want to, you can change those settings and here as well. Now there is another place that we can set the game mode and that's in our world settings. So if we close our project settings and go to the third person map, I'm going to go to Windows and I'm going to tick on world settings. Yours might already be ticked on, but mine isn't. So I'm just going to take that on. And then here there are settings for this specific level. You can see that we've got a game mode category and we can override a game mode. And this basically just says that for only this level, we want to use a different game mode from our default one that we just set in our project settings. You can see that this is actually set to our third person game mode. So if I was to hit play, even though we've set our example Game Mode in the project settings, this just this level on its own would actually still use the third person game mode. This setting is useful because you may want to gain mode that allowed levels use, apart from a couple that you might have a specific game mode that you want to use for those levels. So you would use this setting to take control of the Game Mode and sell it to whatever you want for this specific level. So for now, I'm just going to set this to none, or we can just click it and select none. And that will clear the game mode override. So now when we hit play and we press one, you can see that it's printing out death match, which is that variable that we set inside our example game mode. But we can access it really easily just by using the get Game Mode node casting to our game mode and then we can access that variable. And this will show work for events and functions as well. Now, lastly, I just want to cover some of the built-in functions that come with getting most. So if we go to our example game mode, now, if you remember with functions, we can override functions from our parent blueprints. So if we click this override option here, you can see we've got quite a few functions here, most of them coming from our game mode base. Now if you remember from our functions lesson, when you override a function, it basically tells the engine that you don't want the code that's inside this function in the Game Mode base to run, you want to use your own code. Now as a warning, you want to be careful with overriding these functions because pretty much overriding any of them can break your project. So for example, if I was to override, spawn Default, Pawn that transform, if I click that, you can see that we've got this function that's built into the game mode base. And this function is responsible for actually spawning in the character. So if I compile this and I hit play now, you can see that I no longer have a character and I've no longer controlled anything. And that's all because I've just override it. Function that actually spawns our character. So I'm not gonna go through all of these functions. There are quite a few. Some of them are self-explanatory, some are a little bit more complex, but just be aware when you are overriding these functions. If you do choose to do that, be careful. They can break your project quite easily because these are like core functions for making sure that the game actually works. Also, if you hover over these functions, so you can see you actually get reasonably decent tool tips that tell you exactly what each one of these functions do and are responsible for. So that's gonna be it for our game modes lesson. Hopefully you now understand a bit more about what game modes actually do in the engine and how you can use them in your projects. 23. Basics (Utility Nodes): Hey everyone. In this lesson we're gonna be taking a close look at the utility nodes. Utility nodes are useful for a few different things. They allow us to choose which code is going to be run, how often that code is run. And they can also help us just tidy up the code of our project. So you can see from our last lesson, I've actually restarted just with a brand new third-person template. So you might want to do the same as well. And then I'm just going to open up the ThirdPersonCharacter. And I've added a few of the more commonly used utility nodes here that we're just going to go through in this lesson. So to start with, we'll take a look at the sequence note. So if we move this up here for now, now a sequence note takes in one execution input and has multiple execution outputs. We can add new outputs by clicking the Add pin button here. And we can remove them just by right-clicking and selecting the remove execution pin option. The way the sequence node works is it takes an input like say, a beginning play. Note. We can connect that up here. And it will run any code connected to the then 0 PM. Once all of that code is executed, it will then run the than one code and then the next code and the next code and so on until all of the pins have run. Now, the main use for the sequence node is to just keep your code a little bit more organized. With blueprints. If you have a lot of code, you can tend to have these really long lines of code. A sequence node allows you to just break that up so you can have multiple lines and keep things a little bit more organized. You can also use the sequence node inside a function. So if I create a new function, I drag out when I searched short sequence in C, I can create a sequence node. The way it works inside a function, just something you want to be aware of. It say I had some code up here, say I print string and then if node, and then if I had from hair a return node. Now remember when you run a return node, it finishes the function. So if this return node where to run any code that you had connected to any of these other pins inside your function wouldn't run. So that's just something to be aware of when using sequences inside a function. So now we'll go back to our event graph and we'll take a look at the gate node. So if we delete on those up pit, again, allows you to run code that's connected up to the exit at a frequency of whatever inputs to the internode. So what I mean by that is if I connect a tick up to the internode here, then our exit code will run every tech. And the gate allows us to essentially open and close this exit PM. So if I add a, if I right-click and such what input, input of them, one, we can create an input of them, one. Connect that up to open, copy and paste this. Now select the note here, this little keyboard icon and press two, and actually just changes this to a 2-input now. And I connect this up and I'll just add a print string here that we're doing this all inside the first-person, third-person character. Sorry. We'll compile and we'll go to the map. It play. Now you can see that my print string isn't running. And if I go back to the third-person character here and use the debug option. You can see that the code for my tick is running. It's going into the gate, but the exit isn't running. Now if I go back to my level, I press one. You can see that that print string is now running. And if we go to our third person again, you can see that the exit code is now running. And that's because I pressed one and I opened the gate. If I press two, I can now close the gate. If I go back, you can see that the code is no longer running and that print string isn't running either. Now there are a couple other options on our gate node. We can use toggle. So this will basically just the gates currently open and we want to toggle, it will close it. If the gates currently closed and we run toggle, toggle, it will open up and then we have an option to start close. So currently it starts closed. But if I untick this, we hit Play, you'll see that it actually just starts running instead. Now, I've been running the gate with a techno. So if I just exit out of play here, we could use a timer instead of a tech node, which is probably better for performance. So we'll just do a plug-and-play, will connect up a timer. So if you remember the setTimeout by event node, we drag out from this and create a custom event which called a timer. We can connect this up to our gate instead of a tech, that is to say 0.5. So every 2.5th this time will run, will take on looping. Now, when we hit play, you can see that our Hello print string is only running every 2.5th because that's, that timer is what is controlling our exit output. So next we'll move on to our next node. So we'll just exit out of the plane editor there. And we'll use the do once note. Now, the D wants to know pretty much does what it says. It takes in an input, runs a complete and then if it's run again, it won't run the complete code. So we can try this out. If I just delete my gate note, it will connect this up to our timer that we just used and plug this into completed. So we should see our print string one. Hello once and then nothing else happens. So I'll hit play and see that that happens. And even if I go to my ThirdPersonCharacter here, you can see my time is running, but the D once is blocking it. Now we can reset this do once node. If I take the one pin here and plug that in to reset, and I can pull out and hit Play. You can see hellos printed out, but it's not printing anymore. If I press one, you can see it's printed out again, but now again it's stopped it. So I'd have to keep pressing one to keep opening and resetting that do want snowed. Like our gate node, it does have a stock closed option. So if I take this on and we hit Play, you'll see that we don't get any print string until I press one, which resets that node. Now if we exit plan editor, we'll move on to the next node, which is the do n. And n basically does the same thing as I'll do want snowed. But it allows us to control how many times this node will run before it blocks the code. So if I delete this, I plug in the enter two timer here and the exit to our print string and say, we want this code to run five times and then we want it to stop. So we can plug the counter into our print string here, and this will just output how many times this is run. If we can pull, we hit Play. You can see that it's printing out the numbers, but once it gets to five is stopped because ARRA do, a node is blocking the exit. And we can reset this node as well. So if I take the reset pin, plug that into one, hit play, we can reset, or sorry, count to ten or five, sorry, then we'll press one and you'll see I can reset it again. So now we'll go back to our ThirdPersonCharacter and take a look at the next node, which is the flip-flop node. Now this basically just when it gets run, it we'll run a. Then if this node gets run again, it will run B. And it will just keep going between these two pins each time you run it. So if I connect this up to our one input event here, and I print string from a, we can do, I'll just set this to a copy and paste this and set this to. We will compile and play. You can see that our timer there is still running. But if I press one and you see a, B, a B. So you can use this to cycle between two parts of code. As a side note, with the flip-flop, you probably won't be using it when you're a little bit more confident with coding. But it can be handy if you're creating a quick prototype or something. But typically you would want to use say, a branch, node and a Boolean. And that would give you much more control over how this code would work. And then moving on lastly, we have our latent nodes. And if you remember that's the latent because they have these little clock symbols and the corners. Now we've used the delay node before, allows us to essentially hold the code up for a certain amount of time. So if we were to delete this code out with delete this, and I'll remove this as well. So when we press one, we could have a delay and then we could do some things. So I could say call the jump of them. This will actually make our character jump. I'll set the delay to say two seconds. So now when I hit play and I press 12 seconds later, you see that the character jumps. Now there's a different type of this node. So if we exit out of play here and go back to the ThirdPersonCharacter. We can use the re-trigger are both delay. Now the difference here is if I was to say just keep pressing one while my delay node is counting down that the duration, this node would just ignore the input and it would count two and then jump would run. Now, a re-trigger or delay will keep resetting every time it receives an input. So if I use the word trigger delay instead of just the delay node, her and I hit Play and I start pressing one. You've seen my carrots won't jump even after two seconds because I keep resetting that timer. If I stop pressing it, it will wait two seconds now and our character will jump. Now, there's one last note that I wanted to show you, and that's the delay until next tick node. So if I drag this up here, you can see that this is also a latent node, and this essentially just blocks of code for one frame or makes the code weight one frame before the completed pinna then runs. So if we were to use this with the one and I'll jump function here, you won't notice any difference for I press one, it will seem like it's instant, but it is actually waiting one frame before it tells the jump function to work. Now, this does have uses sometimes in blueprints, you might need to wait a frame before a variable gets set or something like that. So that node can be useful for those kinds of things. That's all for our utilities nodes lesson, we will be using most of these again in future lessons, so you'll have a chance to get familiar with them. 24. Basics (Game Instance): Hey everyone. In this lesson we're going to be taking a look at the game instance blueprint. Now the game instance blueprint is created when our game first starts up and remains there until we close the game. And unlike other blueprints, if we change level, our game instance isn't destroyed. It's permanent for as long as we're running the game. And that makes it a really useful blueprint for storing information that you need to transfer to other levels. For example, you may have variables that you want to transfer from your main menu level into your game world. Well, you can use a game instance to do that. So to start with, we're going to create a new blueprint. And that blueprint is going to send our character to a different level. So we're right-click, go to Blueprint Class, create an actor. I'm going to call my DP underscore teleport. Teleport. There we go. And we'll open that up. I'm just going to drag mine up to the top bar here. Now this is gonna be the blueprint that actually sends our player to a different level. So we'll add a box collision just so we know when they enter this actor, I'm just going to move mine up a little bit like that. Then we'll head to the Event Graph. And we're just going to be using the actor begin overlap node. So it will delete these two and we'll drag out from other actor and just cost to character to make sure that we only run this code if the overlapping actor is a character, then we're going to use the open level notes. So we'll drag out and search for open level, and we're going to use Open level by name. And this allows us to just tell the engine to open a new level. And it will open the level that we set the name for. This I'm just going to drag out and create variables. So we'll do promote the variable and we'll leave it as level name and a name variable type like that. I'm also going to take on instance editable, and then we'll compile. Next, we need to create a new level that we're going to teleport to. So we'll head to the Content Browser, then to third-person maps. And in here we've got our third person maps, so we're just going to duplicate this. Now. I can right-click and hit Duplicate for some reason. But what we can do is just drag this over the maps folder. You can see we can do Copy here. Now actually create us a copy of our current map. Now we'll open up our third person underscore to map. I'm just going to select Save actors. Now we're in that second map and I'm just going to delete a few things so we can tell the difference between the two. So we just select all these things over here, delete these. So we know that when we enter this map, we are in our second map. Now we'll head back to our third-person map. So we'll double-click to open that. I'm going to select, Save, select it. And now we're back in our first first-person map. And we're going to add our teleport to this map. So we'll go to blueprints and drag one in. I'm going to make mine a little bit bigger. We can also go to our teleport blueprint, select the box and just turn off hidden in game so we can actually see the collision like that. And now we need to use that variable that we created on our teleport to tell it which level we want to teleport to. So we'll go to Details and you see we've got our level name here. So what we're gonna do is go to maps, just right-click or third-person underscore two, we'll do Rename, then do Control C, and click away. And then we'll paste that name into our level name here. And then we can test this out. So I'll hit play or run into the box. And you can see that we've now transported to our new second-level. Now when we open a new level, everything in the previous level is destroyed. Our character player controller game modes is all destroyed. And then when the new level is opened up, our character is being spawned. A new controller and Game Mode are also created for our new level. So that means any variables that you had set in your character before we transported over to this new level, all of those will be lost and we'll start again with a fresh character. And to just give you an example of that will exit out of plane editor, head to our blueprints than third-person character. I'm just going to create a new boolean. We'll call it example, and we'll use a tick node. So I'm just going to right-click and search for tech. On tech, we're just going to print out whether or not our example variable is true. So we use a print string. We'll connect this up to here, like that. And now I'm going to add an input, so we'll call this input event one. So when we press one, I want to set this variable to true. So we'll do this and then we'll compile. So now when I hit play, you can see that we're currently in our first third-person map. If I press one, you can see that our variable becomes true. But if I run into our box and we go to a new level, you can see that that variable is now switch to be false because we've got a new character blueprint. Now we can use our game instance to actually save that variable for us and carry over to the next level. So what we'll do is exit out. We're going to create a new blueprint instance. We'll right-click and we'll go to blueprints. We want Blueprint class. And in the options here, there actually is no game instance class. So we're going to go down to all classes and search for instance. And then we're going to select the game instance down here and hit Select. And now that's created us a new game instance blueprint. So we'll call this BP underscore example, game instance like that. Then we can open that up. And you can see that this is just a basic blueprint. It doesn't even have any built-in variables. You can see if I click class defaults, there's no variables here. This is just a pretty simple blueprint that we can use to store variables. We can create functions, macros like other blueprints as well. There are some override double functions in here, so you can override the init, which is basically the function that will run when we first create our game instance, we have a network error, which I won't be covering in this lesson. We've got shut down and this will run when we actually close out our game. Then we've got travel error. And this will run if we have some sort of problem transporting to a new level. For now we want our game instance to actually store a variable for us. So we're going to create that variable. I'm just going to call this example again. And we'll compile. Now before we open up our new level, we actually need to set this variable. So it will go to our ThirdPersonCharacter here and we'll create a new function. I'm just going to call this update gain instance, like that. Now the cool thing about game instances is you can pretty much access them from any blueprint the same as the game mode. So we can just right-click search for Game Instance. And you can see we can use the get Game Instance and this just returns a reference to our game instance. Now because we created our own game instance blueprint, we need to cast that to be able to access its variables. Or you could set up a Blueprint Interface if you wanted to. But we're just going to stick with casting. So I'm going to use a cost to example, and then we want example, game instance like that. So now we will just move these nodes down here and connect them up to the input of our function. Then we want to use set that example variable that we've created enough. So we'll do set example, connect this up here. And then we'll grab our example variable from our character, and we will plug that to set. The set node will compile. So now we actually need to run this function before we open up our new level. So we'll head to teleport and we will inherit, run that function. So we're going to need to change our costs note here to a third person costs. So we will drag out and do cost. Third, we want the ThirdPersonCharacter because that's the blueprint that has our new function will drag out and search for update game instance. And that will set our variable inside our game instance to whatever it is from our character. And then we'll connect this up to our open level like that. So now when our character spawns, we need it to actually read the example variable we've created inside the example game instance. So to do that, which can go to the Event Graph, will create a begin planets. So such will begin play again, which can get the instance or sorry, get the game instance. And that will give us access to the blueprint, will cost to the example Game Instance. And then we'll get its example variable. So we'll drag out and do get example. And we'll use that to set our characters example variable. So we'll set this like that. And we'll run this on Begin place. So whenever our character spawns it, read whatever the example variable is in our game instance, and then set that to its example variable. Now there's a couple of more things we need to do before we can test this out. The first thing is we haven't actually told the engine to use our new example Game Instance. Now we don't actually do this in the game mode like most of the things, we actually do this in our project settings. So we'll have to edit then Project Settings. And we're going to search for Game Instance. And you want the game instance class here, and we'll change this to the BP example game instance. Now the engine knows to use that game instance. And then secondly, we're gonna go back to our second map that we created. So I'm just going to open that up and we'll hit Save here. And in here I'm actually going to add our teleport blueprint here as well. So I'll just drag that in, scale up to be a bit bigger. I'm adding this just so we can move back and forth between our two levels. We need to set a level name. So that'll be the name of our first map, which is third-person map. I'm just going to right-click select, Rename, copy this, and then paste that into our level variable here like that. Then we're going to head back to our first third-person map. So we'll just open that up and then we'll hit Select, Save, select it. And then we're ready to actually test this out. So I'll hit Play. You can see that the value is currently false because we've just started and I haven't set the value. But if I press one, it becomes true. Now, if we went into the teleport, it will remain true even once we're in our second level. And that's because our character is reading that variable from our example Game Instance and then setting up. And it doesn't matter how many times we switch between levels, it will always read that value because our game instance isn't being destroyed unlike our character and controller. Now of course, this is a pretty simple example, which is storing one variable in our game instance. And then reading up from the character, you can store as many variables as you like in your game instance blueprint. And you can access those variables pretty much from any blueprints. So we used our ThirdPersonCharacter, but if we wanted to, we could access our game instance in the teleport. So we could do get game instance. We can access our game instance in here as well. So that's it for this lesson. Hopefully you now understand the uses of the game instance and how you can use it in your future projects. 25. Additional Lessons (Traces): Hey everyone. In this lesson we're gonna be taking a look at traces. Traces allow us to take a start and end location and then check what's between those two locations. So to get started, we'll create some example blueprints. I'm just going to right-click and create a new blueprint class. It's going to be an actor, just going to call this BP trace cubed. We'll open that up. And I'm just going to drag the tab up to the top pair. And we'll add a new component. I'm just going to add a cube component that will compile that. And we'll go to the Event Graph. So we're going to set this cube up so that it will do a trace to another cube every frame. So it will start by deleting these begin play and the actor begin overlap nodes. Actually use the tech node and we'll create a new variable and we'll just call this cube. And I'm going to set its type to BP underscore trace, trace cube. And we'll compile then in the Details panel which is going to take on instance editable like that. And we'll compile again. Then we'll drag out and we'll get our other cube. We want to check that it is set, so we'll use an Israeli node just to make sure we don't get any errors. And then from r is valid, we'll drag out and we'll search for trace. Now, if we scroll up here, you can see that we've got quite a few different trace nodes. They're all under collision here. We're going to start with just a simple line trace by channel. So I'll create that. Now. A line trace is essentially a single pixel line that will go from the start to the end location, checking if it hits anything along the way. Now, there are a few other options on this node, but we'll set up our example first and then I'll explain those. So what we'll do is we'll drag out from our other cube. We want to get up to location. And we're going to plug this into the end location. And then for the start location, we're just going to use our current cubes location. So do get actor location. So our trace will start at this keeps location and it will travel to the other cube location. Now when I say travel, trace happens in one frame, it's not like it moves slowly along. It all happens in one frame and essentially just checks, is there an object between the start and end locations? I'm also going to turn on the Draw Debug here. I'll set it to one frame, and this essentially allows us to see the trace in our game, usually traces are invisible, but this option allows us to see a trace while we're playing in the game. One frame will mean that the trace will only be visible for one frame. Duration means that the trace will be visible for however long the drawer time is set to, so it's five seconds by default. And then persistent means that the trace will be visible forever. So because we're drawing our trace every frame, we can just set this for one frame. So now we will just compile this blueprint and go to our level. I'm just going to drag it in a cube. And we'll drag in a second cube. And I'm going to, with my second cube selected, I'm just going to use the other Cube option down here in the details. And we'll select R of a cube. And I'm just going to move them both up so we can see them a little bit better when we hit play. So when I hit play, you can see that we've got this single pixel line that's going from this cube over to the cube that we selected. If I press F1 to go into wireframe mode, you can see that the trace begins at the center of our key pair and is read. And then once it hits the other cube, we get this red square and then the line goes green. And that essentially means that up until that red square, the trace hasn't hit anything. Then the red square indicates that it's hit something, and then the light turns green because it's, the tracers hit something past that point. Now, you may be wondering why are traced and hit the cube that it came from. And if we exit out of plane editor mode and go back to our trace cube, you can see that there's actually an option here called ignore self on the line trace. And that means the trace will essentially just ignore the actor that did the trace. So because we're in our cube, if I untick this and compile and then hit Play, you can see that the line is already green. And if we hit F1, you can see our trace is actually hitting our cube as soon as it starts and then the rest of the line goes green. See it doesn't actually hit our second cube. Now, that's because this is a single line trace. It will hit one object and then it doesn't care about the rest after that. Now going back to our trace keep, there's a few other options so we can set actors to ignore. This allows us to essentially just set actors that we want our line traced to completely ignore. So if I was to drag out and do a make array, this allows us to just add individual actors to an array and then add that to our line trace. So if I was to plug my other Cuban here and plug that into the array, I'm going to tick back on ignore self because we want our trace to ignore the cube that does the trace will compile when I hit play, you can see if I press F1 or trace isn't hitting anything anymore because we've told it we don't want it or sorry, we want it to ignore our second cube. Now, heading back to our trace cube blueprint, there's another option here called trace channel. Now trace channels are kind of like layers that we can use our traces on. Now, the reason we have this is you may have an object that you want to block one type of trace but not another. So right now you can see that we've got it set to visibility. This is a trace channel that's built into the engine. If I go over to my cube here in the level and I select it, I'm going to select the cube component. I'll just make this a little bit larger so we can see what I'm going to scroll down to the collision category. Under Collision Presets, you can see it's currently set to block all dynamic. We click the drop-down here. You can see we've got these options here that they're grayed out. That's because we've got a preset selected. So if we click the drop down here and click Custom, that will allow us to customize the settings. So you can see that for trace responses, we have visibility and we have camera. Now, if I set our key pair to ignore the visibility trace channel, and I go back to my cube. I'm just going to disconnect the other cube here from our make array. So now I'll trace, will hit the other cube. I'm going to hit Compile and hit Play. You can see if I press F1, the trace still isn't hitting the cube, therefore has to go back with our cube selected here. Select our cube and set it to block the visibility again, and then hit Play. You see that it is now hitting that cube. And that's because we're telling this cube mesh to either ignore or block this type of trace. Now it traces are used for all sorts of things in game development. They used for interaction to determine what the character is looking at. You can use them for things like footprints systems to detect what type of ground the characters standing on. You can use them for weapons. So hit Scan weapons, you use traces. So any game where there's no bullet travel time that typically using traces for the bullet calculations. So traces have a really wide variety of uses in game development. But the important thing about traces, we can actually get information about the object that it hit. So if I exit out of our plan editor here, we go back to our trace cube. You can see that we've got some outputs. Now if I drag out from my outfit here, we can break it. And that's because it's actually just a struct. You can see hips results structure. So we can break that. And that gives us this node here with all of the information about what object, the trace head. Now we've also got returned value here, and this basically just says whether or not the trace actually hits something. So typically you'd probably want to do and if node here and get information about the object only if the trace actually hit something. Now I'm gonna go through some of these variables. I won't cover all of them because there's quite a few, but I'll go through the more commonly used ones at the top. Here we've got blocking here. This basically does the same thing as a return value. It says whether or not the line trace hit something, and that's a Boolean. Then moving down, we have distance. Now, this is how far from the star the line trace hits something. So if the distance between, say, start and end was 500 centimeters and the trace hit something at 100 centimeters from the start, then this distance value would be a 100. Next we've got the location and impact point. Now, for a line trace, these will actually just be exactly the same value, but they will be different for some of our other trace nodes that we will look at in a moment. Next, we've got one of the more important pins, which is our Hit Actor. Now this gives us a reference to whichever actor or line trace hits. And it's very useful for things like if you're creating a gun, that Pfizer line trace or an interaction system, you wanna know which actor the line trace actually hit and using the Hit Actor pin here is how you would do that. We also have access to the hip component. So that'll be the component inside the actor that we hit. So for example, our cube, we would be hitting the cube component. So this hit component would be a reference to the cube inside our cube actor. These pins work like we've used actor pins and component pens before. We could drag out from this, we could use a cost to determine if it's say, Cast to ThirdPersonCharacter. And if the trace hit a third-person character, we'd be able to access that information using our costs nodes. We can use our interface nodes as well, and we can get information from the actor. So we could do something like getLocation. And we can use this act of pin, like we have done with previous act dependent types before. We also have access to the bone name that the trace hits. So if I trace hits a skeletal mesh, so that's an animated mask mesh that has a skeleton. This will return the actual bone name of the collision part that the trace hits. So you can use these to access bone names. And then down here we've got our trace, start and trace. And these would just be the same as our inputs up here for start and end. Now, so far we've only been looking at the line trace by channel. Now there is another line trace node. So if we search for lying trace, you can see that we've also got a line trace by profile and align trace for objects as well. So if I create a line trace for objects, this is essentially the same node. It does the same thing we have are out here. We have the start and end. We have the same settings, but instead of a trace channel, we have this array input that's an object type. If I drag out from here and use them make array that allows us to actually set what values are going to be in this input array. So you can see that by default has got a world static here. I click the drop-down. You can see that it's giving us some object types. Now, if we go back to our cube with our cube selected here, and go to the cube component. This refers to the object type listed here. So you can see that this is set to world to dynamic, which means this cube or only be held by traces that have an input of world dynamic. This line trace here with world static would actually completely ignore that cube. So that's what the input object types are referring to. It's this object type within our Collision Presets. We could quickly hook this up to see if I just plug this into my as valid, I'm going to delete our previous line trace node. We'll plug this into our star and listen to our end. And we will connect this up. We can leave that for now. We just set the Draw Debug Type two for one frame will compile and then we'll hit Play. You can see that if I press F1, that trace is completely ignoring the cube. But if we go back to the trace, the trace cube and we change this to world dynamic. Hit Compile, hit Play. You can see that now that trace is hitting a cube because it's hitting that Q because it's the same object type. And the cool thing with this is we can actually set multiple types. So we can just add a new pen and we could add wild static as well. We could add another input. We could set this to ****, for example. We could add as many as we want this trace to hip. Now the last line trace note that we will look at is the line trace by profiles. So if I search for line trace by profile, now the inputs are the same as our previous nodes, but we've got this profile name. Now that's referring to the object responses that the object we're trying to hit has. So we go back to our map here, select our cube, and in the collision settings you can see we've got object responses. Now, I'll use **** as an example. So you can see **** is set to block. So if I go back to my tracer, I'm going to set profile name to connect this up like we have done before. Connect start to get active location and end up to our other cubes, actor location. We'll turn on the Draw Debug Type two for one frame. We'll hit Compile. And when we hit play, you can see that our line trace is hitting that of a cube over there. But if we accept and I select the cube and select our cube component and we set our **** object responsive to ignore. Then I hit play. You can see that our trace is no longer hitting the cube because our trace is done in that profiles object response. And our cube, it's no longer blocking that trace anymore. Next we're going to take a look at multi traces. Now if you remember, when our trace currently hits something, it no longer cares about anything else along its path, it goes green and it doesn't hit any other objects. But with multi trace as it allows us to hit multiple objects in one trace. So if we head back to our trace cube it now I'm going to delete this trace note that we've been using and I'll make rent. If I search for a line trace, you can see that we've got multiline trace versions of the nodes that we've looked at. So we can do a multi-line trace by channel. And you can see all of the inputs are the same, but instead of a single out here, we have an array of outputs. And this works like a usual array. We can say get the getter result at a certain index. So we could use the get node input an index that we want to access from the array and output are hit results. So if we drag out from our get node, then we do a break. You can see that we have the same break note we had before. And now we're accessing the first hit result from our array of outfits. Now we can also loop through these results as well. So we can use a loop node a for each loop note, and if you remember, that will cycle through all of the results or all of the entries in our array. And it will give us access to each one of them using our array elements. So again, we can use a brake kit result node, access all of that information about each one of the objects that our line traces hit. Now other than having multiple outputs for our hip results, the multiline trace works in exactly the same way as a normal line trace by channel node, we provide a start location and end location. We can say a channel that we want to do the trace on. So currently it's set to some visibility. We can set whether or not we can see the trace. I'm just going to set mine for, for one frame. So now if we compile and we hit Play, you can see that our trace is working. But the cool thing about multiline traces is that we can have multiple hits. Now to do that, I'm going to drag in a new cube over here. I'm going to set my first cube to trace to that one instead. Now if I hit play, you can see that we're still enter wireframe with F1. You can see I'm still only hitting one of our cubes. If I go back to our code and I can actually drag out from outfits, I'll do length will delete this trace, the loop node for now. This will actually tell us how many results are in our hit result array. So if we compile and hit Play, you see that it's only hitting one object even though it's tracing to this cube. Now the reason for that is this cube is still blocking the visibility trace, which means that the trace can't travel through and hit other objects. To allow that, we have to set our cube to actually overlap. The trace. So we go to visibility here with our cube selected, and I'm going to set it to overlap. Now when we hit play, you can see that we're hitting two objects. If we enter our wireframe, you can see that we're hitting this first cube and then we're seeing our second cube. So that's just something to keep in mind if you do work with multi-line traces. And the future is if you want the trace to be able to travel through an object and still hit other objects. The object needs to be set to overlap instead of block. If it's set to block, then any objects at the trace hits after that object won't be outputted in our results from our multi-line trace node. Now, there are other types of trace nodes. So far we've only used the line trace. If we right-click and search for trace, we scroll up here. You can see that we've got a box trace by channel, multicast, trace by channel. We've got the sphere trace by channel. And essentially these will do the same thing as our channel. Line trace by channel, line trace by profile and line traced by objects, nodes. But instead of just a single pixel line actually gives us a shape. So if we were to select, say, for example, the square trace by channel, you can see that we've got the same sort of inputs. The only difference is we have a radius. This is the size of the sphere that are traceable bit. So if I delete our multi-line tracer, we can act up our sphere trace channel. I'll just connect this up to end, start and end. And we'll set the radius to say ten. That's the size of the sphere that will be going from start to end location. So we'll set the draw D bucket two for one frame will compile and then we'll hit Play. You can see that now instead of a single line, it's this sphere shaped trace. Now this just allows you to trace a bigger area. So say you didn't want a bullet to be one pixel in size when a gun fires it, maybe you wanted it to be a sphere that was 55 centimeters in diameter, then you could do that instead. Now, like our line trace, there is a multi-version of this node. So if I right-click and I search for sphere trace, you can see that we've got multi-scalar trace by channel, Maltese, fair trace by profile and multi sphere trace for objects. So we could create a multi sphere version of this node. You can see that it's exactly the same, but we have our radius input and we can output multiple hip results. Now I'm not gonna go through every single trace node because most of them are the same. They're just different versions for the multi trace and then the different trace by types and then the different shapes. But if you want to find them, you can always search for trace and search for say, box that will give you access to all of the box. Trace these top ones here with a single traces and then you've got the multi traces. You can search for sphere as well. This gives you access to all of the sphere traces. You can search for line, trace, line. This will give you access to other line traces. And then lastly you've got the capsule. These will give you access to all of the capsule trace types. Now, lastly, I said I would tell you the difference between the impacts point and the location on our break now, so if we click the down arrow here and open that up. Now on a line trace both the location and impact point will be exactly the same, but with a sphere, for example, the impact point and the location at different, the impact point will be the exact point that the sphere hits the surface of the cube. So if you imagine right on the edge of the sphere where the red boxes, that's the impact point. The very point that the sphere overlaps the box. Whereas the location pin here is the location of that sphere. So our sphere, the center of it, is actually further away from the surface of the cube. So that's the difference between the impact point. That's the exact point that the sphere overlaps, the cube and the location is the center of the cube when that overlap happens. Now that's it for our traces less than at the moment, we will be coming back to using traces again in some of our future lessons though. 26. Additional Lessons (Data Tables): Hey everyone. In this lesson we're gonna be taking a look at data tables. We use data tables to store information that we don't need to change during gameplay, but we can retrieve that information using blueprints. An example of when you might use a data table is for say, if you are creating an RPG or survival game where you had hundreds or maybe even thousands of different types of item and you're getting each one of those items are going to have some kind of information that doesn't actually change during gameplay, like for example, its name, item, description, and weight. Those values might not change during gameplay. So a data table would be a good way to store that information and then easily be able to retrieve it in the code. So let's get started. We need to create a new structure. And that's because data tables use structure to determine which information they can stop. So we'll right-click and we'll go to the blueprints, pop out and go to structure. I'm going to name mine S underscore and that's structure of example, struct. We'll open this up. And if you remember, we have a previous lesson on structures. So if you haven't seen that, I'd recommend checking that out. But we're just going to add a couple of new variables and we will give them names. So our first one article name. And we'll set this to a text variable type. We'll call the second one, wait. And we'll set this to a float. We'll call the next one damage. And we'll set this to an integer and will cause the last one health. And we'll set this to an integer as well. And then we'll save this struct. Now we're ready to create our data table. So we'll go back to the content browser, right-click and select the miscellaneous category. And then here we want to select Data Table. Now, here is where we select which struct we want our data table to use. So I'm going to click the drop-down and search for S underscore example struct. I'll select that and hit Okay. Now we'll name our data table. So I'll call mine example data table. And we'll double-click that to open it. And I'm just going to drag mine up to the top pip. So now we have a new UI Layout up here. We've got our data table. Now this is the current information that these tables storing. As you can see, it's currently empty. And then down here we have the row editor. So when we do have information in our data table, we can select a row, and this row editor will allow us to change the information that's stored in that particular row. So to create a new row or go up to the Add button and press that. Now you can see we've got a new row in the data table. And with that selected, I can change any of the variables that we created inside our struct for this particular row. Now we also have the row name. Now this is the name we'll use to access the information stored in this specific row when we're coding and blueprints. So you always want to make sure that you're giving your row names and your base tables user-friendly names. So we could rename this to say acts. For example, say we were creating a data table for items that are going to be in our RPG game. So you would have entries in the states table or new rows for every item. In here, you would set the item's name, for example, so we can set our name to act. Like I said, the weight ten, the damage to 20 for example. And now we've set this data in this specific rope. And if we wanted to, we could create another row. So we could click Add. And now we've got a new row. Maybe we wanted to store information about sorts so we could create a sword row in C. I've renamed the row name to sort, and I'll set the name to sort. Who set the weight to save five and our damage to ten, for example. Now there are a few other buttons up here that allow us to control our rows. So we have copy and paste. This allows you to copy the dataset in one row and paste it onto another. So if I select my AKS for example, and I do copy, and I select my sword wrote and I do Paste. You can see that it's now replaced the data in my sword row with the information that was set in my AKS row, you can see that the row name hasn't been changed, that still is set sword. That's because your row names need to be unique. So we couldn't create a new row, for example, and call it acts. You can see that it gives us an error because each row needs to have a unique name. Now we can also delete rows. So with my new row selected here, I can hit remove to remove the row. And we can also duplicate rows. So we can select row, hit duplicate and it will duplicate that row. You can see that it's giving it a new name called sword underscore 0. If now I'm just going to remove that sword underscore 0 and I'm going to set my information back to what it was for our SolidWorks. So I'll select Sort and I'll set this to sword. And we'll set this to, I think it was white F5 and damaged him. Now I'll show you how we can actually access this information that we're setting in our data table inside a blueprint. So we'll start by going to our ThirdPersonCharacter Blueprint. I'm just going to open that up. And if we right-click, we can search for Get Data Table row. You can see that we've got two options here. I'm going to select the get data table row node here and see we get this new node that we haven't used before. If we select our data table, this is how we set which data table we want to access information from. So we only have the example data table that I created. So we're going to select that. You can see that our role name has actually changed automatically into a little drop-down option. And we can see we've got both our acts and sword rows that we created inside our example DataTable. Now, these are just variable inputs. So say I had a row name variable that I wanted to plug into here. I could, if I drag out from here, we can do promotes variable. And if you remember that just creates a new variable of the type that we've dragged out from. So I will just create a new variable and see that it's using a name variable type. It's just named it for us row name, but this is just a standard name variable that we can plug into our data table to tell us which row we want to get from our data table. But for now I'm just going to delete that and we'll use the selection menu here. So I'm just going to select sword. Now, we've got two outputs. We've got row found and rho naught found. Now, this is used more for if you're using a variable that plugs into row name. Because if we use one of these selections, it's giving us the rows that exist on our data table. So it's always going to find these rows. But if we had our row name variable connected up and say this was set to, if we can pull to show the default value, say this was set to something like back pack. Now, there isn't a backpack row inside our example data table. So it's, this node would run rho naught found because it won't find that row. Whereas if it was set to something like acts for example, then rho found would be fat, would be run because it's found that row inside our data table. Now we have an output here called outgrowth. And if we drag out, we can do a break node. And you can see it's actually break node for the struct that we used or we created and we're using inside our data table. So we can break that struct. You can see that now we can access all of the information that we set inside our data table. So if I was to create a begin play, for example, we plug this into our data table row. Like that, will make sure that the row name is set to ax, which is then we'll just do from row found. We'll drag out and do a print string. And we can connect, say, the name up to our print string. And we'll compile it and we'll hit play. And you'll see that ax is printing out. If we go back to our ThirdPersonCharacter and we change our row name to something like, I think it was sold. We can pile. And when we hit Play, you'll see that the data table inside the ThirdPersonCharacter is finding that sword row and it's returning the information that we store inside that row. If we wanted to, we could change that data. So if I go to example data table and I change the name inside our sword row, something else, say apple. If we save this and hit Play, you'll see that it now prints out apple, even though we're selecting the sword row, and that's just the row name. We're using, the information that we've stored inside that row, and that's now Apple. Now there is another way that we can tell our get dates, table row, node, which row we want to get this a little bit more user-friendly than using just a name variable. So if we remove our name variable from the event graph here, we create a new variable. I'm going to call this row select. Selector will set the type to data table row handler handle, sorry. We'll create that, will compile and will get an error from this node just because we haven't set a row in. So I'll just set this to sort. And if we compile again, you can see that the error goes away. Now we can our row select a variable like this. Now, this is basically just a structure that's built into the engine. So if we drag out, you can see that we have a break data table row handle node that allows us to access the two variables that are set inside the row selective struct and in class default. So if our row selector variables selected, you can see we can say data table and a row name. Now currently if I select Rename and I think comes up because we haven't set a data table. So I'll set this to our example data table here. Now, when I select the row name, you can see that it gives us access to both the rows exist inside our example data table. I could set this to say ax. Now, using the row name on our break node, we can just plug this straight into our Get Data Table row. Note, now we've gotten much more user-friendly way of telling this node which item we want to get information about from our data table. So if I compile, and now we would expect our print string to print the name because that's the way we're telling it to access. If we go back, we can change this to the sword. And now we'll see it print out the Apple name that we changed it to. Now, just as a side note, if we exit out of planets, you can plug this variable into the get data table row, node as well. But I don't recommend doing that because if you are plugging this in and you change the data table to a data table that used a different structure than what we're using here, you could cause errors and problems in your projects. So typically I'd recommend just leaving this unconnected or disconnected and then leave manually setting the data table that you're using here. Now there are other data table note, so if we right-click and search for data table, and we'll search for row in C, that's a. Does data table row exist? Now, this essentially does the same thing as our Get Data Table row, but it doesn't give us the information stored in that row. All it does is check does the row name exist inside the DataTable. So again, we could copy and paste these nodes. I plug in my row name him, and I'll set the data table to example data table. Now and begin play with it. We'll just print true or false. If the data table that we selected does exist. Now, because we're using our row select a variable. We can only select data tables that exist inside this data table anyway. So it's always going to return true when we use this node to control which row we want to select. But maybe we were using a name variable instead. And that way we could set a name here, say backpack. And this row doesn't exist our data table. So when we hit Play, you'll see that it prints false. If I go back and I change this to say acts that, and we can hit Play. You'll see that it's returning true because that row does exist inside our example DataTable. Another node is the, if we delete this code here just to make it a little bit more space, I'll move this up here. If we right-click and search for data table, you can see that we've got to get data table row names. If I create this node, you see we set a data table. We'll set the example data table, and then its output is actually an array of names. And this will output an array that contains all of the names of the rows that exist inside our example data table. So if I connect this up to begin play, we'll loop through these results. So this node will run for every row that exists inside our array. We can just do a print string like that. Now, this will print out all of the names of the rows when the game starts. So if we hit Play, you can see that it's printing out wax and it's printing out sword. Now. Lastly, I just want to explain how composite data tables work. Composite data tables allow us to take multiple data tables and combine them so we can access multiple data tables when we select one specific dates table. So what I mean by that is if we create another data table, now, these data tables have to use the same structure voice. We won't be able to combine them together. So we'll create a new data table. We will use again the S underscore example struct. And I'll hit Okay, I'm going to name this. We call this weapon items. So for example, you could have different data tables for weapons, consumables, medicine, things like that if you wanted to, if you were making items for say, an RPG game. So open up weapon IPython items. And I'm just going to create a couple of new rows of cool this shot gun. And I'll call this one rifle. Set the name to rifle. Rifle as well. And also the shotgun to shot gun. Now set the weight to say for, for the shotgun and six for the rifle damage will set to 30, and chocolate more set damage to ten. So now we have these rows inside our weapons items data table. Now, if we go back to our ThirdPersonCharacter and we go back to the code we created before. Now, those rows are inside a different data table. So if we select our row selector here, you see I can't select those rows because currently we're using the example data table. And if we were to plug in, say, a row name, and we were to plug this in and we were to manually set the row name to say shot gun. When this code runs, it would actually not find this rope because again, that row exists in our weapon items, not inside our example data table. So there would not be found. Now because the example data table and the weapons item data table use the same struct. We can combine them together using a concert data table. So we'll go to the content browser, right-click, go to miscellaneous, and we want to create a composite data table. Again, we have to pick a structure. Now, this needs to be the same structure we use for both, for example, data table and weapons items data table. So select the example struct hit, Okay? And we'll call this the master item list, for example. We'll open that up and we've got a new editor. There isn't actually much you can do inside a composite data table. We can create new rows or anything like that. What we can do though is add parent tables. So we'll add a new element. And we're going to set this to our weapons items shouldn't see. After doing that, we can now see our weapons items inside our composite data table. And we're going to add another element. And we're going to set this to our example data table. You can see when I do that, those items that are inside our example data table also added inside our master item list. Now, we can't edit these in here, or we can basically do is add new data tables and combine the rows together in one composite data table. So now that we've got all of these items inside our composite data table, if we go back to our third-person character, instead of using the example data table here, I'm just going to disconnect the row name for the moment. We can set this to the master item list. That's our composite data table. And now if you go to the row name, we can actually select our shotgun, rifle and these arrows that exist in the weapons item data table. Or we can select the acts and sword rows and those exist in our example data table. This allows us to combine multiple data tables, as long as they're using the same structure into one big data table that we can then access inside our blueprint. That's helpful for organizing. If you have a lot of data that you're going to be storing inside of data tables. And if we go to say our weapon item status table and I add new rows, I'll call this a knife like that. And we save. If we go back to the ThirdPersonCharacter Blueprint, we can click the drop-down here and you can see that knife is now showing up and it will update automatically if we add or edit the information and Eve are our weapon items, dates table or the example data table. Lastly, if we go to our row selector here, we can also use the composite data table here as well. So if I go to the Data Table option, we can set this to master item list. And now if we compile and we look our row name, you can see that we can access all of the weapons from both our example data table and whole weapon items data table here as well. Then we can just plug the right name in. And now we can easily use our row selector to select any of those rows from either of our data tables. Again, don't worry about this error. It's because we didn't have a row name set. If I compile, you can see that the error goes away. So just to summarize, data tables are really good at storing lots of information that doesn't need to be changed during gameplay. If you have information that does need to be changed, then you can't store that inside a data table because you cannot change dates table information during gameplay. 27. Additional Lessons (Overlap Nodes): Hey everyone. In this lesson we're gonna be talking about the overlap nodes. Overlap notes are a really good alternative to using Box or sphere collision components. Now a really common thing I see with beginners is you tend to open up their levels and they're filled with Box and sphere collision components. Now, these can work and they're reasonably easy to work with. But the problem is later on in your project when you have maybe projectiles or traces or vehicles trying to move around, these collision boxes and spheres can interfere with those systems working correctly, might require you going round and changing collision settings in hundreds of different box and sphere collision components. So overlap nodes gives us a useful alternative to using Box and sphere components. Sometimes we can go to our ThirdPersonCharacter and I'm going to set up an example. Let's right-click and search for input. One. This is a note that as we've used before, will run when we press one on our keyboard. And if we right-click, we can search for overlap. You see that we've got different overlap notes here. I'm going to start with the box overlap for actors. So we'll create that function. Now we have some inputs for this node. We've got box position. This is the location that the box check will be done out. We've got box extent, which is how large the boxes. We've got object types. So these are the types of objects that are box overlap will detect. If you remember from our line trace lesson, we search for make array. We can set which types of objects this node will detect. We can add multiple inputs to this as well. So we wanted to detect, whoa, static, world dynamic. If you remember when we go to an object, say in a world like this ramp over here, if we select the mesh component, will scroll to the collision settings and you see currently it's set to default, but I'm going to sell it to custom. And if you check the object type, you can see this is currently set to wild static. So our box overlapped would detect this object because we're telling it that we want to detect world static object types. Next we have our actor class filter. This tells the box overlap that we only want to find one type of actor so fast to set this to say third-person character like that. Our books overlap node would now only return ThirdPersonCharacter Blueprint. Don't forget to clear this, otherwise our example later on won't work. So make sure you set this to none. Then lastly, we have actors to ignore. Now this is just an array of actors that we can input, tell our books overlap that we want to ignore them. So we could drag out from this and do a make array. We could drag out from that make rate and search for self. And now we're telling the box overlap that we want it to ignore our ThirdPersonCharacter and the outputs of this node or out actors. This is an array of actors that the box overlap, overlaps. And then we have a return value. And this is just a Boolean that'll be either true or false if the box overlap node overlapped anything. So now let's set up an example. We'll get the actor location, and this is where we will do our box overlap checks. So we'll connect this up to box position will set the box extent to say 200 by 200 by 200. We'll set the object types. We'll leave this as static and dynamic. Make sure that actor class filter is set to none. Otherwise it won't be able to detect any other actors. And we're going to leave this self plugged into the access to ignore here as well. We could just plug this into our notes here. But something I like to use when I'm using Box overlap actors nodes is a debug node. So if we right-click and search for debug, sorry, draw debug box. This node allows us to create a visual box in the world that we can use for debugging. So I'm going to plug this into our Draw Debug box. And I'll plug this into boxes overlap. And for its center, we'll just use the actor location and we're going to set it to the same extent as our box overlap. Sauces to two hundred, two hundred, two hundred. I'm going to set the duration to three seconds and thickness to one. By doing this, we're just going to create a visual box and the level for three seconds at the same location and size as our box overlaps. So we can get an idea of the size of the area that we're checking for overlapping actors. Now, I'm just going to drag out from our actors raping and I'm going to search for length. And we'll just use this to detect how many actors were actually overlapping. When we run our books overlap actors node. So I'll plug this into a print string like this, and we'll compile. Now we can test this out. So if I hit play and I press one, you can see we've got this big box and you can see that our text is printing out one. And that's because currently our books overlap. Actors note is only for lactating one actor. That's the floor. And the reason for that is we're telling it to ignore our character. If I run over here and press one, you can see that it's gone up to three because we're hitting the ramp, this square and the floor. This is just an easy way to detect what actors overlap a certain area without having to create a new box or sphere collision component. Now there are other versions of this node. If we hit escape and go back to our third carrot, ThirdPersonCharacter Blueprint and we right-click and search for overlap. You can see that we have a box overlapped components. Now, this works the same as our box overlap actors. It just searches for components instead. So instead of returning the actors, it will return the components that it overlaps. So for example, if our floor was overlapping, our box overlapped components check. It would return instead of the cube act to reference, it will return the stack Mesh Component restaurants instead out of the out components are raping. Other than that, everything is the same with this node. You can set the position size, object types and so on. Now we also have different shapes for these overlap nodes. So we can create, say, a sphere overlap. You can see that we've got our sphere overlap actors and sphere overlap components nodes. And lastly there is also the capsule overlap nodes as well. So you can see we've got capsule overlap actors and capture overlap components. And these are just different shapes that we would check for overlapping acceptors or components. So that's it for this lesson. It's a short one that I just wanted to do on these nodes because I find them really useful. And hopefully they can cut down on the number of box and sphere components that you have in your levels. 28. Additional Lessons (Inputs): Hey everyone, In this lesson I'm going to be talking you through the input system. Now, in Unreal Engine five, we have two inputs systems. We have the original one from Unreal Engine four, and we've got the new enhanced input system that's now in Unreal Engine five. In this session, I'm gonna be talking you through the original input system. And the reason I'm doing that is a lot of projects, at least at the time of filming this, still using that original system. Then in our next lesson, I'll be talking you through the new enhanced input system. Now what do I mean by input system? And input system is how we take player pressing a button on my keyboard or their mouse or a gamepad, actually translate that into code being run in our blueprints. Now, we've already used some input nodes in our previous lessons. If we head over to the ThirdPersonCharacter and I right-click and I search for input. One for example, you can see that we've been using the one input event, and that's the event that will run if we press the one key on our keyboard. If we head over to the Details panel, we can actually change this one input to work for we like, we can press this button here and then select the key we want it to use. So I could press L, for example. Now this node will run whenever, always pressed. Or we can click this drop down here and we can look through all of the different key inputs that the engine has built-in. Now, these kinds of nodes are really helpful for testing things, debugging, just getting an input into a blueprint quickly. But they're not particularly useful for full games or finished games. The reason for that is most modern games have a key binds menu where the player can rebind keys to four different actions. Now, if you're using these nodes and a finished game, you won't be able to do that. And that's where an input system comes in. Now, in this lesson, I'm going to be talking to you about the input system from you before. And the reason for that is a lot of projects that you may open up. We'll still be using the input system from UE for. So it's a good idea to just get to grips with how it works. Then in our next lesson, we'll be taking a look at the new enhanced input system that's comes with Unreal Engine five. So to get started, we'll look at one of the key inputs that comes with third-person character. If we scroll down here and find the jump input action, you can see that instead of saying a key name, it says input action jump. Now that's because this input action is actually defined in our input system. And then in the input system we assign keys. So to find this system, we can go to Edit Project Settings. And then here we go down to the inputs section here, and that's under the engine category. In here you can see we've got action mappings and access mappings. Now, mine's already opened up, but yours might look a bit like this. We click the arrow next to action mappings. You can see that we've got the jump input action. And then under that, if you click the arrow next to it, you can see that the default key bind for it is the spacebar. And we also have a key buy-in for the gamepad here as well. So essentially what this is telling the engine is we want to create an action mapping. Now an action mapping is similar to our input events that we've used before. It can either be pressed or released. And we're telling it we're creating a new action mapping called Jump. And we want these two keys to be bound to that action. And that's why when we play in the third person map, if I press Space, this jump input action will run pressed. And then when I release space, released will run and it will run the jump and stop jumping events. Now we can also create our own input actions in here. So if you go back to the project settings, we can just click this little plus button here to create a new input action. I can call it something like shoot, for example, will set the key to. So you can set the key in multiple ways and click this button here, and then click the key that you want. So I can just left mouse button and you'll see it's automatically picked up for me. Or you can look through all of the different key binds just by clicking this down arrow here and going through the options. Now we've created a new action input and its name is shoot. And when we press left mouse button, that shoe event will run. If we go back to our ThirdPersonCharacter, we'll right-click and we'll search for input. Action shoot in C that under impactions we have are now shoot event. And this will run whenever we press our left mouse button. So I can add a print string here. And I'll just put pressed. I'll copy and paste that and put like that. So now when we hit play, you can see that when I press mouse button, it's registering pressed, and when I release, it's registering released. Now the good thing about this system is you can add multiple keys to be bound to the same event. So say your game was worked on desktop and it worked on console and VR as well. You can have inputs for the VR, jump key, the game pad ki, and that could all be underneath the shoot category if we want to add new inputs. So we can just click the little plus in C, I can now add a new key. I could say press K for example. Now k will also run that shoe event as well as left mouse button. If you want to remove any of these, we can just click the little trash can icon here. If you want to remove a whole action mapping, you can just click the trash can next to the name of the action mapping like that. Now keep in mind if you do that and you still have the event and the thing if we can poll, you'll see we'll get a warning. And that's just telling us that. Mapping no longer exists in our project settings. So we'll delete this for now because we're no longer using it and we'll compile to get rid of that wanting. Next we have access mappings. So if we go back to Project Settings, you can see that we've got access mappings. I click the little drop down here. You can see that we've got options for mood forwards and backwards. Move right and left. And then we've got the same options for gamepad and gamepad look up and down, as well as mouse look up and down at the bottom here. Now access mappings work a bit differently. They run every frame. So what I mean by that is if I go to the move forward and backwards it and I just add a print string. So we just add a print string here. You'll see when I hit play, it's printing out every frame. I'm not pressing any buttons, I'm not doing anything at all. That access mapping will be running every single frame. And that's the same for all of the access mappings. So that'll be the same for our move right and left, and also for our gamepad, look up and down as well as our mouse look up and down. Access mappings also provide an access value. Now this is essentially how much or how much of the input is being received. So if I take my axis value here, and I were actually, we'll delete the print string here, and we'll connect a new print string up to our turn, right and left for mouse, the sim. And I'll plug the x value into my print string and I'll compile. So now you can see I'm not moving my mouse, so the axis value is 0. But if I start moving my mouse slow, you can see that the access amount increases. Now, that's essentially what tells the engine how much I'm moving my mouse, how fast I'm moving it, and then it adds that value to arc, camera's rotation. So if I start moving my mouse very quickly, you can see that the value starts going up much higher. So this is essentially what allows access mappings to control our camera, the direction that it's moving in, as well as our character. If we go back to our blueprint, you can see that our axis value for move forward and backwards is an axis value. And if I do a print string here, we connect this up to him. Compile. And I'll remove this print string so we can see the value just from our move forward and backwards. Hit play and see currently it's 0. But if I start moving forward, the axis value has gone straight to one. And if I go backwards, you can see it's actually gone to minus one. And that's what tells the engine whether we're moving backwards or forwards. If we x out of plane editor and go to Project Settings, and we open up one of these Access Mappings. Say for example, the lookup slashed down mouse. You can see that it's currently not set to. A key is actually set to on mouse direction. So it's set to mouse Y. The scale is minus one. Now the reason for that is it's just the way that the camera's working on rail. If I was to set this to scale one and hit Play. Now when I move my mouse up, I start looking down and my controls are actually inverted. So typically with mouse up and down movements, we would use a scale of minus one to get rid of that inverted camera movement. But if we were to look at, say, move forward and backwards, you can see that we've got W and S. Now, w gives us a scale of one that tells the character when moving forward. S gives a scale of minus one, and that's what tells the character we're moving backwards. And then we have some additional key binds here. These are the two arrow keys on your keyboard, and then we've got the thumbstick on a game pad as well. Now an important thing to remember about input events is the reason these are running inside our ThirdPersonCharacter is because our third person character is controlled by our player controller. If we were to start using these nodes in blueprints, that one controlled by our controller, they wouldn't run. Now a blueprint that we can use these input events in is our controller. Now, in the third person template, there isn't a control. A blueprint will create a new one quickly. I'm just going to create a Blueprint Class, select player controller. I'll just call this example controller. Like that. And if you remember, we need to set our controller and our game mode. So I'll go to third-person game mode and find the player controller class. Here we'll just change this to our example controller, will compile and save. Now when we hit play, we will be using our example controller. And I'll open that controller up. I'll just drag this up to the top here, go to the Event Graph. And now if I search for say jump, for example, you can see I can create the jump input action and this will actually run just fine. And that's because we're in the controller, are input actions will work perfectly fine inside our player controller, because the player controller is what handles are input actions. Next, I just wanted to talk to you about some of the settings that you'll find if you select an input node, we've got consume input, execute when paused and override parent binding. So the first one consume input means that if this is ticked on what we're using an input action inside our controller. And we had that same event inside our player character. The jump action in our character won't actually run. And that's because our controller is essentially consuming that input and not allowing any other blueprint to run up. So if I was to print a string here from our jump event. Now when we compile and hit Play, if I press space, if I go back to my third-person character here, we will just remove this print strings so we can see what we're doing like that, which compile that. And now when we hit Play, if I press space, you can see that it's printing hello, but my characters, no luck with jumping. Now that's because inside our example controller, we're consuming that input. But if I untick this and I can pop and hit Play. Now when I press space, you can see that both my hello text is running and the character is jumping. So both of those events in my controller and the character blueprint or running now. Another one of the settings, if we select the jumping production here, is execute one paused. You can pause the engine, or if you open up a menu, for example, if this is ticked on, then the input will still be able to run even if the game is paused. And then lastly, override parent binding. Say for example, our example controller had a parent blueprint that was different from the player controller. Then if we had this option ticked on and that parent blueprint was also using the input action. Then we're basically telling the engine ignored the input and our parent blueprint, use the code that's connected to us. If we uncheck it, then this node wouldn't run. The node in our parent blueprint would run. Lastly, we've got this other pin here, and this just gives us a reference to the key that was pressed that made this event run. So maybe you have multiple keys that would make jump happen and you wanted something different happened depending on which key the person pressed, we could drag out and search for equal. And using this note, you could check is the key that was pressed equaled to another key. So we could say is equal to space. And this node would check is the key that was pressed Space bar. If it is, then it would return true. We can also get the name of the key, so we can search with display. We can use getc key display name. And this will just tell us in text what the name of the key is that was pressed that made the jump in production run. So that's gonna be it for this lesson. In our next lesson, we'll be looking at the new enhanced input system that comes with unmoored engine five. 29. Additional Lessons (Enhanced Inputs): Hey everyone. In this lesson we're gonna be taking a look at the enhanced input system that comes with Unreal Engine five. So to start with, I'll show you how to enable it. In this current engine version, I actually have to enable a plug-in. So I'll go to Edit plugins and I'm going to search for enhance. You can see enhanced input, which I can take on. If yours is already ticked on, then you don't need to do this. But for me, I'm going to take it on. You can get gives me a warning here, just telling me that it's still in beta. So I'm just going to hit Yes. And we need to restart the engine, so I'll do that now. So now I've restarted the engine and if we check the plugins menu and search for enhanced, we can see that it is ticked on. Then we're gonna go to Edit and go to Project Settings. And then here we're going to use a search and we're going to search for input, or sorry, default input. Now you can see mine by default is set to player input and input component. I'm going to change these to the enhanced player input. And the enhanced input component. If yours is already set to those, then you don't need to do this. Now the input system is what allows us to run code when the player say, presses a button on my keyboard or button on my gamepad, or moves their mouse in a certain way. Now in our last lesson, we looked at the input system that comes from Unreal Engine four. This is still present in Unreal Engine five. So we went through those in our last lesson, if you want to check that out. But in this lesson we're going to look at the new system that's been implemented it into Unreal Engine five. Now the good thing about this new enhanced system is it's actually backwards compatible. So if we go back to our third-person character here, all of these events, these are still using the older input system from somewhere engine for these events will still work. So if I hit play, now that I'm using the enhanced input system, but I can still move around. I can still look about these inputs will still work. But now we can actually create the new enhanced inputs, which we'll do now, we'll exit off the play an editor. And we'll start by right-clicking the content browser. And we'll go to the input option here, and we'll create a new input action. Now, this is the equivalent of, if you remember from our last lesson of going to the inputs option here and creating a new action mapping. This is the equivalent of that, but now we have its own blueprint. So whatever we named, this will be the name of our event. So I'm just going to call this example input. No spaces. So example input like that. Now if we open that up, I'm just going to drag this up to the top here. Now in here is where we can set the settings for our example input event. So to start with, we have the value type. Now this is essentially the value that the key supplies our code with. If it's set to Boolean, then our key is either pressed or not pressed. But we can change this to say, an axis one day. So this is a single float that represents a state of our input. So if our mouse, for example, is moving along the x-axis, so that's side to side. This float value will be either negative or positive depending on the direction we're moving at him and then the speed that we move it in, define how large the number is. Now there's also a 2D and a 3D. I'll be explaining the 2D a bit later. The 3D is a little bit more advanced, so we won't be going into that on this lesson. Then next we've got triggers. Triggers define what actually makes our example input run. So if I create a new input, you can see that I've now got a new index, and here I can choose from a few different options. Now, these essentially tell the engine what we have to do with this key binds to make this example input run. For example, if we set it to tap, we have to tap the key. This event is bound to, to make it run. And if we click the down arrow here, we've got a few settings for the tap type. We have the tap release time threshold. So this basically means as long as I press a key and let go of it faster than 0.2 seconds, our example input event will run. Next. We'll set up an example in our third-person character so we can call our example input. But first we actually need to create another blueprint. Now, you may have noticed that in this blueprint we can actually set a key that we want to make our example input run. Now, there's another blueprint that actually defines that. We will have to create that. So we'll right-click and go to input. Then we want input mapping contexts. I'm going to call mine example mapping context. And we'll open that up. Now in here is where we define our inputs. So for example, our example input. So what we can do is click the little plus button here. You can see that we've got these options. We can set an input. So we're going to use our example and pump. So we're telling it this mapping is for the example input. And then here we can set which keys we want to actually run that input. So we can click the little keyboard icon here and I can press say, L on my keyboard. Or you can click the drop-down here and select a key and the options here. So now we've told the engine that when we press out, we want it to run the example input event. So now we can go to our ThirdPersonCharacter and we can create a new event. We can search, for example. You can see we've got example input. If I create that, you can see that we get this new input node. Now, this input node is going to look different or have different outputs depending on the triggers that we have setup in our example input. So currently we have tap setup. So it's inputs are gonna be relevant to the top. But if I was to move this and we head back to our ThirdPersonCharacter. You can see that the outputs of our note of change. Now, these outputs will do different things depending on the triggers that you have set inside your input. So we'll add back in our tap input or trigger, sorry, and that's the one at the bottom here. And we'll leave the settings as default. So we'll save this and we can go back to ThirdPersonCharacter are triggered here will run whenever we first press down tap button. So for us that's out there. I set it to in our mapping contexts. And the completed will run when we lift the key up. So what we can do is we can add a print string here. We set this to triggered. Spell it right. There we go. And I'll copy and paste this. We'll plug this into, complete it and I'll put complete it like that. Spell it wrong, but there we go. So now when I compile, we'd expect when I tap out faster than 0.2 seconds, these would print, but they actually weren't. And we can see this if I hit play by tap out, nothing's happening. Now that's because we also have to make some code changes inside our character. So to do this, I'm gonna do an event possess. And if you remember from our events lesson, this event will run whenever a controller takes control of this character. So from that we're going to drag out from our new controller, will do cost too. Player controller. And then from this we need to get the enhanced input local players subsystem. Then from that we need to add a mapping context. Now, this is essentially telling the player controller that we want to use this example mapping context that we set up overhead. So we need to set our mapping contexts to the example mapping context. So now when we compile it and hit play, if I tap out, you can see that complete and triggered our printing out. Now the purpose for having to set the mapping contexts allows you to have different control schemes depending on what you wanna do. So for example, you may have a character in your game and a vehicle. Now you may want the characters controls and the vehicles controls to be completely different. So what you could do is have a mapping context for your character and then a second one fuel vehicle. Then in your character, you could set the mapping contexts using the add mapping contexts node to your characters mapping context, which could have all of your inputs for when your players controlling the character. Then in your vehicle, a blueprint, you can have the same code, but that could set a vehicle mapping contexts instead. And then that mapping context, you could have different controls, maybe for changing gears and things like that, things that you wouldn't need in a character blueprint. Now this is a little bit more complicated than say, the previous input system that I'm arranging for use. But this system is a lot more fully featured and once you get the hang of it, there's a lot more you can do with it. But just know for now that if you plan on using the enhanced input system, you will need this code in your character to tell the player controller exactly what mapping contexts you want to use. And keep in mind, the mapping context is where you actually tell the input events what keys can call them. Now, you may have noticed inside our mapping contexts, we can add multiple keys. So if you want to say have L and another key, run our example and put, we could do that. So I could set this to say x. Now, if I hit Play and tap X, you can see that's also printing out. If I press out, you can see that's also printing out as well. If we go back to our mapping contexts, you can see that we actually have a triggers option here as well for each one of the keys. Now, if we add a trigger inside our example input, this will affect all of the keys that we have. Any keys we add under our example, input will have to follow the trigger rules that we set up in our example input. But maybe we don't want to have that in our example input. We wanted certain keys to have to do certain things. So maybe for example, for L to work with, want to have to tap it. But for X to work, maybe we need to hold the key down. And if we go, if we click the drop-down option here and see we've got settings for holding this key dam. So the main one is hold time threshold. This means I have to hold the button down for 1 second before the code will run. If we hit play now, if I press X, nothing happens until. One second is happened, and now my trigger is actually running continuously until I let go of x. You can see complete, It's just run and triggered, had stopped running. But if I try and tap my x, nothing happens. If I hold down my owl, nothing happens because if you remember, we set up the tap rule for my L. So if I tap out, you can see the event it was running now. So just to summarize for the triggers, if we exit out of plane editor, if you want triggers to affect all of the keys that can call an event, you want to add those inside the event. So inside here, you set the triggers here that will affect all of the keys that you assigned to that event. In the mapping context. If you want individual keys to have different trigger rules, you can do that inside the mapping contexts under the specific key. And of course, if you want to add a trigger, you click the Add button here. You want to remove a trigger. You just click the trash can icon to remove it. Now, we'll remove the x input for now. You can also have multiple triggers setup. So if we add one trigger and I say set this to tap, I can also add a second one, and I could set this to hold. So now our L button will work if I tap it quickly or if I hold it down for more than 1 second. And we can test this out. I can hit play. And if I press or if I tap L quickly, you can see that it's working. Or if I hold it down and wait 1 second, you can see that now triggered is running every frame. And if I let go, you can see completed them runs. Now I'm not gonna go through every type of trigger because there are quite a few. And if you ever want to find out what they do, a good way to do that is to just mouse over them in this drop down menu. And it actually gives you a reasonably decent explanation of what each one does. Now you may have noticed on our event note here that we have an action value. Now, depending on what type of input you've used in the mapping contexts, this will give us a value that we can use to control code. So because we're just using an alkene, this will just run one when the key is pressed down and 0 when the key is not pressed. But we can also change this value inside our example input. Here we can set this to say Boolean in C that we get this notification every time we change something. If we go back to the third-person character, you can see that it's now changed to a Boolean. And this would just be true when our key is pressed down and false when it's released. Now we can also use this value to control things like are looking direction and our movement direction. Similarly to how the axis value on the older input system controls our controllers, your and pitch. Those are the directions that our camera is going to be facing. Now there are a few different ways to do this with the new system. I'll show you a couple of ways how to do that now. So we'll start by deleting this event because we won't be using that anymore. And we'll go to the content browser. I'm actually going to rename our example input. I'm just going to rename it, say mouse up, down. We can open this up. And I'm going to change the value type to a axis one D, So a float. So the output value of our event in our ThirdPersonCharacter will be a float. Then we'll head over to our example mapping contexts. Now we'll get rid of our current mappings and I'm just going to create a new one. And we'll set this to our mouse up and down. And I'm going to set this input to mouse Y. And mouse Y is our mouse movement up and down. So we're going to select that. So now we've set our mouse up and down to a float value. We've set our mouse Y to call that mouse up and down event. So let's go to our ThirdPersonCharacter and we'll find the look up and down. And I'm going to delete this because that's the old event. And we'll reuse the pitch note here. So we're gonna do mouse up or down. You can see under enhanced action events, we've got our mouse up down. From here. We're going to drag triggered to our Add controller pitch input. And this will run only when I'm moving my mouse. And it will take the action value and plug this in and we'll compile. Now remember, this is only working because I have this code up here on the possess that tells our character that we want to use our example mapping contexts, which is what we've used to assign our mouse movement to our event. So what we'll do now is we'll hit play and I'm gonna move my mouse up and down. You can see that it is working, but my controls are actually inverted. So what I need to do is invert the minus and positive values that are being supplied from my mouse. And the way we can do that is we can use modifiers. So it will go to our mouse up and down event here. And in here we've got a modifiers option. Now, modifiers are a little bit more advanced, so don't worry too much if you don't get it straight away. But what they allow us to do is modify the value that's being supplied by our key press or mouse movement, for example. So we'll add a new modifier. If we click the option here, we've got a few different ones. But what we wanna do is invert our value output. And the Negate here was what will do that. So we'll set it to negate. So now when I hit play, if I move my mouse up, I look up and if I move my mouse down, I look down. That again, is basically making it so that when the mouse is outputting a positive value, then negate converts that to a negative value. And then the other way round when the mouse supplies a minus value, then the gate turns it into a positive value, and that's what gives my camera the correct movement. So now we need a site-to-site. Now my side to side movement, it's still working because I'm still using that old input here. But if I delete this and I hit Play now, I can only look up and down. I can't look side to side at all. So we need to set up a side to side movement. So we'll do that by right-clicking. Will go to blueprints or sorry, we'll go to Input, input action, and we'll call this mouse left, right. And we'll open that up. We want to set the value of type to the axis one day. And then we need to go to our example mapping context. And in here, we need to add a new mapping. So we're adding a new event. Essentially. We want to set this to our left and right. We need to set a key there or mouse movement that will make this event run. So we want mouse x, so that's our mouse movement side to side. So we'll select that. Now in our mouse up and down, we used a Negate to invert the values that it supplies us with. We don't need to do that with the left and right. So now we'll just go back to our ThirdPersonCharacter. And again, we'll right-click and do your mouse left, right, or was it left right. We've got mouse left, right, under enhanced action events. And we'll connect our triggered up to add controller. And we'll take our action value and plug that in and compile. So now when I go to my third person map and I hit Play, I can look side to side and it's moving about correctly. I can look up and down. We're now using the new enhanced input system to control our camera movement. Now the enhanced input system actually has another way that we can set this axis input movement up. Now, instead of having to individual nodes for this, we could actually do it with one. The way we could do that is using a 2D float in our event. So what we'll do now is we'll delete the mouse up and down event here. We'll just use the mouse left and right. I'm actually going to rename this to just mouse movement. So now we can use just one input action to control. Both are looking side to side and up and down. So in our mouse movement, we've set our axis, we'll set our access to 2D. So that means that instead of a single float value will have to an X and a Y value. Then we need to go to our example mapping context. And we'll get rid of the top one here. We've already got our mouse movement here because we had earlier we've just renamed it and we've got our mouse X here. But I'm going to delete that were just completely create a new mapping. So we'll do mouse move them. So now we need to choose the mouse movements that will make this mouse movement event run. So we'll go to the option here. We'll search for first mouse Y. Now if you remember our mouse white as our up and down, and we need to invert that value. So we need a modifier, and we need to set this modifier to negate that will invert the up and down valley. Then we need a new input. So add a new input. This is gonna be mouse x. Now if you remember before we had individual events for mouse white and mouse x, now we're doing both of them in the same event. So now we've added both our mouse white and a mouse X inputs. Four of them will go to the ThirdPersonCharacter here. And we're going to delete these events that we had for previously. So now, instead of having two separate events for each one of these nodes that control up and down and side to side movement, we'll right-click and we'll search for mouse movement. Mouse movement like that. And we've got our new mouse movement event that we set up. So now we'll take triggered, we'll plug this into control the pitch. And we'll plug this into your like that. Now you can see we've got an action value, and this is just a 2D vector. So if we drag out, we can create a break node and that just gives us access to that X and Y flow values. So it will use these values to control our up and down and side to side camera movement. So our x is always our site to site. So we'll plug this into your controller input. And the y is up and down. So we'll plug this into our controller pitch input. And now we can compile. And we're ready to test this so we can hit play. And if I move my mouse so I decide that's working fine. But if I move it up and down, it's still moving side to side. We can move the camera up or down. Now, the reason for this is if we go back to our example mapping context, the mouse white and the mouseX both just provide us with a single float value. Now, if we go to our event, you can see we've got two flow outputs. Now, these two inputs for our mouse up and down and side to side, or both be trying to use that x value. But they can't both use it. We need to tell one of them that it needs to use the y output. So in our mapping context, in the modifiers for our mouse Y, we're going to add a new modifier. And we're going to set this to Switzerland input axis values. And if you read the tool tip, it actually explains what it does. It says useful to map a 1D input, which is what our mouse Y is, it's a 1D input onto the y-axis of a 2D action. So if you remember, mouse movement is a 2D axis. So our switch is going to map the axis value of our Y mouse Y to that second y-value. So we'll use that. So now our side to side movement will be using the X value here. And our up and down movement will now be using the y value because of that modifier we've just added. If I hit play, I move my mouse side to side up and down, and it's all working correctly. So that's just a couple of examples of how you can use access inputs with the new enhanced input system. Now there are other types of modifiers that you can apply to your key inputs if you want to, you can add them where we've added on a gate and Swiss or input axis values. I won't be covering them in this lesson because there are quite a few. But if you ever want to work out what they do, you can just mouse over it and it gives you a brief description of what each one does. Now we can apply modifiers to a single-player input, like we have done here with our mouse Y input. We've added the negate and the switch input. You can also apply these modifiers inside our mouse movement. Now any modifiers we add in here will affect all of the keys that we add to this mouse movement inside our mapping contexts. So it's important to remember that sometimes you will want to add modifies only to one input like we've done with the mouse Y, instead of just applying them to the input type, because that will affect all of the keys that you bind to that type. So just to summarize, the enhanced input system allows us to create input actions like our mouse movement. We can then create mapping context, which is where we can set which keys we'll call our new input actions. Then we can create those input actions inside our character or control the blueprints. Then using triggers, we can choose how that key has to be pressed for the event to be activated, then modifies allow us to modify the action value that's provided by that event. For those events to work, we must make sure that we use the add mapping context. And we can use that by getting the player controller, getting the enhanced input local players subsystem. And that allows us to add a mapping context. Then we set which mapping contexts we want to use. So we've been using the example mapping context. So that's what set here. If we don't have this code, then the inputs events that we've been using won't work. So that's gonna be it for this lesson. Hopefully you have a better understanding of how the enhanced input system works now and we will be using it a little bit more in our future lessons. 30. Additional Lessons (Tags): Hey everyone. In this lesson we're gonna be taking a look at actor and component tags. Now if you were following along with our previous lesson, all I've done here is create a new third person template so we can start fresh. So it start with tags are basically just an array of name variables that both axes and components have built-in. And because of that, it means we can get an act as tags or components tags without having to cost to another Blueprint. Use Blueprint Interfaces. Then we can use some of the nodes that are built into the engine to check an actor if it has a tag. Or we can do something like getting all of the actors in the world that have a specific tag. We'll start by going to the ThirdPersonCharacter and I'll show you where you can add new tags. I'm just going to drag this up to the top here. And then our class defaults are just going to search for tag. And in here you can see we've got a tags option and it's an array, and it's just an array of names like we've used before. So if we click the Plus button here, we can add a new entry. I can set it to say player. We can add new entries as well if we want to just by clicking the plus button, if we want to remove entries, we can just click the down arrow next to the textbox and hit delete. So now we've added a tag to our ThirdPersonCharacter and that target is plan. Now we need a blueprint that's going to read these texts. So I'm going to create a new blueprint and the content browser. And we'll select Actor and I'm just going to call that trigger, open that up. I'm going to add a box collision component. I'll just move that up a little bit here. We'll go to details such for hidden and untick, hidden and game just so we can sit and we'll compile. Now like we've done before, we'll go to the Event Graph. I'm going to delete the beginning play and the tick nodes, and we'll actually use the actor begin to overlap node that's already here. Now if you remember, this node runs whenever something overlaps our trigger and it gives us access to the other actor that overlapped the trigger. Now, normally if I wanted to get information that's in my ThirdPersonCharacter, I'd have to drag out and I've a cost to my third-person character or set up a Blueprint Interface to retrieve that information. Now, because our tags are actually built into our actor, we don't have to do this because this is already an actor pin. So we can drag out and we can access our tags so I can search for get tax. And you see I can access my array of tags. Then this behaves just like a normal array. We can drag out. We can use a get node with it. All we can drag out and we can loop through all of the tags that are found on our actor. Now act has actually come with some tags, specific functions Built-in so we can drag out and we can search for has tag. We can use the actor has tag node and this just checks is the tag that we set here. Or does this accessory have the tag that we set here? If it does, then that will return true, and if not, it will return false. So we can test this out. Now, I can drag out from here. It will actually right-click and search for print string. We'll connect this up to our begin to overlap, and I'll plug this into our Boolean output, will compile, throw one of these into the map over here, which make it a little bit bigger. Our to re-scale or to bring up the re-scale tool, I'll make it a little bit larger. Hit play. Now when I run into my cube here, you can see it's returning false because I actually didn't set the Typekit. So we'll set this to compile and hit Play. And now when I run into the keeping and see it's returning true because our player character has that player tag. Now, because our tag is just an array of names we can add to it during game play as well. So if we wanted to, we could drag out and do get tags. And using this array PIM, we could drag out and use the Add Node. And we could add a new tag to our plan. So we could add say on fire tag. And then we'll delete these notes down here for now. Then we could drag out from our tags again and loop. So we loop through all of the current tags and we'll print string, the players current tags. So we'll connect this up to the print string and the array element to the string will compile. Hit Play. Now when I run into the box here, It's going to add a new tag to our plot. And then it's going to print those tag names out. Just like that. Now we can also add tags to components. So if we exit out of plane, I just feel hurt and go to our ThirdPersonCharacter. We'll get rid of this search for the moment, and I'll select something like the capsule component here. So this is a component and it's the capsule shape that's in our view port here. And if I with it selected search for tag in the Details panel in C, we've got component tags. Now, these work exactly the same as our after-tax is just that these tags specific to this component. So we can add a new tag, Oh cool, this collision. And I'll compile. Now if we go back to our trigger, I will have to cast to a character using my other actor pin here. Because if you remember, the actor doesn't actually contain the capsule components, so I won't be able to find it. But if I cast to character. Like that. And we'll delete the rest of this code. Then from our character, we want to get the capsule component. And that's down here at the bottom. Now from this we can drag out and search for has tag. You can see we've got a component has tagged note here, and this works exactly the same as our tag or actor has tagged node. We set a tag that we want to check for. Collision. It will return true or false if this character's capsule component has this collision tag. So it will drag out and other print string and connect up to here, hit Compile. And now when we run over our box here, you can say it's returning true. So tags are really handy way of being able to add a little bit of extra information to any actor. So anything that's in the level or any component in those actors. A good example of how tags can be useful is maybe in the future you create an AI system. And you want that AI to be able to tell if an actor is friendly or an enemy. You can do that using tags. Because all of the actors and your level have tags built-in, you could add those tags to any object and they would be able to read it. Now, tanks are also useful for getting actors or components. So if we accept our plan as it's her hair and go back to our trigger. Just going to delete these nodes. If you remember, we have the get component by class notes. So if I search for it, get component by class, you can see we've used this node before and that allows us to get a component from a specific blueprint. Now, we've also got the get components by tag node. So if we create that here, we can get all of the components that are inside of a blueprint with a specific tag. If you remember, when we set our tag inside our Capsule Component, these are the tags that it will be checking for. Then it will output all of the components that have that specific tag that we set. For example, I could set this to collision like that. We'll drag out and we'll get the length of this array. And we'll print string, the length, drag out from here and do print string like that. Now when we run over the trigger, we should see it print out one. Now we can also get the actors that have attack. So if we go back to our trigger and we right-click and such what actor with tag. You can see that we've got the get all actors with tag node. So we can create that. And this will get all of the actors in our level that have a specific tag. Now as a warning, this is a pretty performance heavy node, so you don't want to be using this on tech for example. There's also another get all actors we've tagged now, if we right-click and such will get all actors with tag. You can see that there's a ghetto actors of class with tags. So if we create that, this will do the same thing as the node up here, but it will limit its selection to a specific act of type. So maybe we had lots of actors with a enemy tag, for example, but we only wanted to get the ones that were the ThirdPersonCharacter. Maybe you've had lots of characters that had the enemy tag, but we only get one to get our ThirdPersonCharacter, we could set this here. Now, this will only return third-person character blueprints that have the enemy tag. So tags are really handy way of adding a little bit of information to any object in the world or any component. So that's it for this lesson. Hopefully you understand now what tags are used for and also how they work in the engine. 31. Additional Lessons (Spawning Actors): Hey everyone. In this lesson I'm going to be talking you through spawning actors. Supporting actors is how we create new objects in the world during gameplay. So it will start with creating a new actor that we're going to spawn. I'm just going to create a blueprint class. I'll set it to an actor, and I'm just going to call this example sphere. And we'll open that up. I'm just going to drag this up to the top here. And I'm going to add a new component or search for sphere and we'll create a sphere shape. I'm also going to enable, if we go down to physics here, simulate physics, that's just so that if we place it in the world, it'll start rolling around and have physics. So now we'll go back to the map. I'm just going to delete this trigger. This is just from our previous lesson. You don't need to worry about that if you don't have it. And we'll go to our ThirdPersonCharacter. And then here I'm going to create a new input events. So we'll search for input event one. And if you remember, this node just runs whenever I press one on my keyboard. Now to spawn actors in the world, we use the spoon actor from class node. Now we've used this a little bit before, but in this lesson we're going to go into full detail about how it works. So starting from the top, we have the class. This is the type of blueprint that we're spawning into the world. Will be able to select any of our blueprints from our content browser. If we click the down our hip, nice search, for example, sphere. In C, we found our example sphere. It's a little bit difficult to see because the highlight, but that is that if I click this, you can see that our class is now example swim. You can see the name of the node has actually changed to spawn actor example sphere. And that actually changes the return value type. So if we hover over that, you can see that this is now an example sphere object reference, which means if we had variables, say in our example there, I'll create a new variable quickly, which called this example. I can poll. Now if I drag out from the return value, I can just get that example variable. I don't need to cast my sphere from this return value because we have already told the node that we're spawning that type and it's set the return value to that example sphere reference. So this can be handy if maybe you had functions or events that you want it to cool as soon as the blueprint is spawned. Then next we've got the spawn transform. This is the location in the world that the actor will be spawned. If we drag out, we can use the make transform note here that allows us to set the location, rotation and also the scale of the actor. Now we can also, if we disconnect this, right-click on the spawn transform here and do Split Struct Pin. And you can see we can actually access the location, rotation, and scale right on the node here if we wanted to. Or we can right-click again and do recombine, and that will combine them back together into this transform pen. Now when you're spawning an actor, it could collide or something else in the world while it's trying to spawn. So we have collision handling settings. Now, default will be the project's default settings which are set inside the project settings. Then we've got always spawn ignore collisions. That means that it doesn't care about collisions. They will spawn at the location you SAP. We have tried to adjust location but always bump. That means if it's trying to spawn at a location that is overlapping, something else is collision. It will try and adjust the location a little bit so it's not overlapping that collision. Then we have tried to adjust location, don't spawn if still gliding. So that does the same thing. It tries to adjust the location that is spawning out if there's collision interfering. But if it can't find a location to spawn with no collision, then it won't spawn this actor. And then we have do not spawn, which means that the actor will just not spawn if it collides with anything. For this, I always want my sphere to spawn. So I'm just going to put always spawn, ignore collisions. Now the instigator pen is a pawn reference. Now, we don't actually need to plug this in for our actor to spawn, but this does allow us to tell the actor essentially which players spawned up. This can be useful, say, maybe you are spawning projectiles out of a gun. Then you would want to tell the projectiles which player spawn them so that when those projectiles hit another player, for example, that of a player can then see who was damaging them. There are other uses for this, of course, not just for projectile's, but that's just an example. Then if we click the down arrow here, we have the owner. Now again, this is a pen that you don't have to plug in and is usually used for replication and multiplayer coding. But it does actually allow us to set a variable inside the actor. And if we go to our sphere here, you can search for owner. And that gives us the ownership of the blueprint. Now, if we've set this when we were spawning the blueprint, it will, this node will return wherever we plugged into the owner pin when we spawned it, we can actually access the instigator as well. So if I go back to my examples for her, we can do get instigator and we can get that variable as well. And this will return wherever we plug into the instigator pin when we spawn that blueprint. That's all of the default inputs that come with this node. But we can actually add our own if we go back to our example, so it here, and I select my example variable in these settings for it, we can use the exposed on spawn option. Now, before we took this on, we need to take on instance editable. Then we can take on expos on spot. And if we compile and go back to the ThirdPersonCharacter Blueprint, and we'll compile this as well. We should see that pin a pin. Now it hasn't appeared for me. So I'm going to right-click the node and do refresh node. You can see that the pins showed up. Sometimes this happens and you just need to refresh the node. Sometimes that when you recompile the pen will just appear. It's just, it's kind of random. But as you can see, we've now got the example variable input. So we can set this to true or false. And that will actually set when the actors spawn that variable starting value. And we've done this with a Boolean, but you can do this with any variable you want. If we wanted to say have a afloat and we wanted this to be called, say, damage. We could do that and we could set this to incent said it's spool unexposed on spawn component. Go back to our third-person character. You can see if I can poll, it's still not showing up, but I'll right-click refresh. Now. You see that now we've got a damaging put pen as well. So now we're actually ready to spawn our sphere. So I'm going to connect the pressed up to our example here. And now we need to set a location that we want to split it up. Now I want to spawn my sphere in the direction that my camera is looking, say, three meters in front of my character. So what we'll do is I'll right-click and do get control rotation. Now this is the rotation of our camera. I'll drag out from that and I'll do the get rotation, rotation x vector, and this gets the forward direction for us, for our camera. Then you multiply that by, we want to change this pen to a float. So if you remember, we right-click it. We do convert them and we change it to a float. I'm going to do double precision. So here is where we set how far forward we want our objects bump. So I'm going to do 300. And this is in centimeters, which move this back a little bit. So we've got some more space. And then we need to drag out again and do an add. Now we need to add the current location of our actor, because currently we're just moving a direction 300 centimeters Ford, but we have no starting location. So we'll do get actor location. We'll plug this in here. Now, this location outputted from our Add Node will be our access location. But Ford 300 centimeters in whichever direction our cameras looking. So we can plug this in now to our location up here. Now I don't have to do the rotation because it's fair. And I'm just going to leave the scale at one for now so it will compile. And now we can try it out. I'll jump into the level. I'll hit play. And if I press one, you can see that we're spawning in our sphere wherever I'm looking, but 300 centimeters ahead of us. So that's pretty much how you spawn in new actors into a world. Next, I'll show you how to destroy actors. So for that, I'm going to actually reuse our trigger from our last lesson. If you don't have this or this is a, we can delete these nodes and the code. And here, all this is, is a collision box that we set here, I've said to hidden is ticked off, and that's it. So we've got an event begin overlap here. What we're gonna do is we're going to check is the overlapping actor a example set. If it is, then we'll destroy it. So we can drag out and we can either do cost to example, sphere like this. Now it costs a more useful for when we actually need to get information from a blueprint. Because we don't actually need to get any information from this blueprint which just want to check, is it an example where we can actually drag out and do get class like this. And this gets the actors class. So it gets which type of blueprint that is from our content browser. And from that we can drag out when can actually do equals. And we can check is it equals to the example sphere. And if it is, then we want to destroy it. So we'll use an f node like that. And we'll drag out from other actor and do destroy. And there's a node called Destroy Actor and that kills or destroys our actor in the world like that. So this saves us casting. It's a few extra nodes, but casting does take a little bit of performance. So if we don't have to, then ideally we don't want to cast. So now we want to try this out. I'm going to go to the third person map and I'm going to add in our trigger. I'll put it over here and just make it a bit bigger. Scale it up a bit. And we'll hit play. And I was born in a sphere. So spawning over here. And I can kick it around because we've got physics enabled. Just push it into that box and you'll see that it gets destroyed instantly. Now, there is another way to destroy actors. If we go back to our trigger, we can delete this Destroy Actor node. We can drag out and we can do set life span like this. Now the set lifespan node allows us to tell an actor that we want it to destroy after a certain amount of time. So I can set this to say one. Now, 1 second after the sphere overlaps the trigger, it will be destroyed. So we can try this out and hit Play. I can spawn in a sphere. I'll push this into our box and you'll see that it hasn't destroyed yet and then it destroys after a second. We could change this value to say three just so it's a little bit more obvious. Press one again, push this in. You can see that it's actually gone out the other side. And then it destroys Because asked to wait three seconds. So that's it for this lesson. Hopefully you now understand how to spawn and destroy actors in the world. 32. Additional Lessons (Code Organization): Hey everyone, In this lesson I'm going to be talking you through some of the code organization features that are built into the engine. Now, I've just thrown together some code here. It's just for an example, you don't have to copy this out yourself. It's just so I can demonstrate the different features we can use to organize our code. So to start with, we have reroute nodes. Now, if I double-click a white line here, we can create these reroute nodes. Now these allow us to control where the pen will actually go. And they don't have any functional purpose. They don't affect how code is executed. All they do is help you keep your code tidy up. So you can either double-click on a white line or a variable light. So for example, a yellow line down here. I can double-click on that and I can create reroute nodes for that. Or you can right-click, scroll to the bottom here, and you can use the AD reroute note here that creates a new reroute pen as well. So these can be handy if you want to get around some code that's in the way. So for example, I could add an F no tip. And maybe I wanted this code is run if something was true, but I wanted some code over here to run it if it was not true. So I could copy paste this and you put a C there. So instead what I could do is I could drag from false to my spawn act to note it, double-click this white line, drag these down. Now we've got nice clean looking code. This code will run if it's true, then we'll just sort of zigzag around it and run this code if it's false. Next we have comments. Now comments are really important to keeping your code tidy. And also if you're working with other people or comments are important so that they can easily and quickly look at your code and see what parts of it do. So to create a comment, we can highlight some nodes and hit the C key on your keyboard. And that will create a new comment. We can add some text to this so I could write create player, HUD. So now I can just look at this comment. I know that these nodes here create the player hut. Now we can control what color the comment boxes. So I can change that to say red. I can increase or decrease the font size with this value here, I can show a bubble. So if we zoom out, it can be a bit difficult to see the text with the show bubbled texts on. You can see we get this little bubble here that rescales when we zoom out. And if we select the comment box again, you can see we've got the color bubble that just allows us to change the color of the bubble here. Then we've got the movement mode. Now, if we move the box with nodes inside it, it brings those nodes with it. But if we want to turn this off, we can change this to comment. And now only the comment box will move. If you ever want to edit the text, you can always just double-click it to this way. Or if you select it, you can change the comment text over here as well. Another way you can create comments as if you right-click scroll all the way to the bottom. There's a add comment option here that you can click and that just creates us a new comment node. We can also resize the comment node just by dragging the edge in any direction you want and you can resize it. You can also use common boxes inside of boxes. So if I make this a little bit larger, if I just select, say these nodes, I can add a new comment to that. And I can add some texts that so I can do create widget, for example. Another good thing about comments is if I can do, if I do Control F, that allows us to search the blueprint for key phrases. If I search for, say, create player HUD, which is what is in my comment, you can see that actually finds the common and it tells me what's in that comment. If I double-click it, it will take me to that comment box. Next we'll take a look at the collapsed note. So if we zoom out here and select this code, for example, if I right-click one of the nodes, I can select Collapse Nodes. If I click that, we get this new note here that I can name. So it's cool, this fire, for example. Now, all that's done is taken the notes that we had selected and compress them down into one node here. So if I double-click this, you can see that all of our nodes still exist. They're in here and they will still work when we press one, it was still spawn a sphere. It's just that now all of these nodes are contained in this one node. Now we can add inputs and outputs to our collapse node if we wanted to, similar to a function or a macro. So we could add an input, say an execution pin output, and an execution output. We could also add a Boolean output, for example. And if we open up our collapse know T, You can see that I input node now has that execution input. We also have that execution output and our Boolean pen. Now unlike a macro or a function, we don't actually have to run these pins for the code inside the collapse node to run. Because our press one note here is inside our collapse node. It will still run without us running these pins outside of the collapse node. Now personally, the way I like to use these is to group code together. So for example, we have all of this code here. That's pretty much just for the character's movement. So we could right-click, do collapsed node, and then I could call this a movement. Now all of my movement code is in one place I can go to, that's all in here. And maybe I'd have a collapse node for my shooting mechanics and climbing and various other things. That way you don't just have tons of code and your Event Graph. If you ever want to undo having your code in a collapse graph, we can always just right-click the collapsed graph and we can do the expand node that will actually delete our claps node and bring all of our code back to the Event Graph. Now you may have noticed the other collapse option. So if we right-click there's a collapse to function and Collapse to Macro. Now keep in mind that these events here can't exist inside a function or a macro. So if I was to right-click this and do collapse function, you'll see we get an error, but the code here could actually exist inside a function. So if I select that and I do collapsed function, you can see that it creates this new function, actually automatically adds the input for us as well. If we open that up, you'll see that our code is in there. If we go back to our event graph here, there's also the option for multiple Event Graph. So you can see we've only got one. And if we click the down arrow here, we can actually see our fire collapse note it also gives us a list of all of the current events in the event graph. We can create new event graphs and create a new one. I could call this se movement for example. In our new movement event graph, we could just copy and paste or I'll cut, so do Control X. And I'll paste this into our movement graph. And now all of these nodes are in our movement graph. They still work exactly the same as if they are in the Event Graph, but now they're inside a new graph. We can use these to, again organize your code. Now we can also organize our My Blueprint panel here. So we'll start with variables. If we click one of our variables here, we have some options. So this variable actually comes with a tool tip because it comes with the third person template. If I select my health variable, for example, in C, we can set description. So I can set this to say the players current, like that will compile. So now when I hover over my variable here, it says that the players current health. And if I go to class defaults and I find my health area, but which as you can see, if I hover over it, it says the players current health. We can also categorize our variables. So if I select my health variable here again, and I go down to category, we can set a new category. So currently we can set it to default camera or character, but we can create new ones. So if I just select the text and delete that, we can give it a name. So I'll call this the health category. Hit Enter. You'll see that now our variable is in its own health category. And we can drag other variables into that health category just by dragging it like that. Or if I drag it back out, we can change the category here now to help. And it just moves up variable into that category for us. Now, if we go to our cost defaults, you'll see that we'll have a new category for health. So we'll compile first. Then we'll go to class defaults. You can see that now we've got a health category. We've got our starting health and our health variable both in there. Now we can also add subcategories. So if I select my health variable here, and I go and I click the text, if I click so we still have health there. But I'm going to add a vertical line. Now, this is the key in the bottom left-hand corner above the windows key. It might be in a different location for other keyboard layouts, but that's where it is for me. If I hold shift and do a vertical line, I can now write another subcategory name. Could do, say starting, for example, if I hit Enter, you'll see that now our health variable is inside the health category, inside the starting category. So we've now got a subcategory. Now, we can also do this same thing for functions. So if I select my func new function here that I created when I collapsed and nodes. We can say a description for that function. So I could call this, this is a test function. Function. Now, when I mouse over it, you can see it reads this as a test function. So we've got a tool tip. We can set a cap category. So you can see it's actually got access to our variable categories. So I could set this to say at the health category. Now we've got it inside a health category. And we can do the same thing with macros. So if I create a new macro and I select it, you can see I can say Category, say the camera category for example, we can change its color as well. So if I go to the Event Graph, we'll drag that in. I'll just add some inputs to it quickly so it's a bit bigger. So add a few inputs. Now we can actually change the color. So if I select this, we can change it to be like red. You can see now we've got red title, but we can set a description as well if we wanted to. So this is a test, correct? Not correct. If I mouse over that, you can see it says This is a test macro. Now these are helpful, especially if you're working with other people. You can give detailed descriptions what functions do, and variables do as well. It can also be helpful if you're working in a large project on your own, because you may have hundreds or even thousands of variables across lots of blueprints. And you might forget what a variable does or how it works. So it's always good to have a brief description of what your variables do. Lastly, we can say blueprint description. So if we go up to cost settings, we can set the current blueprint description. So you can see at the moment it says Character Blueprint that contains movement logic. If we go to the Content Browser and hover over our blueprint, you can see we get that description when we hover over it and the content browser, we can change this to whatever we wanted. We could change this to say the, this is the main character. Now when I compile, hover over it and the content browser, you can see this is the main character. So that's pretty much all of the main ways you can organize code in Unreal Engine, it's really important to keep your code tidy because it can really cut down on how much time it takes to fix a bug or add a new feature into your project. And especially if you're working with other people, comments and tooltips for your functions and variables are really important. So that's gonna be it for this lesson. Hopefully you've learned a little bit more about how you can keep your blueprint code nice and tidy. 33. Additional Lessons (Debug Tools): Hey everyone. In this lesson we're gonna be taking a look at some of the blueprint debugging tools that come with the engine. So before we get started, I have created a new third person template project, just so we've got a fresh start for this lesson. Now, one of the things that makes blueprints really powerful is how fast they are to debug. Because we can see what code is running in real time. We can check variable values easily while the game is still running. And we can also use breakpoints to essentially paused the game when a certain piece of code is run. So to start with, I'll show you how we can see which code is being run while we're playing in editor. So I'll hit Play to enter plan editor. If we press F8, you can see that I've now got control of my mouse and I can select things in my content browser or around in the editor. So I'm going to open up my ThirdPersonCharacter here. You can see that we've got the editor open, but it's not showing us which code is currently being run. Now that's because we need to tell it which blueprint we want to check. So up here in the drop-down menu, we have the different blueprints that exist in the level. So there's only one ThirdPersonCharacter and I'll level. So we've only got one option. So I'm going to select that. Now. If your windows smaller, if I make mine a bit smaller like this, you can see I don't have the drop-down. That's fine. You can just click this little arrow here. And that will give you the options that don't fit onto the toolbar. You can see that we can select our character here as well. So now with our character selected, you can see that the execution lines on several of our nodes are lit up and that's because they're currently running. Now. Currently we can see that several nodes are running inside our ThirdPersonCharacter. And the reason for this is these are access input nodes and they run every frame. Now as well as being able to see what code is running, we can also check variable values if we head over to the mouse inputs here and I take a look at the lookup slashed down mouse input. We've got an axis value. And if I mouse over that, we can see the current value, which at the moment is 0. And that's because I'm not moving my camera in game at the moment. But maybe I want to see what this value is while I'm actually moving my camera around. So what I can do is right-click and do watch this value. And we get this little speech bubble that says the current value of that pen. So if I take control of my character just by selecting the viewport, I start moving my camera around. You can see that the value on that speech bubble is updating. So that's a really helpful tool to be able to see what variables are while we're playing the game. Now, it does have some limitations. Usually it won't work inside a function. So if you're working inside a function, typically the watch value won't work inside that function. It will only work inside an event graph or a macro. Now, you may also have multiple of the same blueprint and your level and want to see what code is being run in each one of those blueprints. So if I X out of play now and I drag in a ThirdPersonCharacter and just place it over here. Then I hit play and see that it's currently showing us which code is being run, but only inside the character that we're currently controlling. What if we wanted to see the code that's being run inside our alpha character. Well, if we go to the drop-down menu now you can see that we've got another character here on our list of blueprints. Now, you may have hundreds of a blueprint in your level, so it's hard to know which one in this list is the blueprint you want to check. So what we can do is while we're ejected, we can select, or if we press F8, we can select another blueprint like our character here. Go back to our ThirdPersonCharacter, click the Drop-down. You can see that we actually have this handy selected in brackets, and that tells us which one in the list we have selected in the level. So we can select that and then we can view the code that's being run for this ThirdPersonCharacter. Now, because this character isn't being controlled, none of its code is actually currently running. So now moving on, we want to take a look at breakpoints. Now if I go back to my spawned character here in the drop-down menu so we can see that the code is running. We know that we've got the right blueprints selected. What we'll do is we'll exit out of planets, turn out and I'm going to delete my character here, so I'll delete that. Now. We're going to create a begin play note. And I'm just going to drag out and do a print string. And if we right-click this node, you can see we can add a breakpoint. And if we do that in C, we get this little exclamation mark here and we'll compile, just get rid of that exclamation mark. So this red symbol means that this node has a breakpoint. Now, breakpoints stop the code or stop the game when the node gets run. So if I hit play now, you can see that the games currently halted. And it's telling us, Hey, this node with the breakpoint as being run. Now, this is really handy tool if you want to check to see if a piece of code is being run. Now, if we want to resume playing and editor, we can just click this little play button up here and we can take control of our character like normal. Now, our breakpoints also have a few other features that we can use. So if we exit out of plane now, I'm just going to add some nodes to print string or add an F. And we'll add a flip-flop node. And from that we'll add, say, a couple of prints strings on each of the outputs, like that. Now, if we play an editor, you can see that our breakpoint runs. Now. We can resume like we did before. All we can use the next frame button, and that will take us through each node of our code. So if I press this, you can see that it runs the branch node. If I press it again, it will take us to the flip flop node. And the reason that true pen is running is because our condition on our branch node is ticked on. So it's true. Now with the flip-flop nodes selected, if I click the next frame button again, you can see it's actually takes us to a whole new blueprint. We've got these codes here that we didn't actually write. The reason for that is our flip-flop node as a macro built into the engine. So it's going to take us through its nodes in its own code. So we'll go through this and we can select for each one of these. Now when we get to the end and I press it again, it takes us back to our ThirdPersonCharacter out the a input of the flip-flop node and runs the print string node. This is another really helpful feature of breakpoints. We can go through our code one node at a time while the game is running to see what code is being run. Now, there are some other controls for our breakpoints. If we make our window a little bit larger here you can see we've got some additional options. So what I'm gonna do is restart our plan editor. Now we've gone back to our original breakpoint. Now we have a few different options, so we've got step into next node to be executed. This works pretty much the same as our advanced single frame. Now, if we press this and you see it moves us on to the next node. Now, if I press this again, you can see it takes us to our flip-flop node. Now, maybe I don't actually care what's going on in this node is a node that's built into the engine. I know that it's working. So maybe I just want to skip over this node and the code inside it. What we can do is we can press this next button and that will actually just skip taking us through the code inside that node. So we can just hit that and see that it doesn't take us into the standard macros. We just skip over that and we can use this with functions as well. So if you have a function in your code and you don't want to go through every node that's inside the function, you can just use this button to skip over it and see what the result is. We can also use this little magnifying glass to take us to the currently selected nodes. So if I was looking around my code and I wanted to see where I was, I could just click this and it takes us there. So that's how we can navigate while using our breakpoints. And if your window is smaller, so your windows like this, don't forget that you can always find these settings in the drop-down menu over here if your taskbar is too small. Next, we're gonna take a look at the blueprint debugger window. So if we go over to the debug drop-down and click blueprint debugger in here you can see that we've got this panel and this gives us some information about the blueprint we currently have selected. So you can see if I click on the down arrow here next to my blueprints name, you can see that the variable that we set to watch, if we go down here, this axis value is also listed here. So maybe if you've had lots of different values that you were watching, you could open up this window and see all of them appear down here. We can also see the breakpoints. So this is where we have breakpoints in the code that tells us the node. And if we click it, it will actually take us to that node. So maybe if you have a break point in your code and you've forgotten where you put it, you can always just click this to take you to where that break point is. Lastly, we have the execution trace. Now this tells us what's currently running in our blueprint. So right now you can see we've got the event begin play and print string. That's because the breakpoint is being run. So all of our code is currently frozen. But if I click the Resume button, you'll see that we now have our input axis events, and these are being run every frame, so these will get updated continuously. Now, if we exit our plan editor and hit Play again, breakpoint is now triggered. And if we go over to the call stack here, we can actually see what exactly made that breakpoint trigger. Now, currently we're just running out and begin place. So it's quite easy to see. You can see that it's telling us in the ThirdPersonCharacter, the event begin play in the Event Graph is what's triggering our breakpoint. But you may have a situation where maybe you have a custom event that runs some code and that customer then could be run in lots of different places. Maybe another blueprints as well. And maybe that code is being run when you don't actually want it to, but you don't know which event in which blueprint is calling it to run. This is where the call stack can be really helpful. So if we exit out of plane editor for now, I'll set up an example. So if I create a new customer vent, creating a custom event, and I'll call this example. I'll connect this up to our code here. And we'll take up again play note and we'll call that event, so I'll call it example. Now, maybe we also have other places that are calling our example event as well. So if I right-click and search for input events one, and I'll copy and paste this. And I'll set this input to two, for example, just by clicking the little keyboard button here and then pressing tube. And we'll also call that event from these inputs as well, like this. So copy and paste these in, and then we'll compile. So now when we hit Play to plan the editor, you can see that our breakpoint is running and now it's telling us the code that's calling that breakpoint. We can see that in the ThirdPersonCharacter, the event begin play. So if we move over to our event begin play is running in the Event Graph and that's cooling the example event in our event graph. And then I'll break point as being called. But if we resume play and I'll just take control of my character. You can see in the background there I'm moving around the camera. If I press one, you can see that our breakpoint is running and now it's telling us the one input is being pressed. That's cool. And that's in the Event Graph. That's then cooling our example customer then, then that is what's triggering our breakpoint. And then the same for if I press too, you can see that in our call stack gets changed to two in the Event Graph, cooling the example event, and that's in the Event Graph as well. Now, this can also work for functions. So if you add a breakpoint inside a function, then whenever that gets called, it will also show up in the call stack which events made that function be run. And this is really helpful in larger projects because you may have functions and events that are being called in lots of different places. And if that code is being run when you don't want it to be, it can be really difficult to track down where exactly it's being cooled. So using a call stack and the breakpoint, you can find very quickly which events are actually calling that function or event. Now, the last thing I find really useful when debugging code is the print string node. Now we've been using it a lot in our previous lessons, but I'm going to show you some of the uses for when you're debugging code. So what we'll do is we'll exit our play an editor, and I'm just going to close our blueprint debugger will maximize our ThirdPersonCharacter and close the standard macros. Now, print strings or something I use all the time when I'm debugging code. We can add them to event chains to know when an event being run, we can use them to print out variable values. We can also use them just to provide information on some of our settings. So for example, say I had a starting healthfully. So I can call this starting health. And I could have a check and might begin placode for example, I could do is greater than 0. And we could do an F node. Connect this up like this. Then we probably want our starting help to always be greater than 0. So what we can do is if the sign health is not greater than 0, we can add a print string and we can just put the starting is 0. Now, if we were to play an editor and are starting off with 0, if we resume after this break point, you can see that it's giving us a warning saying, Hey, you're starting health is 0. So you can use these to give yourself warnings about maybe a setting not being correct or something not being set at all. This can also be really helpful if you're working with other people. Maybe they're adjusting a setting and they change it incorrectly. Then when they play an editor, you can have a warning setup that will tell them, hey, this setting is incorrect, you need to change it. Now, I'll print string also has some other options. So if we click the down arrow here, we've got printer screen. Now, if this is ticked on, it will be visible in game on the player screen. We've got print a log. Now, if this is true, it will also be added to the output log. So you can find the output login window, then go down to the output log here and tick that on. You can see we've got our output log. If I play an editor, now I'm going to remove our breakpoint here just so it doesn't run. So to remove a breakpoint, just right-click the node that has the breakpoint on it and just select Remove break point. Now when we hit play, you can see that our text is printing out. And if you look in the output log, we've also got under log blueprint user messages. We've got those messages from our print strings. Now we've got a few other settings for our Print String nodes. We've also got the text color. This will change the color that it appears on the screen. Then we've got duration. This is how many seconds it will appear on the screen. Now it's something I like to do with my Print String nodes is when I'm using them around my code. I also create a variable called show debug text. And we can poll just to get our default value shop. Now I tend to connect this up to the printer screen and print a log here. So now if I want to turn off all of my prints strings, maybe I'm taking screenshots or video or something like that. I don't want my print string showing. I can just go into the blueprint. I can select my show debug texts on ticket or take it on, and that will turn on or off all of my prints strings, as long as I have them, this variable connected up to or my print strings like this. You can also just select all of this do collapse to function. We can call this function something like error. Texts like that. We'll open it up. So now in here we've got our print string with our show debug text. We can drag out from the string to the input node to add a pin. We can do the same with duration and texts color. Compile this. And now in our Event Graph, we have our error text node. We can say add a message saying starting is 0. We can set the duration, save three seconds and the texts to read. And as long as our show debug text is ticked on, if I hit play, you can see that our text is showing up here. But now, if I wanted to hide all of my prints strings, I could uncheck this. And if I was using this function instead of these Print String nodes, so I had a, maybe a message here. Let's say example, run. And we could change the color to blue, and we'll just delete these prints strings. So now if our show debug texts is ticked off these white rum. But if we take it on, we can now see those messages. So that's gonna be it for this lesson. Hopefully you now understand some of the tools that are built into the engine that help you debug your code. 34. Additional Lessons (Timelines): Hey everyone. In this lesson we're gonna be taking a look at the timelines node. So to get started, I'm just going to create a new blueprint that we can walk in. So we'll create a blueprint class set to actor. And I'm just going to call mine cube. And we'll open that up. I'm just going to drag mine up to the top here and go to the Event Graph. So just to give you a brief explanation as to what timeline nodes do, they allow us to change your values slowly over time. They're really good for animating things like, for example, a door. Or if you want an actor to move from one location to another, but you wanna do it nice and smoothly. So to create a new timeline, we will just right-click on our Event Graph here and search for timeline. And you can see we've got an option for Add Timeline. Now, you cannot add timelines in functions, and you cannot add timelines in components. So that's just something to keep in mind when you're using timelines. So we'll click Add Timeline and you can see we get this new node here and I can name it. So I'm just going to call mine example time line. Like that. Now, we'll be going through all of these inputs and outputs in a moment. But what we'll do is double-click the timeline node, and that will open up this new window that we haven't actually looked at before. And this is where we set what values we want our timeline to be able to change. What we'll do is we'll create a new track. You can see we can select from floats, vectors, events, and colors. We'll just start with a simple float, so we'll add a float track and we can name it. So I'm just going to call mine Float, Float, output like that. Now here we have a timeline that essentially tells us what the value of our flow output will be. Specific time. So currently we haven't added any data points yet. So our float value is just gonna be 0 the entire time that our timeline plays. But if we want to add new points, we can, we can hold Shift and click. You can see I've now got a new point on my timeline here. And up here we can set the time that this point is up. So I'm going to set mine to 0. So that's right at the beginning of the timeline. And then we can set a value. If I was to set this to say one, you can see that I can't actually see my point anymore. Well, you can do is click this little button here, and that will bring all of the points that are in your graph into view. So you can see my points behind these buttons up that value one and at time one. But we can also add additional points. And this is what allows us to change our value over time. So if I shift click again over here, you can see I've added a new point and we've got a new time. So I'm going to set this to one. I'm going to leave the value at one, and we will select our original point over here, and I'm going to set its value to 0. Now, you can see that when our timeline starts, the first is at 0, so its value will be 0. But as time moves along, you can see at the top here we've got the time Valley, once it gets to the value of one, and that's our time, the output value of our float will be one. If we go back to our event graph here, you'll see that we actually have a new output on our node, and that's our float output. And this is what's going to return that value from our timeline. Now, currently our timeline will run for five seconds after it gets told to run. And the reason for that is up here it says length five. Now if I was to change this to say one, you can see that our timeline here has gotten a bit smaller. And that's because the highlighted area is the time that the timeline will run for it because we've taped for 1 second, you can see that it's now stopping out 1 second. So now essentially, when we tell our timeline to play, it will output a value starting at 0, which will be a float. And then as time moves on, you can see, if we mouse over, you can see the value increase as time goes on. And that's because our second is over here at one. So it gives us a linear increase in the value. So now we will actually learn how we can run our timeline if we go back to the Event Graph here, you can see that we've got a play and play from start. And this is what tells the timeline to play. And it will usually play from the beginning of the timeline. So when we tell it to play, it will start from time 0 and it will start, our value is 0 value. Then we have stop, which will stop the timeline for money and its current point. We have reversed, which will reverse the timeline running at whatever current point is that. So for example, if our timeline was at 0.2 seconds of running and then we told it to reverse. It would reverse from 0.2 seconds back to 0. Then we have reversed from end, which means that the timeline will reverse from the end points. So odds is 1 second, so it would reverse from one back to 0. And then lastly, we have the set new time. And this allows us to actually tell the timeline what exact time we want it to run from. Now, when our timeline is actually running, what will happen is we have these two output nodes here. Now the update will run every frame that the timeline is running. So if our timeline is set to run for 1 second, which it currently is, this will run for 1 second every single frame. And then once the timeline has finished running, the finished PIM will run. Now we also have a direction. Now, our timeline could be running either forward or backwards. To know what way it's running. We can drag out from our direction and we can use an equals note. We can use equals anion. And here we can just check is it going forward or is it going backwards? And that would just return a true or false depending on our value. We can also use a switch so we can drag out and search for switch. You see we can create a switch node that will either output forward or backward depending on what our current direction is for our timeline. Then lastly, we have our fluid output value. And as I've said before, this will increase slowly over time as our timeline plays because of these two points that we have in our graph. So what we'll do now is set up an example of how this works. So we'll just run play from Begin Play. And I'm going to add a print string up to our update. So now our print string, every frame that our timeline is playing will output the current float value. So if we hit Compile, go back to our map. I'm going to drag in the cube because currently I don't actually have one on my level. If we hit Play, you can see that it's now gradually increasing from 0 to one. Now I'll show you how we can actually move the cube using this value. So we'll go back to our cube. I'm actually going to go to the viewport and just add a cube component so we can see it in the world and will compile, get back to the Event Graph. So now we want to actually move our cube. What we'll do is we'll use a set actor location node. And from that we're going to do a main location or make vector like that. So I'm just going to be increasing the Z value. Now, we could, in our timeline note here, actually set this value to whatever we want our cube to increase by. So I could set this to say 300. And we can click this little button to just fit the points and vertically. And we'll go back to our rent graph. We could plug this straight into our z value here, plug the update into this. And we want to get actors current location. From that, we'll use a break node. Now, all we're doing here is we're getting its current y and x locations because we want those to stay the same, but then we're increasing it z location. So if we hit play now, you'll see that the cubes slowly moves up as our timeline place. If we wanted to, we could make this up in a little bit slower so I could open up my timeline here. I could set the length to say four seconds. Now, we need to change our last point here. So we'll need to change it's time to four seconds. So now our cube or slowly move up over four seconds. So hit Play. You can see now it's moving up much slower than it was before. Now another way that we can use our float variable to change the location, and that's a little bit more practical if we change our n value. So what I'll do is click the Zoom To Fit Horizontal. So that just brings the timeline. To show all of our points. I can select our point here, and I'm actually going to change the value back down to one. So now our first value is 0 and our last value is one. And we'll do the Zoom To Fit Vertical as well, so we can see that happening there. So now we'll go back to the Event Graph. And instead of just directly telling the cube or output flow is gonna be it's high. We can use this to move r cubed between two locations. So it will delete this code here for now. And we'll drag out from our new location and search for lab. If you remember this from our vectors lesson, this node allows us to gradually go from the a location, B location, and that amount is determined by the Alpha. So 0 would be just the output of this node would be the a value. And if this was set to say 0.5, then it would be a value between the a and b locations. And if this was one, then it would just be the full B location that's being returned. And if you remember, our float value now outputs starting at 0 and ending in one at four seconds. So we can use this to control our lymph node to move our cube between two different locations. So what we can do now is we can create some active variables. So I'm just going to call this start actor. And we'll set this to an actor type. Select that two down here, object reference, and then we'll duplicate this or just right-click and do duplicate. We'll call this actor like that and we'll take on these ice so we're able to edit them in the level. For our state actor. We want to get its location. And we'll plug this into the a value. Then we'll do the same thing with our inductor. Get to location. We'll plug this into the b value here and we'll compile this. So now we'll go to our level and we can create a new actor. So I'm just going to create a blueprint class. We'll call it an actor and we'll call this waypoint, for example. Like that, will place one in the level here and one here. And I'm actually going to select both of them just by holding Control. And I'll move them up in the air so we can see them a bit easier. So now when we hit play, what will happen if we select our cube? We need to tell it the start and end actors. So I'll set my start to this guy over here and the end to the other waypoint. And now when I hit play or cube or instantly appear over it this way point and slowly move to that end waypoint. So if we hit Play, you can see that is slowly moving between those two waypoints. That's happening because if you remember, our float value is going from 0 to one. And then I left node is getting are a location which is our star actors location. And slowly, gradually moving that to the end actors location, which is the b value. And then we're telling our actor to move between those two points. So this is a better way of controlling and actors location using a timeline node instead of just manually putting the location inside the timeline. Now we can also add different types of variable outputs to our timeline. If we open it up and we go to track, you can see we can actually add a vector trap. So I'll click that. You'll see that we've now got a new graph down here. I'm just going to click the arrow next to our float output here just to hide it so we can see our new track a bit better. I'm going to name this too. Or if you right-click and select Rename, we can name this to vector output like that. And if we compile and go to the Event Graph, you can see that we've now got a vector output on our timeline node. Now this works exactly the same as our float value did, is just that we have free float values being controlled in this one graph, one for our z, y, and x. So if we wanted to, we could gradually outputs a vector from our timeline note that starts at one value and ends and another, just like we did with our float. And if we want to add new points, we can Shift-click that adds a new point here. Now if I move this, see that this is actually in the x value, but our Y and Z is don't have a point and they're still at 0. So if we want to work in just one of these values, say I wanted to just add a value to the z. We can hide the y and the x, and we can Shift-click on our z. And now we can set a z value. Maybe now I wanted to add a y value. I can hide my z value and unhide the y value. And you can see I can now move about this point. And this just makes it a little bit easier if you have all of these points is visible, can get a little bit confusing. So now I've got all of them visible. I can change these points as I like, and we could add another 1 12th y value here. And we can move this. And we could do the same for our z value. Now, the starting values for each one of these outputs. And if you remember, a vector is just free floats combined. So if we break it, use the break vector node. You can see that we've got an X, Y, and Z. Whatever values we sat in here for x, y, and z, timeline values, that's what will be outputted at that specific time on our timeline. And we can use this output vector just like any other vector. So if I wanted to, I could actually plug this into my lap node, for example, at the end point. So now when we compile, instead of going to the end waypoint, It's gonna go to whatever the output location is from our timeline. If you remember that output location will actually change because we've got these points in here that are changing the x, y, and z values depending on the time. So if we hit Play, we'll see our cube actually moved from the start location. It's going towards 0, so it's going to head towards that direction. Now, there are other outputs that our timeline can do. So if we go back to our timeline note here and open it up, we can actually have it output and event at certain times when it's being run. So if we add a new track here, I'm just going to add a vent track. Now I'm going to hide my vector output just by clicking the little arrow here. And we'll rename our event track to event output. Like that. Now, like our previous output types for Shift-click, we can add a point to the timeline. But the only difference is here. We don't, the value here doesn't actually matter. All that matters is the time. So if I set this to say 1.5, if we shift click again, we can add another point and we can have this run at say, 2.5. So now what will happen is the event output on our timeline node will run at 1.5 seconds and then 2.5 seconds. And if we go back to our event gra, you see we've now got a new event output. So if we add a print string to this, and we'll see this hello now print at those two times when our timeline is running. So we've got one at 1.5 and then another 2.5. Then the last output type for our timeline, if we go back to that node, will hide our event outputs by clicking the arrow next to it. Again, we'll add a new track and we can add the color track. Now this allows us to output a color at a certain time. So again, like before, we can shift click on this color down here to add a new point. So I've just added a new point here and we can move them around as we like now, because these are white, It's not actually changing the value. But if I right-click this at the top, we can choose a color. And I can set this to say red, for example. Now, at about 2.5 seconds, the output color will be red. But we can move this around and we can change how severely the color changes depending on these other values. If we move these around and see now at 2.5 seconds we get a light red color. If we want to, we can change the default ones that came with our timeline so we can right-click this one, choose a different color. We can change this to say, a blue like that. And now you can see we've got a blue color here that will be outputted at 0.5 seconds. But as time goes along, slowly changes to a pinkish purplish color and then goes to red. Unlike before. If we go back to our timeline, you can see that we've now got a new output. I didn't give it a name, so we'll give it a name here quickly. I'll call it color. If we go back to the Event Graph, you can see that now we have access to our color variable type, and you can plug this into any other color input that you like. So if we wanted to, we could actually plug this into our print string. We can plug the color into the text color here, for example, just hit play and we should see some different colors for our texts. You can see like purple and now it's like a red. So that's all of the types of outputs that our timeline can do. So you can really use timelines to do a lot of different stuff. Now, maybe you wanted your timeline to actually just go back and forth to do a loop. I can show you how you can set that up. So what we'll do is we'll use our inductor location again here for our B input. And we will take the finished pen. And actually, we'll drag out from all directions and we'll search for switch. When you switch on timeline direction will connect this up to finished. So now we want to be able to control what our timeline is going to do, but we don't want to have to plug these into the inputs here. So what you can actually do is use a variable to control this timeline. If we go to the components down here, you can see we've got example timeline. We can get that variable. And we can actually use this to control our timeline. So say later on in our code we wanted our timeline to play, but without having to plug into this input, we can use this variable. We can drag out and we can search for play. You see we can call a function called play. And this will actually make our timeline play. To make our timeline loop back-and-forth, what we can do is we can use the reverse. So if we drag out, we search for reverse. We can use the reverse option. So if it's currently playing forward, we want it to then play reverse once it's finished. And then if it's going backwards, we want it to play from start. So we'll just do play. Well, we can do play from start like that. So now our cube is going to move from the star actor location to the end and then back to the end, to the start. And it would just keep looping and doing that. So we'll delete this note. We're not using that anymore. So we'll compile and hit Play. We can see our cubits moving from the start to the end. And now it's moving back from the end to the start. And this will just keep doing this now back-and-forth. Lastly, we'll look at playwright. Now the playwright controls how quickly the timeline is going to play. So right now our timeline is set to four seconds. That's how long it'll take for it to play. Play rate is currently set to one because that's the default. Now, if we increase the playwright two, that would make the time I run twice as fast. So I'll show you how we can do this. We can take our example timeline variable, drag out and do set rate. So now we can set the playroom. So maybe I want this to run twice as fast. So if we connect this up here to play, and we play now, you'll see that it's running much faster than it was before. If we increased it again to say four, it will run four times faster. So now our timeline will actually complete in 1 second, even though inside the length is four, because we're telling it to play four times faster. So if we hit play now you'll see that it's completing that now in 1 second. Now, there are a few other settings that I wanted to quickly go through inside the timeline node. So if we go back to our queue blueprint and open up our timeline. In here we've got a few bands at the top that we can use to control what our timeline does. So for start with, we've got autoplay, and if we turn this on, it basically means that we don't actually need to run the play pen for our timeline to rub. It will just run at the start of the game or whenever our Cuba spawn. So if I plug in the play pin and we hit play, now, you can see that it's automatically playing, even though I'm not actually telling it to. There's also a loop option. If we go back to our cube and then our timeline, you can see there's a loop button. Now, this won't do the same thing as what we've done down here, where once the cube gets to the end location and then goes back to the start location. This loop will just make the timeline start from the beginning every time. So if we turn this on, I'll unplug my finished it and we compile and hit Play. You'll see that it gets to the end and then it just starts again from our start location. So that's a couple of oxygen she might find useful if you're using timelines in the future. Now we can also change the way that our values and our graphs here go towards each other. So if I select both of my points here, just holding Control, I can select both of them. If I right-click, There's a few different options for the interpolation. So if I set it to say auto, and you see that now, instead of this straight line going between the values, we have a curve which means that the start value will slowly increase faster and faster. And then it will slowly decrease faster and faster until it gets to its target value. We can use these little handles here to control how quickly or how slowly the value will approach the target value as well. So if I select my point here, move it up like that. I've value will increase slowly than faster and faster until it gets to this point where it will actually be higher than our n value, because you can see the line goes above it, but then it will come back down to our V1 value. Now there's a few different options. When we highlight these points, you can choose from auto user, break, linear and constant. So constant for example, just a straight line up until the point and then it goes instantly to that value. We can use linear, which is the default. It goes from that point to the endpoint at the exact same rate all of the time. We can use these settings inside our vector output here. So you can see if I select both these points here, I've actually already set to auto, but we can set it back to linear for example. Or if you want to, we can take it back to auto. We can control those points like we did before with our float. And we can do this with each of our x, y, and z values as well. So we could do the same with our y-value, for example. We could adjust these to really increase or decrease however we like. So that's it for our timelines lesson. Hopefully you have a better understanding of how they work now and what you can use them for in your projects in the future. 35. Additional Lessons (Sockets): Hey everyone. In this lesson we're gonna be taking a look at sockets. Sockets or how we can attach actors to other actors or components to other components. Now we can add sockets to skeletal meshes. So that's meshes that can animate like for example, the mannequin that we've been using for our character. Or we can add sockets to static meshes. So those are measures like the cubes we've been using. So to start with, I'll show you how we can add a new socket to a skeleton. So we'll go ahead over to the Characters folder here, then to mannequins meshes. And then here you can see that we've got our mannequin skeletal meshes and also the skeleton that the mannequins use. We'll open up the SK mannequin. In here. You can see on the left-hand side we've got a list of all of the bones that are skeleton includes. Now, this is where we select a specific bone that we want to add a socket to. Say, for example, we were adding a hat to our character. We will want the hat to follow the head bone. So it will scroll through and find the head bone which should be near the bottom here. If I keep going. Here we go. We've got the two neck bones and then the head bone. So if we select the head bone, right-click and do add socket, that will add us a new socket to the head bone. If we head over to the Details panel, you can see we can rename this socket. I'm going to call my hat socket like that. Now with the socket selected, you can see that I've got the option to rotate it here. And if I press W while selected in the viewport, I can also move the socket. The socket is currently if you look over here on the Details panel at zeros are 0 location. That means it's at the exact location of the head bone, but we can move this so we can move this up. So now our socket is above our head bone. What that means is even when the characters animating this socket will stay this distance away from the head bone. And this is useful because if we're attaching a hat to this socket, we would want it to follow along with the head bone even when the characters animating. Now if we wanted to preview what it would look like when it's attached to a socket. We can do that. So we can right-click our heart socket here, go down to Add preview asset and we can actually select a mesh to attach to our socket. Now keep in mind this is preview only. So even if we attach something in here right now, we won't see it in game. This is just for preview when we're watching animations or in our skeletal Editor. For me, I'm going to select just the, select the cylinder here. And you can see that my cylinder is rotated the wrong way. So I'm going to rotate my socket and you can see in real time or cylinder rotates. Now, obviously this isn't a hat, is just a cylinder, but we're gonna be using this as the example. And we can see what our cylinder will look like while it's attached to our socket. So now if we go and watch an animation that uses this skeleton, we'll actually see this preview and we'll see it move along with the animation. So if we head back to the content browser hit, I'm gonna go to the mannequins folder. Then animations will go to the money. And we'll take a look at the jump, for example. We'll double-click that and I'll bring that animation over to here. You can see that while our jump animation is playing, R hat is still following along with our head bone. Now, heading back to our mannequins skeleton, if we wanted to get rid of this preview, we can always just right-click, do remove all attached assets and that will just get rid of all the previews for us. We can, if we want to add multiple sockets to the same bone. So if we wanted another socket that maybe had a different location for maybe a different kind of hat. We could do that as well. We just right-click Add a new socket, and that would allow us to add an additional socket to our head bone. If you ever want to remove a socket, you can right-click it and select the Delete option here. Now we can also add sockets to static meshes. So if we go back to the content browser here, I'm just gonna go over to the level prototyping folder and two meshes. We've just got some simple stack meshes here. But if we open up the shampooed cubed, for example, in here we've got some of the details about the mesh and the mesh in the viewport. And if we go up to the Windows panel here, there should be a socket manager and their minds ticked on. If yours isn't, you'll want to click it. And you can see that for me, it's over here. And this allows us to add new sockets to our static mesh. So we just click this little plus button here. We can name our socket. I'm just going to call mine socket again. Like that. Unlike before, we can position our socket. We could say set up here. And now, wherever this mesh moves, this socket will be 90 centimeters from its center even during gameplay. Unlike in the skeleton, we can also add a preview. So if we go down to the option set, we can click Advanced and say a previous stack mesh so we can select the cylinder we had before or the cylinder here and see that we've got that same meshes we had before. And we can preview what it would look like when it actually attaches to the socket. So now you know how to create sockets and add them to skeletal meshes and static meshes. Now I'm going to show you how we can actually use that socket during gameplay and attach things to it. So it will go back to our Content Browser, go to the Characters folder, or to the content folder. Then go to third person blueprints and we'll open up our ThirdPersonCharacter Blueprint. Now I've got some extra variables and a function here from one of our previous lessons. If you don't, don't worry about that, we won't be using those anyway. So before we start spawning actors and attaching them to the sockets, I'm first going to show you some of the more commonly used nodes with sockets. So we'll first start with getting our character mesh from our components panel. And if you remember, we can just double-click this to open the viewport. This is our animated mesh in our character. So heading back to the Event Graph, I'll zoom in here. We can grab our mesh component. If we drag out from that and search for get socket location, you can see that we get this note here. This allows us to provide a socket name like r hat socket. And if this mesh, so if our character mesh here has that socket using that name, it will return a world location for that socket. Now we can also use this get socket location node with static meshes. So if I added a new static mesh, which doing this as an example because our character doesn't have a staggered mesh component. I'm going to add that in. And if I drag that into our event graph here, I can also plug this into this note. And now if the stack mesh that we have set for this component has a socket, we'll get its current world location. Now, there are a few other notes that work like this. We can drag out from our mesh and do get socket rotation. This will give us the world rotation of whatever socket name we put in here that's on our character mesh. Or we can delete these nodes, we can drag out and search will get socket transform, and that will get the transform of whatever socket name we set in here. And if you remember from our transform lesson, we can just drag out from here, use a break node and that gives us access to the location, rotation, and scale of the socket. Now this also gives us a transform space option. Now if this is set to RTS world, that means it will get the world rotation, location, and scale of whatever socket name we put in here. Assuming that our mesh input does have that socket. Now if we click the transform spaces, a few different options, we can select actor. Now, this will get the sockets transform relative to the actors center location. And what I mean by that, if we go to the viewport, if we select our stake mesh component that we added, if I move it over here and imagine this is the socket. The sockets actor relative transform would be this location that we have here. So if this was a socket and we were getting that socket's transform using the actor option here, it would return the location provided here. Now, the next option if we go back to our transform node is the component. Note, now this will get the sockets transform relative to the component that it's attached to. So if again, if I go back to our viewport and we imagine that the stack mesh here is a socket instead of a component. If I was to attach this to this measure, you can see that our location has actually changed. Now this is its component transform. If I take it back and attach it back to the capsule component, see that the location is different because this is the actor transform. And if we move it back to component, you see that this is now the component transform. So again, if our socket or sorry if our stack mesh was a socket and we were to get its location using the components space, it would return this value here once it's attached to something like the Mesh Component. And then lastly, if we go back to our Transform now we have the parent Bowman's space. And if we go back to our mannequin here, we select our bone. Its parent bone space would be the value that we have set up here. Now, don't worry too much if you found that a bit confusing. Most of the time when you're using this node, you'll just be using the World option anyway, because that's typically the most useful, being able to get the world location of the socket. Now, there are a couple of other notes that are useful when working with sockets. So we'll delete these nodes now and I'll drag out from our mesh component variable, will search for it. Does socket exist? And this will just check, does the socket name that we provide exist on the mesh or the static mesh that we plug into the snout and then it returns a true or false value. If it does. We can also get a list or an array of all of the socket names exist on a particular components. So we can drag out and search for get socket, get all socket names. And this will just provide us with an array of names. And these will be all of the names of all of the sockets on this specific stack mesh. And this will work again with our skeletal mesh as well. We can just plug that in like our previous nodes. So now we're actually going to attach something to a socket during gameplay. So we'll start just by deleting these notes and hitting compile. We're gonna go to the Content Browser. I'm going to create a new actor that will attach to our character. So we'll right-click do Blueprint class. We'll create an actor, I'm going to call mine BP underscore hat, or open that up. And then here I'm just going to add a new Static Mesh Component like that. And we'll set it. Mesh. So we've had over here open the stack mesh drop-down. And I'm going to set this to the cylinder that we've been using before, like that, will compile and save this. Then we'll head back to our ThirdPersonCharacter. And I'm going to right-click and search for input event. And we'll use an input event one. So if you remember this nodes runs whenever I press one on my keyboard. So the first thing we're gonna do when we press one is spawn on new hat actor. So I'll drag out from pressed and social spawn active from class. We'll set the class to r hat like that. Now, because we're going to immediately attach our hat to our character's head socket. We could get away with just dragging out from here using a transform node and just spawning the hat at 0 in the world. And then it will instantly get attached to our character's head anyway. But the thing with this is sometimes for a couple of frames, you might see the hat appear in the center of the world and then suddenly snap to the socket. So what I like to do is get the sockets current location spawn are at that location and then attach it. So instead of using the transform node, we're going to get sockets location. So I'm going to get the mesh will drag out and do get socket. We'll use the get socket transform. We'll put our sockets naming and this needs to be exactly the same as the socket we created in our skeleton. So if you remember when we call it hat socket, we need to use the exact name of ways that won't find our soccer hat socket. We're going to leave this at RTS world because we want to get the world to transform. And we'll just drag this out, plug this into spawn transform like that will set the collision handling to always spawn ignore collision, because we just want it to spawn at this location. We don't want it to try and adjust our extra in any way. So now we're going to set r hat actor to a new variable just so we can edit it if we want to later on drag out, we'll do promotes a variable to create a new variable for us. I'm going to call this hat like that. Now, we've got a hat that will spawn at our socket location when we play it again. So if we can Paul hit play and if I press one, you can see that our heart is spawning on top of my head. But if I move in C, it stays there because we haven't yet attached it to our character. We're just telling it to spawn at that socket's location. So it will exit out of plane editor and head back to the ThirdPersonCharacter here. Next, we're actually going to attach our hat to our character. So to do that, we'll drag out from the mesh component up here, create a new mash variable, drag out. I'm going to search for it. Attach. Now there are two attached notes we've got attach actor to component, which is what we're gonna be using today because we're attaching the whole heart actor to a component, which is our mesh component. But we can also attach components to other components. So for example, if inside R hat, we held a component that we wanted to attach to the mesh, but we didn't want to attach the entire hat actor to our mesh. We could use that attach components, component. But for now, we'll just use attach actor to component. And we'll connect this up to the set node. Now we have a target, and this is the actor that we're actually going to be attaching to our mesh, which is the parent. So we'll plug that into the target here. Then we need to set the socket name. Now this is going to be the hat socket. Again, this always needs to be the exact same as the socket we created in our skeleton. Otherwise it won't attach the actor to the soccer. Next, we've got the location, rotation and scale rules. Now, this is what the engine's going to do to the heart actor when I actually attaches it to the mash. Now, by default is keep relative, and I'll show you what that does in gameplay. So if I hit play, I press one. You can see, I can't even see my hat here. But if I press F1, I look down. You can see that the hats actually over there, it's attached to the socket, but it's got a really far distance. And basically that's the distance that the socket is from the World Center, which is over here. So if I run my character over here and I press one, now, we should see the Hat much closer to the character. This is the relative distance the socket is away from the center of the world. Now, the next one, if we go back to our ThirdPersonCharacter here, is keep world, which if we set these all up toward the hat, will connect to the socket. The distance away is currently from the socket. Now, if we use this and press one now, you actually see it's right above our character's head and it stays connected to the character set. But if I was to go back to my character and under delay, say two seconds. If I hit play now and I press one and I move over here. You can see that now it's connected because it's moving with the animation, but it's that distance that we were away from it when we spawned it. Then lastly, if we go back to ThirdPersonCharacter, we can change this to snap to target. And that will just make our heart snap directly to the socket. So again, if we can poll, we'll get rid of this delay here and hit Play. If I press one, you can see our hats attach to the socket and it stays there no matter what we do. And if I actually add in that delay like that. Now before, if we press one and then moved away, it would stay that distance away from us book. Once that two seconds that up, it just snaps straight to the socket as you would expect it to. Now you may want to detach an actor from another actor, which I'll show you how to do now, if we go back to the third-person character here, I'm going to add a new input events. So we'll search for input event, and I'll add it for input events 0, for example. Up here, we're gonna get our hats variable that we created earlier that's being set when we spawn the hat, we can drag out and we can search for detach. And we can use the detach from actin option here. And we'll run this when our 0 is pressed. Now the default is keep relative. Now, this will do the same thing as when we attach the hat. It will keep the relative location of the hat from the center of the world, which isn't usually very useful. So most of the time you'll be changing this to keep world like this. So when r hat detaches, it will stay in the location that was when we told it to detach. So if I hit Compile now, hit play, I'll press one spawner hat. Are we still got that delay? So if I go back to our code here, we'll just remove that. So it will compile, hit Play. When I press one, you can see our heart is attached to our character like it was before I can jump about and it's still there. If I press 0, you can see that it's no longer moving with our character. And it's keeping that exact location it was when I pressed 0 to detach it. Now it lastly, there are a couple of other notes that you may want to use when using attachment. So if we go back to our ThirdPersonCharacter here, we can drag out from r hat and do get attached. And this will actually get us the attached actor. So if we use this node while attached to our character, it would return a reference to our character. We can also drag out and do get attached. And this will give us the attached actors. So this gives us an array of all of the actors that are attached to the hat currently. An example of how this could be useful is maybe when your character dies and you destroy its body, you want to destroy all of the things that might be attached to it. This could be a good way of getting all of the actors that are attached to your character and destroying all of those as well. Then the last one, if we drag out and search for gets attached again, you can see that there's get attached parents socket name. And this will tell you what socket R hat is currently attached to if it's attached to a socket. Now if you want to find any of these nodes that we've gone through, you can always just drag out from a component like the mesh here. If I will make a new mesh component up here, drag out, you can search for attach to find these attached nodes. You can search for socket to find the socket nodes. And you can also search for gets attached to get these attached modes. Now, one last thing I did want to mention before finishing this lesson is you do need to be careful and attaching actors to your character because they can interfere with your characters collision. And this can cause your character to fly off into the air or have problems moving because that actor that you've attached to it is blocking its collision. One thing to make sure when you do attach things to your character is this a good idea to go through any of their components? I have collision like an r hat. We've got our stack mesh component here. We go down and find the collision presets. Currently it's set to block or dynamic, which includes our character. So it's always a good idea to change this to custom and make sure that **** is set to ignore so that r hat doesn't interfere at all with our characters collision. So that's it for our sockets lesson. Hopefully you now understand how they work and how you can use them in your future projects. 36. Additional Lessons (Movement Component): Hey everyone. In this lesson we're gonna be taking a look at the Character Movement Component. And for those of you that were following along in our previous lessons, I've just created a new third person template so we can start from fresh for this lesson. Now, the Character Movement Component is built into any character blueprint type. So here inside our ThirdPersonCharacter Blueprint, you can see in the Components panel, we have the Character Movement Component. Now, the character movement component is what allows our character to actually move. And it also provides us with loads of additional settings that we can use to adjust how our character moves and what type of movement it's doing. So if we go ahead and select the Character Movement Component, you can see over in the Details panel, we have all of the settings for that component. If you don't have the Components panel or the Details panel, you can always turn them on just by going up to the windows drop-down here and selecting on the Details panel and also the Components panel here. Now we're not gonna go through all of the settings for the movement component because there are quite a few of them, but we will be going through the main ones and I'll be explaining what they do and how you can adjust them. If you ever forget what a setting does, you can always just mouse over it and it gives you a reasonably good tool tip about what that specific setting does. So to start with, we have the gravity scale. Now, this is how much gravity is applied to our character. Fast to set this to something much higher, like five, and we'll compile it and hit play. When I jump, you can see my character actually doesn't jump very high. And that's because we're applying five times the normal gravity to our character. Now keep in mind this gravity value only affects the character, no other objects in the world. Then heading back to our ThirdPersonCharacter and selecting the character movement, we've got the max acceleration. Now this is how quickly the character will accelerate up to its max movement speed. The higher this value, the faster the character will be at that accelerating, and the lower, the lower it will be. Next we have the breaking friction factor. Now the higher this value is, the faster the character will stop when we release all of the movement input keys. Next we have the crouched half height. Now, this is the height that our capsule component will be when our character is crouched. And if we go to our viewport, you can see our Capsule Component here. Now our capsule component is what the texts, what our character is running into. Now, when you're crouched, typically you'd want this to be shorter because your character is crouching down, and that's what would allow you to move under lower objects. So now we'll head back to the Event Graph and I'm going to set up a quick example of how we can tell the movement component that we're crouching. So if we move up here, I'm going to create a new input event, log search for input events C. And I'm just going to scroll up and try and find that input. So that's here for me. I'm just going to set it up so that when I press C, our character Will Crouch. And when I really see our character walk on crouch, now keep in mind, our character won't actually play a crouch animation because we haven't set up the animation side of this. But what we'll be doing is we'll tell the movement component that we want it to use the crouch settings to tell our movement component that we're crouching will drag out from Preston search for crouch. And we'll select the crouch function here. And then we'll drag out from released and search for and crouch like that. Now, these are functions that are built into character blueprints. If you try to use these functions and say, just a random act of blueprint, you wouldn't be able to find these functions. Now there's one other setting that we need to turn on and that's actually inside our Character Movement Component that we need to tell it that our character can actually crouch in the searcher we're just going to search for can crouch. And you'll see under movement capabilities, can crouch has actually ticked off. So we're going to take that one. Now we can test this out in game, so just compile and head to the third person map and we'll hit play. Now before I hit C, I'm just going to press the Tilde key, which is the key on the left-hand side of the wonky. I'm going to search for show space collision. I'm hit Enter. So now we can see all of the collision in our level, including our capsule collision, which you can see is that red outline of our character. Now if I hold down C and see that my capsules now gotten smaller, That's our capsules half-life, which is 40 centimeters. And if I try and move and see that my character is actually also moving slower and my camera is moving down. Now, this is all happening because we've told the movement component that we're going into the crouch movement mode. So now if we head back to the ThirdPersonCharacter Blueprint and select the movement component here. And if we search for crouch and search bar up here, we can find the other crouch settings. So we have the max walk speed crouched. Now this is how fast the character move while crouching, and that value is in centimeters per second. Now we also have a setting called can walk off ledgers when crouching. If this is takes off, I can show you what that does. We'll hit play, run over to our ledge here. And if I hold seat crouch in C, it won't allow me to walk off the edge while I'm crouching. Now, if we were to enable that setting, it would allow us to walk off edges while crouching. So next we'll get rid of the crowd search and we'll carry on through the general settings. Now we have the default land movement mode and default water movement mode. Now, movement modes or how we tell the movement component which settings we want it to use. So by default, when on land, we're telling it we want to use the walking settings which found down here. When in water we want to use the swimming settings which are found further down. Now when the movement component is in the swimming mode, it won't suddenly start using swimming animations. Animations are handled separately. What it does do is it tells the movement component that we want to use the swimming settings instead of say, the walking settings. Now, moving on to the walking settings, we have the max step height. Now this is how high of an edge that your character couldn't step up without having to jump. Now by default, this is 45 centimeters, but maybe you had a staircase and the character can't just walk up at normally, you'd have to jump. You may have to increase this value a little bit to allow the character to step up a higher height. Next we have the walkable floor angle. Now this is how steep of a slope our character can walk up. If you want your character to walk up steeper slopes, you'd need to increase this value. Next up we have our max walk speed. Now this is the maximum speed our character will go while walking. So if we want our character to walk faster, we had increased this value and if we wanted them to walk slower with decreased, then we have the max walk speed for crouched. We've explained this before. This is the speed our character will move while crouching. Then we have the Min, analog walk speed. And this is used for if you have a bucket, a gamepad stick. This is the minimum speed your character can go with the input of the input stick. Next, we have the braking deceleration walking. Now this is how much deceleration force is applied to the character when you're no longer walking in a direction. So the higher this value, the faster your character will slow down. Next we have the can walk off ledges. If this is true, it behaves like R can walk of ledgers when crouched, it allows our character to walk off the ledge when walking. And if this is false, our character won't be able to walk off of ledgers. Now, scrolling down, we'll go to the jump settings here. Now we have the jumps, the velocity. This is how much force is applied when a character actually jumps. So if we were to set this is something really high like 2000s. And we can pull, if we hit play and we jump our characters now jumping really high. Now, heading back to the ThirdPersonCharacter and selecting our character movement hip, we've got some other settings for our Jumping. I'm not gonna go through all of them, but some of the main ones are the air control. Now this is how much control over the direction that your character is moving the player will have, the higher this value, the more control they'll have. Now, moving down, we're not going to be covering the network settings in this lesson because they're far more advanced than what this lesson is going to cover. But if we keep moving down, you'll find the swimming settings. And here you can set the max swim speed. We can set things like buoyancy. And these are only relevant if your character is in the swimming mode. Then we've got flying. Again. We can set the max flow speed. This is the speed that the character will move while in the flying movement mode. Now, moving down to the character movement rotation settings, you can see that we've got a rotation rate. This is how quickly the character will rotate to face the direction it's meant to face. So if I was to set this from 500 down to 50, and we compile and hit play. Now, if I look in the direction here and I press W, you can see my character slowly rotating to that direction. That setting is how we control. How quick are character rotates. Now we also have a couple of other rotation settings here. Now we've got orientate rotation to movement, which means the character will face the direction that we're moving in. If we turn this off and fall and hit play, and see that if I start moving in this direction, our character continuous facing forward because we're no longer rotating to our movement direction. Now in our movement component, we also have another setting called use controller desired rotation. Now if we turn that on, our character will face the direction our cameras facing. Now we set our rotation rate to 50. I'm going to turn this back up to 500. And if we compile and hit Play, you can see that now whenever I move my camera, our character will turn to face the direction. Now you can see if I stopped me from my character quickly, our character has got a bit of delay. Now that's because of rotation speed. So we could either decrease or increase this value to make our character rotate quicker to that direction. Now, something to keep in mind, we've used controller desired rotation is it doesn't work if you also have orientate rotation to movement ticked on. If they're both ticked on here or use controller, desired rotation will not work. So those are most of the main settings that you'll be adjusting and the Character Movement Component. But we can also adjust them in game. So if we want to access what these values currently are, all change them. We can always get our Character Movement Component drag out and we can search for a particular value. Say for example, we were making a sprint system and we want it to change our characters max movement speed. We could search for set max walk speed, and that gives us access to both our max walk speed and our max walk speed crouched as well, where we use the max walk speed. I'm going to set the max walk speed to say 1500. And we'll copy and paste this node, connect their target backup to our character movement here. And we will create a new input. So it will search for input, then shift, create a left shift input. When pressed, we want our max walk speed to increase to 1500 and when released will change it to say, 600. So now when we compile and I hit Play, if I walk about without pressing shift, we've got our normal walk speed. And if I hold shift down, you can see our character gets much faster. Now heading back to the ThirdPersonCharacter Blueprint, we can also change what movement mode or character is in. So again, if we get our character movement, we can drag out and just do set movement mode. And we can use the SAT movement mode function here to change the current movement mode of our character. So we could set it to falling or swimming depending on what movement mode we want our character to currently be in. Now if you remember, we enabled can crouch in our movement component, but you can actually also enable and disable other movement modes. So if we scroll right down to the bottom here, it should be under the naff movement. We can drop, click the drop-down for movement capabilities. Then here you can see we can actually enable and disable all of the different types of movement modes that your character can enter. Now we can also access whether or not these are enabled or disabled in our code. So we can search for can crouch for example. That will allow us to check can our character currently crouch? Now using our character movement variable, we can also adjust any of our other settings. So we could drag out and search for sets, use controller desired rotation. And we could turn this on or off depending on what we're doing in our code. We can also increase or decrease or rotation rate. So we can search for rotation, rent, and we can set a rotation rate that we want to use instead of having to set it inside our character movement rotation settings here. Now there are settings we haven't covered in this lesson purely because there are a lot of them and some of them are far more advanced and quite specific to certain needs. But you can find under most of the categories and advanced option which will give you access to some additional information. And if you want to know what these variables do, you can always just hover over. It gives you a pretty good explanation as to what they do. The last settings we're going to cover are actually in the class defaults of the character. So if we click class defaults and scroll up here, you should find the use control of rotation, pitch, yaw, and roll options here. Now, like the user controller desired rotation setting that we have in the character movement, these makes the character face the direction that the camera is pointing. But the difference is with these settings, if these are enabled, the character will face that direction instantly. It doesn't take into account the rotation rate that we have inside our Character Movement Component. If we scroll down back to the rotation settings, it will ignore this rotation rate. If we turn off our use controller desired rotation, and we head back to our class defaults, scroll up. We can actually enable these settings to see how they work in game. So to start with will just enable rotation Europe. So that's side to side. We'll compile, hit Play. You can see now when I rotate my camera, the character instantly faces that direction. Now, typically for a ground-based character like our ThirdPersonCharacter here, you would only use the, your option, but you can enable the other settings in the class defaults. If we scroll down to find those, you can see we've got pitch and roll. Now if we enabled both of these and hit Compile, you'll see when we hit play, we can aim our character in any direction that our camera is facing. But again, typically you wouldn't use those two settings for a ground-based character like this. Now, lastly, like our variables in our Character Movement Component, we can set those using the code so we can right-click, we can search will set controller rotation. We can use set, use control of rotation, pitch, roll and yaw. And we can adjust those settings using code. So that's gonna be it for this lesson. We've covered most of the more commonly used settings with the Character Movement Component. So hopefully you now understand how that works and how you can adjust how your characters move. 37. Additional Lessons (Audio Effects): Hey everyone. In this lesson we're gonna be taking a look at how we can play sounds using Blueprint nodes. Now, Unreal Engine five has to sound systems. Currently you have the sound cue system and the Meta sound system. And both of these systems use the same Blueprint nodes to actually play the sounds. And that's why we're gonna be taking a look at both of them in this lesson today. Now, the Meta sound system is currently in beta, which means we need to enable it. So we'll head up to the edit option, go to plugins, and we're going to search for matter. We're going to take on the metal option here. If yours is already ticked on, then that's great. You've already got it enabled. If not, which is going to take it on, we're going to click yes, and then we need to restart the engine quickly. So now I'm back in the engine and I've enabled the metro sound system. Now we can still use the queue sound system as well. We've just enabled the metro system as well. And what we can do to make sure it is enabled is Right-click in the Content Browser here we can go to the sound option and make sure that we've got the Meta sound source option here. Now I'm just going to explain the main difference between sound cues, metal sounds, and sound waves. So what we're gonna do is we'll go to the engine folder. And if you don't have that, you can go to Settings and then go to the content category and make sure show engine content is ticked on. And that should show this folder here. Now, with the engine folder selected, we're going to add a new filter, will go down to sound. We're going to find the sound wave option which should be down here. We'll take that on. And now currently we're seeing all of the sound waves that are built into the engine. If we hover over one, we can actually play it. So if I hit, you should be able to hear that sound. And sound wave is basically the sound file you'll get when you import a new sound into the engine. Think of sound waves is just a basic sound file. It doesn't really have many customization options. Open up one of these sound waves now which bring us over to my other screen here, you can see that we've got some settings here. Mostly under sound is what you'd be adjusting. There are additional settings, but we're not going to cover them in this lesson purely because they're a little bit more advanced. But you can do things like adjust the volume pitch and you can also turn on or off looping for this sound wave. But past that, there isn't a ton of options in here for customizing the sound. Now this is where it sound cues and Mehta sound system come in. So it will close our sound wave for now and head back to the content browser. And we're gonna get rid of our filter hips. So we'll remove sound wave, will add a new filter and we're going to look for the sounds pop out. Then we want the sounds cue option here. And now you can see all of the sound cues that are built into the engine, like the sound waves. So we can mouse over one and hit the play and hear the sound, that sound cue or play. If we double-click a sound cue, we can open up the sound cue editor. Now, I'm not going to be going through all of the things you can do in a sound cue editor because there are a lot of them. If you right-click, you'll see there's lots of different nodes that do different things for sound control. But essentially what a sound cue does is it takes a wave sound. So if we select this note here, you can see it's actually representing the compiled failed wave. And we can change that if we wanted to. And then it outputs that sound to the output node. Any sound that we have plugged into this output is what will be played whenever we play our compile failed sound cue. Now, if we wanted to, we could actually have multiple wave sounds in a single sound cue. And the way we can do that as if we right-click search for wave player. We can select that new node and setting new wave that we want to place so we could do compile success. Now, maybe we wanted, every time we told this sound cue to play it to randomly pick between two different sound waves. We could do that just by dragging out search for random. And we could plug both of these sound waves into this random load, then the output into our output node. And now every time we play this Q, it will randomly pick one of these sounds like that. Now there's some things here on the left. There's the volume multiply it and pitch multiply. And this will affect all of the waves that are in this cube. So instead of having to go to each wave that our queue users, we could just control the volume and pitch here. Now we've got the attentuation settings. Now, I'm not going to be covering this in detail in this lesson because they're a little bit more advanced. But basically attentuation setting blueprints just contain a bunch of settings that control how far a sound travels and also how much the sound's volume decreases over a distance. If you want to see those settings that are included, that blueprint you can take on this option here. And I'll actually show you all of those settings. I'm not gonna go through these because there are a lot of them and they're quite complex. If you want to learn more about these epic actually has some really good documentation on sound attentuation. So now we've covered the basic differences between a sound wave and a sound cue. Now, sound waves again, are just the basic sound file that you important to the engine. And then sound cues. We can do things like randomly picking sound waves. We can adjust things like the pitch through these nodes here. Now, lastly, I'm just going to explain how we create a sound cue. So what we can do is if we go to our content browser here, I'm going to get rid of my sound cue filter just by right-clicking and doing removed sound cue. And we'll add a new filter. And we'll go to sounds and we'll just take on sounds. And this is going to show us all of the sound types. So we'll take this on and we're going to find a sound waves. So we've got our camera shutter here. Now to create a new sound cue, you can either just right-click a sound wave. And in here, you can go up to create cube and you can click this, and that will create us a new sound cue. If we open that new sound cue, you'll see, if I bring it over to the screen. You can see that it's actually got a camera shutter wave. And that's what we right-clicked on in the Content Browser. And it connects up to our output for us inside our new camera shutter q. You can also create sound cues. If we go up to the Characters folder here, I'm just gonna get rid of these filters, just right-click and then do remove all filters. Then we can also create sound cues by right-clicking. And here go to sound and you can find the sound cue. And what that will do is just create an empty sound cue for us. So if we open this up, you'd see that there's actually no input here because we didn't tell it what wave we want it to use. And if you want to add a wave, you can just right-click and search for wave, wave player. And you can set a sound cue here and connect that up to the output. So next we're going to move on to the metal sound system. And the metal sound system just replaces the sound cue system. So if we head to the content browser, I'm going to right-click go to sounds and we're going to create a new metro sound source. Now, this is the equivalent of our sound cue here. So what we'll do is we'll create a new measure sound source. We'll call this new sound like that, and we'll open that up. So now we've got a new user interface. It kind of looks similar to our queue system, but it has a few differences. First, we have an input here, and this kind of works like execution pendens do inside of blueprints. This will run when our metro sound is told to play. And then we've got a finished. So we want to run this once we're finished running our code and hen, then we have this output and this is what we plug into for our sound. Now currently it says our tomato, because our setting for our Meta sound is actually set to mono. If you want to change this, which typically you probably do, you want to click this drop-down and select stereo. And now you can see we've got an option for our left and right outputs. Now, unlike the sound cue system, I'm not gonna go into super in-depth with this system because if you right-click, you'll see that there are lots and lots of functions. It's a very big system. But what we will do is we will create a new Wave plan. So if you right-click and search for wave Claire, we can use this node to play our wave sounds. You can see we've got a play and stop inputs. And again, these work like execution inputs on a blueprint node. This is how we held this note to play a sound or to stop playing a sound. We can set a wave assets. So this is where we set our wave sound that we want it to play. So we could pick, say, compiled file. We can set a start time. So if we wanted to, we could start the sound at different time other than 0. We can change the pitch. We can set it to loop. We can set the time that the loop starts. And we can set how many times or how long, sorry, the loop will. Loop for. Loop duration is set to minus one. That just means if flute is ticked on, it will loop forever. Now, this node has a lot of outputs and we're not going to be covering all of them, but we will cover how to actually play this sound. So from our input, we want to run our play on our wave Claire, this is what tells it to start playing a sound. And then from our outputs we want, I'm finished, and we'll plug that into our metal sound on finished here. That's what tells them at a sound that our wave has finished play. Then we've got this outlet and outright, and we're going to plug those into our outputs here. For our metal sound. This is what provides a left and right audio output for our sound. So now if we hit play, we should hear a sound. Now, the difference with metazoans is we have these execution pins on the nodes. And here, what we could do instead of just running the unfinished output node, is if we wanted to, we could have multiple sounds play one after another. So we can copy our wave player here, paste it in down here. Now, when our first sound finishes, maybe we want another sound to play so we can connect this finished pin up too polite. We insert a new sound or set it to say compile success. But now we want to connect our left and our parts to these output pins so we can actually hear the sound. But if we replace them, you can see it disconnects our first ones. So what we need now is a mixer. So we'll right-click and search for mixer. You see that we've got lots of different mixes depending on how many inputs it has, we're going to use a stereo mixer. So we'll do stereo mix or two. That means we can plug in our left and our right from here, and our left and our right from here. And it will give us just one output for left, for right. Then from our finished on our second wave plot will connect this up to the output. So now what will happen is when we tell our medicine to play, it will play are compiled, failed. Once that's finished playing, it will play are compiled success. And it's going to output the left and right audio from both these nodes into the mixer and then output the result to our metal sound. And we can test this out just by hitting Play. You can see both sounds play one after the other. So that's just a simple example of the things that you can do with the new metro sound system. Now, there are some other settings. If we go to the source settings here, you can see we can set an attentuation setting just like our sound cues. And again, this is the blueprint that controls the distance that the sound can be heard and how much the sound's volume decreases over a distance. So next I'm actually gonna be showing you how we can play all of these different sound types using blueprints. So what we'll do is we'll go to our ThirdPersonCharacter, head back up to our content folder here. I'm just going to hide the content folder for our engine. We'll go to the third-person folder, open up blueprints, and go to the ThirdPersonCharacter. And if you haven't noticed already, I have created a new third-person project from our last projects are so we have a fresh start here. So now we're just going to set up example of how we can play some sounds. So I'm going to add the game play node will drag out from this and do a timer by events. From the event pimp. We're going to create a custom event. We'll call this the sound of M. And just tidy this up quickly. And I'm gonna make this loop, say every two seconds and we'll take on looping as well. So now there's four main nodes for playing sounds. If we drag out from our sound event here and search will play sound. And you see that we've got play sound, 2D and play sound at location. The difference between these is play sound. A 2D is really useful for things like UI sounds. It just plays it on the local players computer. It doesn't play the sound at a specific location in the world. Then we've got play sound at location, which plays a sound at a specific location in the world. So we'll start with the place on Tuesday. Here you can see we can set a sound. This can actually be a sound wave, a sound cue, or a metal sounds. So if we search for our matter, you can see we can set it to our new masker sound. We can set to acute sound queue or we can set to a sound wave. Now, it's good practice to either use sound cues or Meta sounds purely because you just have more control over how those are run. But for now, I'm just going to use our new Meta sounds. So I've searched for new metro sound and we'll select that again. You could select a Q if you wanted to. It would run exactly the same as our metro sound. It will compile and will hit play. And we should hear that sound play. And it's paying both of those sounds. Because if you remember, in our metal sound, we chain those two sounds together. Now, heading back to our ThirdPersonCharacter, we'll click this little drop-down here and it gives us a few settings that we can use to control this sound that's being played. We can change the volume and pitch. We can set a start time. So maybe you had a really long sound and you wanted it to start at five seconds in, you could put five here, and that's the time that the sound would stop playing. We have concurrency settings. Now, this is kind of like the attentuation blueprint. But this type of blueprint holds the settings for how many of this sound can be played at the same time. I'm not going to be going into it in this lesson because it's a little bit more advanced, but that's what that's used for and that's the same for owning actor here, those are both used for concurrency. But for now we can just leave those blank and our sound will play just fine. So next we're going to take a look at the play sound location now. So we'll get rid of our place on Tuesday. Just compile, drag out from our sound here and search for Plato sound at. We won't play sound at location. Now this node is going to have a few extra options. So we can say sound. This time we will pick, say, our cameras shutter queue for example. We can say location. So I'm just going to use our characters location. So we use get actor location. Plug that into the location pin. And if we compile, we should hear that sound play every two seconds. Just like that. If we head back to our third person blueprint, if we click the down arrow here, you'll see that we've got a few new options as well as some of the same ones from our previous node. We can set a rotation if we'd like. We can also change the volume pitch and start times like before. But now we have an option for the attentuation setting. Now, if you leave this blank, it will use the attentuation setting that you have set inside the cube. So if you remember it set here, now, this is kind of like an override options. So maybe this time when you play the sound, you wanted to use different distance settings for how far the sound can be heard. So this is kind of like an override setting. Typically, if you're using sound actuation, you want to actually set them inside the sound cues as opposed to the nodes here. Then like before, we have the concurrency settings and our owner actor pins here as well. Now, both the nodes we've been using so far, I've just been placed down to nodes and they're great for just playing a sound and forgetting about it. But we may want to be able to play a sound and pause that sound or lupus or replay it. So there's some other nodes that we can use for that if we drag out from our sound now and search for spawn sound in C that we've got spawn sound 2D, spawn sound at location and spawn sound attached. Now I'm not going to be covering the spawn sound 2D because it's basically the same as our previous 2D note. But what we will do is use the spawn sounder location. Now if we create this, you can see that we've got all of the same options we had before, apart from we've got a new one called auto destroy. What this means is once the sound that we set has finished playing, it will auto destroy this sound component. So depending on what you're planning to do with this sounds, you may want to turn this off. Maybe you plan on repeating it or pausing it and then play it again later. You'd probably want to turn this setting off. Now you can see we've also got an output, and this is an audio component output, and this is what we can use to control their sound. So if we drag out, we can promote this to a variable. So we can select the promotes Variable option that will create a new variable called audio component. And we can set a name. So we'll set it to say a sound component like that. And now using this sound component variable, we can call lots of different functions to actually control the sound that we've set. So if we get our sound component variable here, we drag out, we can do things like pause ourselves so we can search for Set Pause. And we can set whether or not the sound is paused or if we wanted to change the volume of our sound, we could drag out and do set the volume. We could change the volume, multiply using this node. And once we're finished with our sound component, maybe we just wanted to destroy it. We can just drag out search for destroy, and we could use the destroy component node here. Now there's actually quite a few settings that we can use with our sound component. If you drag out and search for audio, you can actually find all of the audio related functions that can be used with our sound component. Now the next node we'll cover is the attached sound to node. So if we delete this code for now, we'll move this up a little bit so we've got a bit more space. We'll drag out from our sound event and we'll search for spawn sound. And we want the spawn sound attached note here. Now instead of a location, it actually gives us a component that we can attach ourselves to. This is useful for things like maybe you had a car, if you had a car engine noise, you'd actually want that to follow the car around. So you'd want to attach that sound to a component. We could attach it to say, the mesh component of our character here. We could plug that in and now the sound will follow along with our mesh component. And of course we can set our sound so we could set this to say be the click on button Q here. Now if we click the down arrow here on our spawn attached node actually gives us a few new options. I'm just going to move these up. So we've got a bit more spacer. We can set a socket to attach our sound too. So if our mesh had say, a socket on its head, we can set the socket name here and i sound would actually attached to that socket and follow along with our mesh. Next, we've got the location and rotation settings. Now, these do something different depending on the location type setting here. So if this is set to keep relative offset, and we would say set our Z value to 50. Well currently our sound is attaching to our mesh. So if we go to our viewport, I'm meshes location is right here and this pivot point. So because we've added 15, the z r sound would attach to the mesh, but it'd be about this height, 50 centimeters above the meshes location. Next, if we go back to our node, we have the option for keep whirled position. Now, if I left this at say, zeros are 0, the r sound would spawn at the center of the world and then would attach to our character mesh. Now, depending on how far away our character mesh was from the center of the world, safe, for example, it was 500 centimeters in the x-direction. The sound would always stay 500 centimeters in the x-direction way from our character, but it would still follow along with our character as it moved. Then lastly, we have the snap two options. Now, there's two of these. It doesn't matter which one you select for sounds. So snapped to target will just mean that the sound is attached to the meshes roots. So right here on our mesh, another new setting that this node has is the stop when attached to destroyed. And that basically means that our sound, if this is ticked on, we'll stop playing when our mesh gets destroyed. If this is ticked off than r sound will carry on playing even if the mesh gets destroyed. Then below that we've just got all of the same settings that we had for our previous nodes that I've been through already. And of course, we've got an output node of the audio component. And we can set our audio component variable we created earlier. And we can use all of those same functions that I just showed you with this sound component variable. Now we can also add audio components to the blueprints. So if we head over to the Components panel and we search for audio, you can see it actually says Audio and then in brackets camera shutter cue. For me, the reason it's doing that is if I go to the Content Browser, I've actually got that selected. So if I de-select that, we go back to our component here and I search for audio. We should just see the audio name so we can click that. That creates a new audio component. And that component is attached to our character automatically. And over in the Details panel, you can set all of the things that we've been saying on these nodes before, we can set the sound that we want to use. And this can be a wave, a queue, or a metal sounds. So we could choose our new metro sound. And that will work just fine with our new audio components. We can set things like the volume, the pitch, we can adjust the actuation settings. And we can control this audio component the same way we control to our audio component down here. We can drag out, we can pause it, for example. We can remove it if we wanted to. We could use a destroy. And it behaves exactly the same as our sound component variable that we used earlier. So now we can test this audio component out. I'm just going to disconnect this code here so it won't be playing anything. And if we compile it and hit Play, you'll see our audio sound plays in the Stan Lee because that component is part of our character. Now, maybe you don't want the sound to play instantly, you want to play it later on, what we could do is go back to our ThirdPersonCharacter, select our audio component, scroll down to the auto activate and tick that off. Now, when we compile and we hit play, our sound doesn't play. But we could add in some code to activate that component. So we could right-click search for input. We can search for say, input event one. And when I press one of my keyboard, I want to activate my sounds so we can get audio component drag out and do activate and use the activate note here. Plug that into our pressed. And now we can compile and hit play. And when I press one, i sound plays. Now I can reactivate that every time I want to just by pressing one. That pretty much covers the main ways you can play sounds using blueprints. Now we can also play sounds inside of animations. So what we'll do is we'll X out of plan editor. I'm going to head back up to the content folder here, to the Characters Folder, then to the mannequins, then animations. Quinn, we're going to open up a run for the animation here. And in here you can see we've got a notified bar. Now, notifies are basically pieces of code that can run at a specific time in an animation. So if we right-click on our notify bar, we can add a new notified and there's some built-in ones here, but we're gonna be using the play sound. If we add that, we can drag this to any point we want in the animation, say right here. And now, whenever the animation gets to playing, at this point, it will play the sound that we sat. And up here in the Details panel is where we can set ourselves. So this can be again, a wave sound, sound cue or the new meter sounds. So we can select this cell it to our camera shutter, or we could set it to our new metro sound. And that will just play fine. We also have settings for things like volume pitch, and we can turn on whether or not the sound follows the mesh. This can be quite important if you're doing a sound that you want to follow along with the character, you'd want to take this on. Now when we drag over to our metro sound here, let's see. I'll play whenever the animation hits that point. We can also add multiple sound, notifies so we can right-click and another one hit click play sound. And now we've got an additional place and notify. We can add a totally different sound, say the camera shot acute. So now when we get to that point, we had that camera shot at play. And then when we get to this point, are meant to sound plays. So now we're actually ready to test this out in game. We'll head over to our map and hit play. So now when I run forward, we should hear our sounds play at the time of the animation we sat there like. So, that's gonna be pretty much it for this lesson. Hopefully you now understand a little bit more about how we can play sounds and the engine using blueprints and also animation notifies. Just as a side note, you might be wondering whether you should use sound cues or metta sounds. That's going to depend on when you're watching this video. Currently, metal sounds is in beta, and that's why we have to go to the plugins menu and enable it. But if you're watching this lesson and it no longer says Beta next to the metal sounds plugin, you should probably be using the metro sound system. 38. Additional Lessons (Particle Effects): Hey everyone. In this lesson we're gonna be learning how to spawn Niagara particle effects using blueprints. So before we get started for those of you that were following in the previous lesson, I have created a new third-person template, just so we've got a fresh start for this lesson. Now, the third person template doesn't actually include any Niagara particle effects for us to use. So we're going to use a free one from the marketplace. I'm gonna be using Niagara footstep VFX pack from side arm studio is completely free so you can just pick it up on the marketplace, select Add to Project, and then select your project and it will automatically download everything for you. So once that's finished downloading, you should find a new folder and your content browser that we can go to. And in here will be all of those particle effects that we've just downloaded. So we'll go to the Niagara Effects folder and go to particle systems. And then here you can see we've got all of our Niagara particle effects. Now we can select one of these to have a closer look. I'll open up the dirt linger, for example. And I'll just bring this over from my other screen. It may take a moment to compile, so just let it do that before we can see a preview. Now mine's finished compiling. If I zoom in a little bit, you can see that we've got a dirt particle perfect playing here. Now we're not going to be covering the Niagara Editor in this lesson purely because it's a huge system that could have an entire course just focused around it. But what we will be doing is we'll be using these new effects that we've imported into our project and we'll be spawning them during gameplay. So we'll start by going to the third-person character. So we'll head over to our third person folder, then blueprints than ThirdPersonCharacter and inherit, which is going to set up a timer on Begin Play to spawn our particle effect. So we'll right-click. So just forget for begin play. Drag out from here and we'll do timer by them. We'll drag out from the event pin and search for a custom event. And we'll call this spawn effect like that. And we'll set it to spawn every 1 second. And we want this to loop. So I'm going to take on looper. Now, there are a few different nodes that can spawn Niagara particle effects. We're going to be focusing on the two main ones in this lesson. So if we drag out from spawn effect and search for spawn system, you can see that we've got four nodes, but we're gonna be taking a look at the spawn system at location and spawn system attached. Now the difference between these two, notice the spawn system at location will just spawn our effect at a given location and it will stay there. Whereas the spawn system attached, we can use that to attach our particle effect to something. And if that moves, it will follow along with that object. So we'll start with the spawn system at location note and we'll create. Now starting from the top we have system template. This is the Niagara effect that we're going to spawn using this node. So we can click this. You can see that I've got all of my effects from our footstep asset pack. So we can select one of these. I'm going to select say, the grass effect here. And that means that now when we run this node, it will spawn the grass particle effect. It may want to compile some shaders, just let it do that. Then next we have the location. Now this is the location that our particle effect will be spawned up. We have the rotation, this is the rotation, it will be spawn that. And then we have the scale as well. Now we've got auto destroy. Now what that will do is it will destroy our particle effect component when it's finished playing its particle effect. So typically you'd probably want to have this turned on. We also have auto activate, which basically means that when we spawn the particle effect, it will automatically start playing. And we have the pooling method. Now, pooling is when the engine basically stores up a load of deactivated particle effects. And then when we tell it to spawn a particle effect, instead of creating a new one, it can reuse a deactivated one. Now for this example, which can leave this as none. So now we're going to spawn our particle effect at our characters locations. So we're just gonna do get actor location. And we'll plug that straight into our location variable here. I'm going to leave rotation and scale as they are. Now we can compile and try this out. So we'll hit play. And if we look at our characters center here because that's our characters actor location, you can see we've got a particle effect playing every 1 second. Now, if I start moving, you'll see that the particle effects stays where it was when it was spawned. It's not actually attached to our character. So what we can do now is we'll take a look at the attached node. Instead. It will delete our spawn system at location. And we'll drag out from spawn effect and search for spawn system. We want to use the spawn system attached. Now, this has a lot of the same settings as our previous node, but it actually has a few new ones as well. So starting from the top, we can set our Niagara effect and the system template. We can pick a different one this time maybe the leaves. We can also provide an attached to component. Now, this is what allows us to specify which component we want to attach our particle effect to. We could grab the mesh component here, and we can plug that straight into the attached two components. This will cause our particle effect to be attached to our mesh component. Now if our Mesh Component had sockets, we could specify the socket name here and that would cause the particle effects will be attached to that socket. Now we have the location and rotation. These will do something different depending on what our location type is set to. If it's set to keep relative offset, then if we head to the viewport, if we were to set that value, say 250 in the Z, what would happen is our particle effects would be spawned at the 0 location of our mesh. So that's the point here where the pivot is. It would add 50% to its height. So it would still be attached to the mesh, but it'd be 50 above the meshes pivot point. Next is the keep whirled position option. So if we change this to the keyboard position setting, what will happen now is whatever location we set here is where the particle effects will be spawned. And then we attach it to the mesh. So if your characters say 500 centimeters away from the center of the world, then the particle effect would be attached to the character 500 centimeters away. And would keep that 500 centimeter distance from the character that's attached to. Last, we have the snap to target. Now, this will cause the particle effect to snap to whatever we're attaching it to. So if we're attaching it to our mesh, it would attach directly to its pivot point here. So for this example, we're going to keep our set to snap to target so that our particle effect spawns exactly on our character mesh. And then after that, we've just got the same settings that we had before. We have auto destroy, an auto activate and then we've got the pooling method as well. I'm going to take on also destroyed because I actually want my particle effect to destroy after it's finished playing. So now we can test this out again. We can hit play and you can see that our particle effect is playing at our mesh location now, instead of at the center of our character. Now, you may want to be able to control which particle effect is going to play depending on a variable. So what we can do is head back to our third-person character here, and we're going to create a new variable that we can plug into our system template to tell the node which type of effects we want to play. So we'll create a new variable, I'm going to call mine effect. We can change the variable type to Niagara system. We want Niagara system object reference, then we'll compile and now in the class default. So you can see we can select any of our Niagara effects. I can pick say, ice for example. Then we'll just drag this in and connect it up to our system template and compile it before testing again, we're just going to let the shaders finished compiling. Now that's finished. So we can hit Play. You can see that now we can see our ice particle effect playing instead of our leaves. Now all of the particle effects we've been using a quite short, but maybe in the future you're working with one that plays for a long time at a certain point, maybe you want to destroy it for whatever reason. Well, you can do that as well. If we head back to the ThirdPersonCharacter, we have an output here, and this is a Niagara particle system component. And this allows us to control what we want this particle system to do after we've spawned it. So we can drag out, we can use the promoter Variable option that will just create a new variable with the Niagara particle system component type, as you can see here, I'm just going to call mine and spawned effect like that. And we'll compile. Then using this variable we can access some useful functions. So if I get the variable, we can drag out and we can use the pause. We can use set post. And this allows us to pause the particle effect or unpause it depending on which Boolean values you sat on the note here, we can get whether or not it is currently ports. So we can do get paused because of such reports will do is paused and that will return whether or not the particle effect is currently paused. And then if we want to destroy the particle effects, we can just drag out search for Destroy. We can use the destroy component node here. Now we can also add particle effects as components instead of having to spawn them with a node. So if I say wanted to add a particle effect to my mesh here, I could go to add search for Niagara. We could add a Niagara particle system component to it. With that particle system selected, you can see over here, we can set a particle system that we want to use. So say the gravel for example, if we go to our viewport in C that when I went into the view, but it gave us a quick preview. But we can set the location and it actually shows us what it will look like when it's playing at that location. This will behave the same as an attached particle effects. So this is attached now to our mesh component. So wherever I meshed component goes, our particle effect will follow. And we can also use this component in the same way in our event graph. So if we get our Niagara component, we can plug this into say, the destroyed component. If we wanted to destroy that component. We can also use those pores nodes that I just showed you with our Niagara component as well. Now another way we can spawn particle effects as using the animation system. So if we head over to an animation now, I'm gonna go to characters, mannequins than two animations. And we're gonna go to the Quinn folder because that's what our character is. And we'll open up the Rumford animation here. Now, inhale, we can add notifies which are kind of like bits of code that run at a certain point of an animation. These allow us to play sounds or particle effects while our animation is playing at the exact moment that we want to play a particle or a sound effect. So what we can do is we can right-click on our notify timeline here. Go to Add notified, and you can see that we've got some built-in notifies here. Now we're gonna be using the play Niagara particle effect. So we'll select that and that creates us a new particle effects notified. And we can drag this along to have it play anytime that we want during the animation. So I could put mine at say 40 here. With that notifies selected. You can see up here we can set any Niagara system. So I could set this to be, say, our particle effect. Now, if we go over to our notify here, you should see a dirt particle effect pair. Now, if yours doesn't, you may get a little pop-up saying that it's compiling shaders, just allow it to finish doing that and then you should see your particle effects play like this. Now currently the particle effect plays out the characters root, which is right down here. But if we wanted to, we could set a different location. So we could use the location offset here to add say, a 50 and the height. So now when we play the particle effects, you can see it's more up to the character's knees. Now. We can also set the rotation offset, which is the particle effects rotation. And we can also set the scale. We can also attach the particle effect to a socket or to a bone. So for example, if I wanted my dirt particle effect to attach to the head, we could set the head bone hip, select the head. And I'm going to set the location offset to 0 and the z. So now when we run the particle effect, you will see that the particle effect is now running at the head bone location. We can also add multiple particle effects. If we wanted to, we could just right-click Add, notify it and we can add another Niagara notify. And here we can set this to another location. We can set a different particle effect to save the ice particle effects. And we can have both of those play in this one animation and see that it's currently playing down here. Now, just a quick tip when working with notifies. If you've just got one bar here, it can get pretty clogged up if you've got a lot of notifies and an animation. So what you can do is click the drop-down here to add notify track. Not just gives you a new notify track that you can add notifies to like another particle effect for example. And it will work exactly the same as adding them to the first track. It just helps you organize them a little bit better. So now we've got all of these powerful effects in our animation. We can actually check to see if these are playing in game. So what we'll do is we'll save, we'll go back to our third-person character here. And I'm actually going to delete the Niagara component that we just added and we're going to disconnect. I begin play node. So now our ThirdPersonCharacter isn't spawning any particle effects at all. And we can test this out and game. So now when we hit play, we should be able to run around and see those particle effects that we added to our animation. You can see the other particle effects is playing and our ICER particle effects is also playing. A little bit hard to see, but you can see it running down there at the feet. So that's just a basic overview of how to spawn and add Niagara particle effects to animations. If you're interested in VFX and how to create new particle effects with the Niagara system, I definitely recommend checking out courses that are specifically focused on that system. 39. Widgets (Overview): Hey everyone. In this section of the course, we're gonna be taking a look at widgets. Now, widgets or the type of blueprint that we use to add UI to our players screen, things like menu systems, inventory systems, health bars. All of those would be typically done with widgets. Now, which is a pretty big system on their own. You could probably make an entire course just for widgets. So in this section we're just going to be going through some of the basics. You'll learn how to create new widgets, how to edit their layouts, how to bind things like variables and functions. To start with in this lesson, we're just going to be taking a look at the widget UI Layout. We're also going to be learning how to actually create a widget and then add that to the player screen. So it start with, we're going to create a new widget. To do that, we're just going to right-click in our content browser, then find the User Interface, pop out and go down to Widget Blueprint. And we are going to select the common user widget here. And we're going to name it bp underscore, HUD, like that. Now we need to actually write some code to spawn that are hot and then add it to our player screen. So I'm gonna be doing this in the ThirdPersonCharacter Blueprint, which bring us over from my other screen here. Now, you can do this inside the player controller as well if you like. I'm just doing it inside the ThirdPersonCharacter because that's the blueprint I have in this template. So what we'll do is we'll right-click and search for it to begin playing. And from that we're going to drag out and we're going to search for Create Widget. And that's gonna give us this new node here. And it's a specific node designed to spawn widgets. So the first thing we're gonna do is we're going to set a class and we're going to select our new BP HUD that we just created. Now we also need to provide an owning Player, and this is a player controller type. So what we'll do is we'll right-click and search for gap player controller. We can just plug this straight into our opening prayer. So now we're spawning or BP HUD, but we're not actually adding it to the player screen yet. So what we need to do first is create a variable to store a reference to our HUD. So if we want to access it later, we can just drag out from the return value, click promotes variable, and that's going to create a saint new BP HUD variable. I'm just going to call mine HUD. And we can drag this up here. Now. We're going to drag out from the output of the set node and we're going to search for Add to Viewport. And now this node is going to add to our players viewport. Now on Begin Play, we create our bp HUD, said it's Owning Player to our players control. We set the variable HUD just in case we want to access it later. And then we add our head to our player screen. But if we hit play now, we actually wouldn't see anything. And that's because our bp HUD is empty. So we'll head over there now. We'll compile this and open up our bp HUD. Now we're inside our bp HUD designer view. And this is where we actually lay out what our widgets going to look like. Now, up here on the left, we have the palate, and this is where you'll find all of the built-in widget types that come with the engine. We have things like buttons, images, progress bars, and lots of others that we will be looking into in future lessons. Now essentially creating new widgets for our HUD is done by using the built-in widgets that come with the engine, things like the progress bar in the image widget types. We customize them to behave in a way that we want. So if we wanted to health bar, we're typically use our progress bar and we would customize it to behave like a health bar. Or if we're building a menu system, maybe we could use the button widget and the image widget and use them in combination to open up new menus and change settings, for example. So that's our palette section here. We also have the library section. This is new and Unreal Engine five. This is sort of a more user-friendly view of the palate view. You can see that actually has the same options in here. It just gives you a little preview on the icon here. So it's a bit easier to see what these individual widgets do. And later on when we create our own widgets will actually find those under the user-created. So if I click that dropdown, you can see that there's aren't, there aren't any widgets here apart from this built-in one. But when we create our own widgets, we can actually find them in here and use them inside of our other widgets. You can use either the palate or library view as completely personal preference. Now, moving on down to the hierarchy here as well, we can see the current widgets that are in sidebar widget now currently the random because we haven't placed any m. But if I was to say grab this text and just drop that in, you can see that now we've got a textbook that's showing up. We can use these settings here to toggle its visibility. Now, this is helpful if maybe later on, you've got a lot of widgets going on and most of the time they won't be visible at the same time. You can hide them just like this to make it easier to work in the widget. Next there's the bind widgets. Now, this has more to do with widget animations and we're not going to be covering animating in this course just purely because it's a little bit more advanced. And what we're gonna be covering. Next, we've got our Details panel. Now because I've got my text box selected here in our hierarchy panel is giving us the settings for our texts. So for example, what I could change what the text says. So I could say, Hello, This is a test and it updates our texts. We can set things like color, but if we were using something else, if I delete my texts here and added an image, you can see when I select our image, we actually get different settings. And that allows us to set things like an image the size of our image, and things like that. If at any point any of these windows are closed, you can go to the Windows tab just here and you can take any of them on up here. Next we have the graph view. Now this is where we put code that's gonna be run that's relevant to our widget. If we head over to the graph view now, you should notice that it looks pretty much the same as the blueprint editors that we've been working with. You have your mike Blueprint panel. Here you have the functions, macros, variables, and event dispatchers. We have our Details panel, which depending on what I select, if I create a new variable, for example, you can see it gives us all of our variable details as you would expect it to. And of course, if I drag this variable when we can get and set it, we can run code normally as if this was a normal blueprint. Now we do have a couple of different notice, so we have the event construct that you can see. It's kind of grayed out. Now, if we delete this and just search for it, we can search for Event Construct. You can just create it normally. Now, this works pretty much like a begin playing out it run whenever our widget is created. Now we also have this event pre-constructed. This will actually one every time we can pull the blueprint. So to give you an example, Maybe we could hide our image which other week raise it. You notice that we actually have an image variable here in our variables. And this is referring to the image that we added to the blueprint. And the reason we have that accessible in our Event Graph is if we go back to our designer, select the image. You can see that here it's ticked on for is variable. So that means we can access this image fruit code via a variable. So what we'll do is we'll grab that image, will drag out one just to set visibility. We'll connect this up to our preconstructed like that. So when I can pull it out, we can see it's set to Visible. So if I go to my designer, we can see our image. It's just a white image right now. But if we go back to the Event Graph and I change this to hidden, now when I compile, go back to the designer, you can see it's no longer visible because we set it to hidden, and that event actually runs every time we compile our code. Now, our widgets can actually cool code inside our event graph. So what we can do is we'll go back to our designer here. I'm going to delete the image for now and we're going to take a button and drag it onto our Hud. You can either drag it just straight into here or you can drag it down to the hierarchy. It does the same thing. So we'll just drag it in with our buttons selected in the Details panel. If we scroll down to the bottom, we have some of these event options. Now if we click this plus button, it will actually create us a new event and the event graph. So maybe I want this button to run some code. When it's clicked, we can click this little plus button here, and that actually creates us a new event inside the event graph. Now, this event will run whenever we press that button during gameplay. Now, something to keep in mind when coding in widgets, it's good practice not to put gameplay code inside a widget. Really, you should just be having your widget to display information and then take input from, say, things like button presses. And then that widget should tell other blueprints, like blueprint actors or your character blueprint what was pressed, you shouldn't actually be doing any of your gameplay coding inside of a widget. So for example, if this button killed my character, for example, we could just right-click search, forget player, character, drag out from here and run Destroy Actor. Now, when I press that button, it would destroy my character and this would work fine. But it's not particularly good practice to do this. What really you should do is we should cost too. Or third-person character like this will delete the destroyed actor node. And then inside our ThirdPersonCharacter, we should actually have a separate events. So I'll create a new customer. Then we can call this kill player. Then this would run Destroy Actor. Like that. We'd go back to our HUD, drag out from our ThirdPersonCharacter and we would call that events would call kill player. So now our widget isn't actually the blueprint that's running the gameplay code. It's just taking the buttonClicked input. It's telling the ThirdPersonCharacter, Hey, you need to run this event. Now, this doesn't matter too much for coding in single-player games. But later on, if you want to branch out into multiplayer coding, this is a very important practice to follow. You don't want widgets to actually run any gameplay code, only to tell the gameplay code inside of other blueprints what's happened. Now. Lastly, if we actually compile our HUD, you'll see we get some errors. That's just because we deleted our image in the Designer View and replace it with the button. And if we move up here, we've actually still got a reference to that old image. So what we can do is just delete these nodes, compile, and that'll get rid of the arrows. Now we've finished for this lesson. In our next lesson, we're going to take a closer look at the Designer View and then how we can control the layout of our widget. 40. Widgets (Layouts): Hey everyone. In this lesson we're gonna be learning how we can actually control a widgets layout. So to start with, in our last lesson, we created this BP HUD and we added some code to our ThirdPersonCharacter, which basically creates that HUD and then adds it to our players screen on Begin Play. Now we also added in our last lesson to the BP has a button widget. Now currently that's taking up the whole of our bp HUD. So what we're gonna do is select it in the hierarchy liter. Then we're going to compile and that's gonna give us a warning. So we'll head over to the graph view, which is going to delete this code here. And the reason we're getting this warning is because this event is supposed to run when the button we just deleted is pressed and it no longer exists. So that's why we're now getting that warning, will delete this and compile. Now we're going to head over to the design of view and we're actually going to take a look at some of the panel types of widget. So we'll head over to the palette tap here, and I'm going to select panel. And in here we have a few different types of panels, and these are useful for controlling layouts with widgets. But we're going to start with the canvas panel. So we're just going to drag this into the top of our widget hierarchy here and just release that. And now we have a canvas panel. And you can think of a canvas panel. It's kinda like a representation of the players whole screen. If we were to add something like a button here, and we can just drag that in and release it onto our canvas panel. If we compile and hit play, we should see our button here on our players screen. So now we'll X out of plane editor and head back to our hardware. Now, you may have noticed we have this button down here that we can drag and that allows us to resize our viewport here. Now, it's important to keep in mind all this is doing is changing the preview of our widget so we can see what our HUD would look like, say at this resolution, or maybe a different resolution like down here. But this isn't actually changing the size of our widget. All this is doing is changing the preview. We can see what our widgets actually look like at specific screen sizes. Another way you can do this is with the screen size option here, and this just gives you a bunch of previews for different devices. So if you're working on a mobile device, you could pick a device in here to preview it's exact screen resolution. But for most people, you're probably going to be using a ten ADP monitor. So we can head over to monitors and select the 21.5 to 24-inch monitor. And that's actually going to change it to ten ATP for us. And you can see that resolution down here. Now, our canvas panel is actually kind of special compared to our other panels. When we drag things like buttons or images into it, we can actually drag them around and move them to different places with inside the canvas panel, we can also resize them. So if I want to make my button bigger, I can just drag it out and make it larger. Now because I have my button selected and it's a child of our canvas panel. And what I mean by child is it's directly contained inside our canvas panel. As you can see here under our canvas panel, we have our button, which is a child of the canvas panel. Now because of that, we also have some settings in our buttons, details that are exclusive to it when it's inside a canvas panel. To start with, we have anchors and I'll explain a little bit about that in a moment. But we also have the position x. So this is a side-to-side possession, possession y, which is it's up and down position, then we have its size. So this is its size and width and its size and height. Now, our anchor is basically the center point for this widget. So if I was to set this to 0 in the x and 0 in the y. You'll see it goes up to our top left-hand corner because currently that's where it's anchors. But if I was to change this anchor to say the center, you can see that it's position x and y. It has actually gone up. And that's because now it's 0 position would be in the center of the screen. So if I was to set this to 0 again, you'll see that widget actually goes to the center of the screen. Now, the alignment is kind of like the pivot point position for our widget. So currently 00 means it's going to be in the top left-hand corner. If I change this to 0.50.5 or center of our widget is now at its center. And that's why the widget has now moved into the center position, even though it's x and y position is still 0. Then we have the size to content, which I will explain later on in the lesson. We have the z order, which basically controls if we have two widgets overlapping each other, the one with the highest see order will be on top. So if I grab another button here, will have to zoom in to see it. If I drag this over the top of our widget, you can see that it's actually over the top of our lower widget. But if I select my lower widget and I increase this to one, you can see that now it goes over the top of this. We're jet because it's the order is 0. Now, moving down in the Details panel, we have some appearance options, and these are going to differ depending on which widget you currently have. So because we're in a button, if we account for the style, you will see we got options for normal hovered and pressed. Now, these are what the button is gonna look like when it's just normal, nothing's happening to it. Then when the mouse is hovered over up and then when it's actually being pressed down. And if we open up one of these, say the normal option, we can change things like the image or tint, or whether it's drawn as a rounded box or just a normal box. And you see that now. No longer has the rounded corners, or we can change it as tense. So I could change this to say be red. And you can see now it's highlighted in red. Now as you can see, there's lots of different options and every type of widget has different options. So I'm not gonna go through all of these settings. If you want to find out what they do, you can mouse over them and it gives you a little tool tip. Or you can just have a play about changing colors and sizes and things like that. But just as an overview, when you select a widget, this is where you'll find all of its settings for how it actually looks. So next we're going to actually delete these buttons here. We're going to take a look at some of the other panel options we have. So we're going to start with a vertical box. So if we just drag that in, I'm going to zoom out a little bit more. Now, as you can see, this is just an empty widget. There's no visual appearance for us. But what we can do is add other widgets to it. If I scroll up and I grab, say the text, I can either just drag it on top of the vertical box here or we can drop it over it in the hierarchy. So we can drop that in. You can see that it's now added our texts for us here. Now, because we haven't added our texts to the canvas panel. When I select it, I can not move it around or resize it. Like if I added some texts directly to the canvas panel. And the reason for that is our vertical box is what takes control of the size of our text is going to be its position. So if we were to add another text into our vertical box, see that now it starts stacking them vertically. And this is the key feature of a vertical box. As we add new widgets to it, it will add them in a vertical stack. Now, if we select our vertical box here, you can see that currently it's this size. If we move it about, We can still move it about in our canvas panel because it's attached to the canvas panel, whereas the text is then attached inside the vertical box. But if you look at a toolbox, isn't actually the same size as our texts are. Texts like leaks out of it. Now, this is where the size of the content option comes on. If I take this on, you can see that now my vertical box has gotten larger and now is the size of whatever we put inside it. So this is the main feature of the site's content. Any widget that has children widget inside it. If you tick this option on for that widget, it will resize itself to just be the size of whatever widgets are inside it, like our vertical box. Now, if we select some of the texts that's currently inside our vertical box and we scroll up to the top here you'll see that we've now got settings that are called vertical boxplot. That's instead of the canvas panel slot that we had when we put our text just directly inside the canvas panel. Now, these are some of the controls we can use to adjust our texts while it's inside a vertical box. So to start with, we have padding. Padding is basically how much space there is between our texts and the outside of the vertical box. So if we change this to say ten, what it will do is it will give our texts ten pixels between its edge and the edge of the vertical boxes you can see here. Now it's done it in all directions for this text because I've just put ten in the top hit. But if we click the down arrow, we can actually specify left, right, top, and bottom. Next we have the size and alignments. Now currently, our vertical box will just change its size to whatever is inside it. Now, to really test out the settings, we're going to have to disable that. So we're gonna turn off size the content and we're gonna make our textbox bigger. So now it's actually bigger than our texts needs. So if I select my text here, currently, it's set to just take up as much space vertically and horizontally as it can. So what we can do is if I wanted to my text to be centered, we could set it to a center alignment, and now it's centered in the middle of our vertical box. If I resize my box, you can see that it changes its center. Or we can select our text again and set it to be right aligned. And that will mean that the text is now attached to the right side of our vertical box. Next, we also have the vertical alignment, and this allows us to control the vertical position of our text. Now currently it's set to fill vertically, but we also have its size set to auto. So the text is just going to use as much space as it needs vertically. But say I wanted my text to be more in the center of our vertical box. What we can do is we can tell our size to be filled. And this means that our text is basically telling the vertical box it wants to use as much space as it can. Then we can use our vertical alignment. We could set this to say center, and that will be centered in the space that it has available. Now, these settings can be a little bit confusing to begin with, and a lot of the time you just have to play about with them to get the result that you're looking for. But they can be really helpful when working in things like vertical boxes. And the behavior of these settings are going to depend on the widget that you have selected. So if we have to grab a button and drop this inside of vertical box here, you can see that it's actually extending itself to the full size it has available in the width. And the reason for that is because of our alignments. Now, if I was to set my horizontal alignment to center, you'll see my button actually gets much smaller. And that's because if we go to Style in the normal drop-down here, our image size is set to 32 by 32. So if I was to increase this, you can see my button actually gets larger. Or if I was to increase it in the X value, you can see it gets longer. And if I was to set my size up here to fill, you see my button gets much bigger. Now it's not taking up all of the available space because our text up here is also set to fill. So if I was to set this to auto and see that now my box is pushing all this texts out of its way and it's taking up as much space as it can vertically. And that's because our vertical is set to fill vertically for us to take on fill horizontally, you'll see now a button takes up all of this space. And just as a side note, if you're changing the size of a button in its normal style, you'll probably want to do the same for both hovered and pressed because you've got to remember that when you hover over a button, it will then start using these settings. And if your size is different from your normal size, then your button is going to shrink down whenever you hover over it. Don't worry too much if those settings have gone over your head, the best way to learn widgets is to just play with them, try and make little things and get them working and laid out the way that you want to by using these buttons here. And also the padding and alignment settings that you have available by selecting the individual widget. Now we've been using the vertical panel, but there is also a horizontal panels. So if we go to our panels option, you can see we've got the horizontal box. And if we drag this in, this behaves pretty much exactly the same as our vertical box, but instead it's horizontal. So if I grab, say, a text widget, we just drag that into our horizontal box. You can see that it's added it inside our horizontal box down here. If I was to add another one to our horizontal box, you can see that it's added it, but now it's moving them horizontally instead of vertically. Now, the cool thing about these panels is we can use them together. So if we zoom out a little bit here, I'm going to delete all of these in my vertical box. And we're going to add a horizontal box inside the vertical box. So we'll go down two panels, find a horizontal box. And we're going to put this inside our vertical box like that. Now, inside our horizontal box we can add something like texts, will add some texts. And maybe I want an image as well. So if we imagine this was maybe a list of items, we'd want the items Image and then some texts for its name. So we'll add an image as well to our horizontal box like that. Now, we can change the order that these are in, inside our horizontal box. We can select them and you can use these little arrows just to move them about. Or in the hierarchy panel, we can just drag it. And we get this little blue line that tells us if we're moving it so we can move it above our text. And now it's above our text or in front of our texts for the horizontal box. Now say I didn't really like the way this looks. I wanted some space or maybe I wanted my textbox to the other side of our panel here. I select my text. We could set it to fill and I'm going to set it to right align horizontally. And now my text is over here and my images are still on the left-hand side. So now we could copy and paste or horizontal box. So we'll select it, do Control C, then we'll select our vertical box and do Control V. And now we can paste in a couple of our vertical boxes. You can see now we've got a list of horizontal box inside our vertical box. And then those horizontal box have our images and our texts. So we can select our text and change these. We could change this to say sword, this to gold, and this to health drink, for example. Now we have a vertical list of horizontal boxes that then have this information inside. Now, maybe we wanted to change the distance from the edge of our horizontal box to the edge of the vertical box. We can do that using our padding. So we can set our paddings, say ten. And that will actually give us some space between our different entries and also the edges of our vertical box. So we could do this with each one. We can set this to ten as well. And then the same with this, just to tidy up a little bit like that. Now if we wanted to, we could set an image for these. So if I select one of the images here, we can set an image. Now I've only got the images that come with the engine. So we'll, we'll use, say this one. That's actually set our image that we could sit and have 12 here so we can scroll down, find a different image, maybe this Android icon, you can see. Now we can set images for each one of our rows here. Another way we can use padding is actually within, say, a vertical box here. Maybe I wanted my text to be this side, but I wanted a bit of space between the image and the text. What we could do is change this back to auto, so it's over this side. Then we could either use padding. So I could open up padding at a left padding of say, 50. And you see now our text is 50 centimeters, so 50 pixels away from our image. Or if we get rid of this quickly, we can use a spacer widget. So if we search for space, we can use a spacer widget and we can drop this in, in-between our image and our texts in the hierarchy. Just it, select the spacer and we'll set its size here. We want the x to be the horizontal, so we were increases to say 100, and that gives us a 100 pixels between our image and our sword. Now, so far we've been looking at panels and panels for the most part can have unlimited children. So we can add as many widgets as we want to our canvas panel or to our vertical box or the horizontal box. But some widgets don't have that freedom. If we get rid of our search here and we add, say, a button, we can add a child to a button. So if I grab, say, some texts, I can drag this on top here to add it as a child or just drop it on the button in the hierarchy panel. And you can see now we've got the text and that's a child of our button. But if I was to grab, say, some more texts, I can't actually add that to our button anymore because our button can only have one child. So a good way around this is if we remove the texts from our button, we can use a panel like our horizontal box. We can add that to our button. And now our horizontal box as a child of the button. But we can add as many children as we want to, the horizontal box. So we could grab, say, some text, add that to our button, could also grab an image. So we can add that to our button. Now, currently it's leaking out of a button. But what we can do is select the button, we can re-size it so our content stays inside the button. Or if you remember, we can click Size to content. Button will actually just resize itself to whatever space it needs for the content inside it. So this is a really easy way. You can make widgets that can only have one child, have as many children as you want just by using the panel boxes down here. Now one thing that can be challenging with working with these panel boxes is say I wanted my texts or this entry here in our vertical box to be larger. There's no size option that we can just control. But what we can do is we can wrap individual elements with a size box. So say, I wanted this image to actually be much larger. What we could do is select our image here. We could wrap it by right-clicking, do rap with. And basically this just means we're telling the image to be contained in another widget. So we're going to select, say, the size box. And now our image you can see is inside a size box. That size box is still inside our vertical box is just kind of put our image in that size box for us. We can do this with our boxes as well. So if I select my image here, for example, we could wrap this with say, a vertical box if we wanted to. You can see we've got vertical box or horizontal box or any of these options that you have here. Heading back to our size box that we just created. You can see that we've got some size options here. So what we can do is we can select these options to turn on the size overrides. If I enter a text here, so say 100 by 100. You can see that it's now forcing this image to be that size. So this can be really helpful when working with vertical boxes because sometimes you just want to force a widget to be a certain size. And the controls here can be a little bit restrictive. So using a size box, we can just force a specific size. There are a few other options here as well. So if we untick or override options, and the reason why I'm taking them is because these basically just force the widget to be this size. None of these options will better if you've got these tectonic. So we're just going to take these off for now. We can also set a Min and max size. And this basically tells us that we want our widget to at least be say, 50 by 50. But it can resize itself up to say, another site. So say 200 by 200. You see currently it's 50 because our images only a small image. But if our image was larger, it would actually make use of that additional space up to 200 pixels. And then the image wouldn't get any larger than 200 because we say max size. Now at the moment we've just been adding widgets manually by dragging men to our canvas panel or our vertical box, for example. But in our next lesson, we're actually going to be learning how we can create widgets using code, add them to these boxes. We'll also be looking at the scroll box, so I'll just bring that in here. And basically the way the scroll box works is once the widgets inside it, the children inside it get larger than its current size, will get a scroll bar up here, will actually be able to scroll through the content inside the scroll box. 41. Widgets (Creating Widgets): Hey everyone. In this lesson we're gonna be learning how to create widgets using code, instead of having to manually drag and drop these widgets into our panel here. We're also going to be looking at the scroll box. Now, I'd explain this a little bit in our last lesson. But essentially, when the content of our scroll box gets larger than the box actually is, it will give us a little scroll bar that we can use to scroll through its content. So to get started, what we're gonna do is we're going to create a data table which is going to contain some information about some items. And then we're gonna have our widget code create a listing for each one of those items, and we're going to store them inside our scroll box here. So to start with, we're gonna go to the Content Browser and we're going to create a new widget. And this is gonna be a custom widget that we're actually going to spawn in and used to display our items of information. So we'll right-click, go to the user interface option and create a new widget. We're going to select user widget. And we're going to call this BP on score item listing like that. And we'll double-click it to open up. And I'm just going to drag mine up to the top here like that. Now the difference with creating this widget compared to our HUD, which is we're not actually going to use a canvas panel because our item listing widget is going to be added to another panel. Similarly to how we've done our images and our texts, the item listing isn't going to take up our entire players screen. So we're not going to use a canvas panel, we're actually just going to use directly a horizontal box to start with. So I'm just going to grab a horizontal box, put that here. That's going to allow us to lay out with things in a horizontal direction. We can you grab a image so we'll find the image option. Well, I will add some texts for the player or the item name, and I'll also add another text. Maybe we will have a cost value. Right now this looks a bit strange because if you remember, we're still previewing this is if the widgets being added to a 120th by ten ATP screen. But what we can do to give us a bit of a preview is to go to the screen size or the full screen here to custom. And this allows us to actually just manually enter in a pixel size for our widget. Now remember, this is just for previewing. This isn't actually the size of our widget. So this just gives us an idea of what the widget will look like at a certain size. I'm going to set mine to say 350. And the length, or maybe we'll make it 400 and the length, maybe AT, and the width. So now we get a little bit better idea of what our widgets actually going to look like once we add it to a scroll box, like we did in the layout video, you can spend a little bit of time moving these around, adding spaces, changing the fonts or colors if you want to. I'm going to put my cost so it's against this side, so I'm going to set it to align to the right side and we're going to take on film. So now our text is on this side of our widget. Now, we're also going to need to change these widgets values in code. So what we're gonna do is we're going to select each one of our widgets here and we're going to rename them. So I'm going to rename image to Item icon. And we've got is variable turned on, which is good because we will need to access our image in the Event Graph. Now if we select our textbook, you can see it doesn't actually have that TikTok. So we're going to take that on. And I'm going to set this one to item name. And this one will take this on as well, and we'll call this item cost. So now if we head over to our graph view and compile, you'll see that we've now got variables for each one of our widget types. Using these, we can actually just get them as variables and we can set information about them. So if I wanted to change our item cost text, I can do set text. We can use the set text node, and this actually allows me to change the text that's being displayed by our item cost text. Now we'll just delete these nodes because we actually need to set up our data table. So we'll save our item listing for now and go back to the content browser. Before we create a data table, we need to create a struct first for that data table to use. So we'll right-click and we'll go to blueprints Then structure. And I'm just going to call mine S underscore item. And we'll open that up. And in here we're going to add some new variables. So I'll add a new variable. The first one, we'll call name. We'll change this to be a text value. So this will be the name of our item. We could set a cost, so we'll call this cost, and we'll set this to an integer. And we could add another value, say for a texture, will search for 2D texture. And we want the 2D texture here, object reference. I'm just going to call this one icon like that. And we'll save this. Now we're going to head back to our content browser and we're going to create a new data table using our S underscore item structure. So we'll right-click, go to the miscellaneous option here, select data table, and then we're going to select our S item in the drop-down here and hit Okay, then we'll call our data table item list like that. So now we need to open up the item list and actually add some items to it. So we'll open that up. And we'll add some new rows. So I'll add a new row. I'll call this say sword. Sword, sword. And we'll set the name to sort. We'll set the cost to say five. Now I don't have any icons for items, but we can use some just random textures. So maybe I'll pick the camera texture for this one. Well, I didn't have a row. We'll call this say spelled that wrong again. So this is the ACS. Then we'll set the name for our AKS row two acts as well. We'll set the cost of say, 20 will set another texture. So I'll just pick this green face. We'll add another one, and I'll set this to be hello, drink. I spelled that wrong again. Drink like that. And again, we'll set the name to help drink, set the price to say, or the cost to two. And we'll pick another image. So I'll pick, say, the Android icon here. That will do for now. We will add some more so we can get our scroll box working a little bit later on. But for now that'll do that. We'll head back to our item listing widget. Now we need to create a function that's actually going to set up this listing and set our item cost icon and names for this widget. So to do that, I'm going to create a new function. I'm just going to call this setup listing. We're going to add an input, so we'll select the input node here. And under inputs we'll add a new input. And I'm going to set this to F underscore item. Now, that's the struct that we used for our data table. If you remember, we will be able to input a item struct to this function. So we'll set it to that and we'll set the name to item. Now, we're going to use the information from this struct input to actually set our widgets. If we drag out, we can break our item struct and we can access the name cost an icon. So to start with, we'll grab the item name Widget, Get that variable, and then drag out and do set text. And we'll do the setText node. Connect that up to our input. And we're going to take the name and plug that into the text. Then we'll get the item cost. Do the same thing. So set text, get that node. Connect that up to our previous setText, and we grab the cost. We can plug that straight into our texts as well. It'll give us this node that just converts an integer into text. And then lastly, we're going to set the icon. So we'll grab item icon and we're going to drag out from this and do set brush. We want set brush from texture like that. And this allows us to basically just tell what our image widget, which texture you wanted to use. So I'm just going to grab our icon here, connect up to texture. So now when we run this function, we'll set the item name cost and the icon or to wherever struct we provide to the input. So now we can compile and save this and we'll head back to our HUD. Now, I've got the scroll box from our previous lessons. So I'm actually going to make this a little bit larger because it's quite small at the moment. So it's just a bit bigger there. And we're also going to add a vertical box to our scroll box. Now, we could just add our widgets directly to the scroll box. But the problem with that is you might get some scaling issues and there's also some options that will be missing. So if we scroll down, I'm going to grab a vertical box and add that to the scroll box here. Now, if I was to just, for example, say grab a button and add it to the scroll box. If I select that button, you can see that we're actually missing those fill and auto options. Whereas if I add that to the vertical box, you can see that we get those options back. So that's why I'm actually going to be adding, we can delete this button. Now. I'm actually going to be adding our widgets to the vertical box instead of directly into the scroll box. But don't worry, the scroll box will still behave how it should once our vertical box inside the scroll box gets too large for the scroll box will get a little scroll bar and we'll be able to scroll through the content. For now, we need to be able to access this vertical box in our code. So we're going to do like we did before in the item listing, we're going to select the vertical box that we've added to the scroll box. And we're going to say his name to item list. And we need to take on is variable and then we'll compile. Then we're going to head over to the graph mode and we're going to use the construct node now, yours might be grayed out. Mine isn't because I moved it earlier on, but I said it's grayed out. That's fine. You can still drag out from it and it works fine. So what we'll do is first we need to get all of the entries from our item list. So we're going to right-click and do get data table. And we want get data table row names. And this allows us to set a data table and it will give us all of the row names from our item list. So it will give us all of these names here. So next we'll head back to the hood and we're going to set our data table to Item List, will connect this up to our Event Construct. Then from the outro names, we're gonna do a loop. So I'll drag out and search for loop. Now, I actually had a bug while filming this lesson where my loop nodes one coming up. So if you do have that issue where these aren't here, you can go to the Content Browser, find the engine folder. If it's not there, you can show it by going to settings. Click on Show engine content, then go to engine, search for standard. And you want standard macros, just open that up. And then if you go back over to the widget to your Hudson Bay, drag out, you should be able to find them. Hopefully you don't get this bug, but just in case you do, that's how I fixed it. So just do that. Now, hopefully you have these loop node showing up. So I'm just going to search for loop and we want to do a foreach loop. And that's going to loop through all of the different entries from our data table. And using the row name, we're going to get the data or get the struct from our item list. So we're gonna do get data table. We won't get data table row. We'll set the data table to the item list. And you can see that we've got our role name. So we're just going to plug that into array element because if you remember, this is providing us with all of the row names. So each time this runs, it will give us one of the row names from our item list. We'll connect this up to the loop body. Then we're going to create our item listing widget. So we'll do create widget. We're going to set the class to our item listing Owning Player. We can just drag out and do get Owning Player because we're inside a widget, we can just supply our new widget. We have our current widgets Owning Player. Then we'll connect up row found to create widget node. Then from return value, we want to set up this new item listing widget. To do that, we're going to use that setup function we just created. So such was set up. And we want the setup listing function then which can grab the row or the outro from our item list and connect that up to set up listing. Then lastly, we need to actually add on new widget that we've created here to our item list. So I'm going to grab the item list. And we're going to drag out from that and do Add child. We want our child to vertical box will connect this up to our setup listing here. And then for content we need the widget that we're adding to the item list. So we'll just grab the return value and connect up to content like that. So now just to summarize the code we've just written, what happens when the widget is created is it gets all of the row names from our item list. So I'll get these three rows from our item list. Then it will loop through each one of them. So this code here that we've got highlighted 13 times. And each time it runs, it will run with a different row name from our item list. That means we will get the different struct information from our item list. And that sets up or creates a new listing widget and gives it a different information for each widget listing we create. And then for each one, we add them to the item list widget that we added to our scroll box and here. So now we can actually test this out in game. I'm just going to delete these old widgets so we added in our previous lesson. So I'll just select the vertical box here, delete that, delete the button. We'll select this horizontal box here. Delete that and we'll delete this text box just so we can see our scroll box a bit easier. I'm going to move the scroll box just up to the top left-hand corner there. So it will compile that. And now we're actually ready to test this, so we'll hit Play. And now you can see we've actually got all of the items that we added to our item list into our screen. And that's all being done via code. Now currently we don't have the little scroll bar because there's only three entries, so it doesn't take up enough space to actually cause the scroll bar to exist. But what we can do is if we exit out of plane editor, we can just go to the Item List. You could add individual items if you wanted to. But I'm just going to take say the ax here and we'll duplicate that a few times and then do the same with the health drink, which is duplicate that a few times. Now when we hit play, hopefully we do have that scroll bar. Now currently I can't actually interact with the scroll bar. And that's because our mouse is locked to our players camera. So next I will just show you how we can set up a little bit of code that allows us to release our mouse from the camera control so we can actually interact with our different UI elements. So to start with, we'll go to our character blueprint. So I'll just go to, we'll get rid of this search, will go to the content folder for the person, then blueprints. And we'll go to the ThirdPersonCharacter and open that up. Now we've still got some code from previous lessons. Obviously we've got the code here that which actually creates our HUD and adds that to the screen. So we do want to keep that. And we can delete this kill player code because I'm not using that anymore. So what we're going to do is add an input, so I'll right-click and search for input event. I would do a shift. You left shift. So every time we press Left Shift will toggle between controlling our characters camera and then having our mouse actually free to interact with UI. So to start with first, we need to get wherever on our mouse is currently controlling the camera or not. So we'll do get player controller. From that, we'll drag out and do get Show mouse cursor. This will be true or false whether or not the mouse cursor is currently visible. So we'll do an F. That'll allow us to control which code we run if the mouse cursor is currently visible than we want to hide it. So we'll do or will copy, I'll get player controller. We'll drag out from that and do set input mode. And we want to set the input mode to game only because we're switching. If the mouse cursor is currently visible, we're switching to gain mode, so we just want to control our camera. So we'll connect up to true. And then we also want to hide our mouse cursor. So we'll drag out and do show mouse cursor. And we want this to be false like that. Then if our mouse cursor isn't currently visible than we want to set its visible. But first we want to set it to gain mode and UI. So we'll do set input mode, game and knew why the reason we're using game and UI and not just UI is if we were to set it to just UI, none of our inputs and our character would work anymore. So if we were to press left shift again, we wouldn't actually be able to exit the Y mode because this node wouldn't run. So instead we use the set input mode, game and gy. And we'll connect this up to false. And then we're going to get our variable that we actually created in a previous lesson. You can see that the code down here, this is just where we create the HUD. We set it to a variable and then add it to our viewport. So we're going to use that variable to set the widget and focus like that. Then lastly, we want to show our cursor. So I'll just drag out from get player controller again to set show mouse cursor. We want to take that on and connect that up to our output here. So now this is all set up when we press Shift, it will release our mouse from camera control and allow us to control the UI. And then when we press it again, it will take back control of our players camera. So we can compile this and test this out. We'll hit play. So currently I'm controlling my camera. If I hit Shift, you can see I've now got my mouse. I'm no longer controlling the camera. I can actually use our little scroll bar here as well to scroll through all different entries. Now, in this lesson, all we've done is used the horizontal box to add to our scroll box. But if we wanted to, we could edit the item listing widget as much as you want it to. So we could go to the designer. Maybe I wanted this to actually be a button. What we can do is right-click the horizontal Boxer. We could do rap with and we select a button. Then we could have it so that when this button is pressed, it run some code. So we can select the button here, scroll down to the bottom, and do unclicked. That creates us a new event. So whenever this listings button gets pressed, it will print out a. We could do a print string, and we can have this print string print out the current value of the item name so we could get itemName, do get text. We would use the getText. Note it. So now whenever we click this button, the name of the item that we've clicked on will be printed. So we'll head to the game, hit Play. And now you can see these are buttons. So currently I've got control of my camera. If I press Shift, got my mouse now, now when I click these, you can see it's actually printing out the name of the item. So that's it for this lesson. Hopefully you now understand how you can actually create widgets and then add those widgets using code. 42. Widgets (Bindings): Hey everyone. In this lesson we're gonna be taking a look at widget bindings now, which it bindings allow us to control certain properties of our widgets using variables or functions. So to give you an example, if I drag in an image here and I'll just make it a little bit bigger. If you look over in the right-hand side of the Details panel, you will see this bind option for a few of the different properties that our image has. Now, these are actually settings that we can control with either a variable or a function. So a good example of this is the visibility option here. Now, this basically just sets whether or not the widget is visible or not. So if we leave it as vegetable, we can pause it and hit play. We'll see we've got our image here. And if we go back to the hood and I set the visibility to hidden compile and then we hit Play. You can see it's no longer visible. But we can also control that setting with a variable. So if we go back to our HUD, select our image here, you can see we have a bind option next to the visibility. And right now we only have the Create Binding option, and I will explain that in a minute. But if we go to our graph view here and we create a new variable, and this is just gonna be called, we'll call it image visibility. And we're going to set its type to state, sorry, slate visibility. So we want Eastlake visibility. This is the type of variable that we need to use when we're binding to a visibility setting. So I'll do as component. And if you see down here, the default value is actually the same settings that we have in our design view if I click the drop-down for visibility here. Now that we've created that variable, we can actually bind it to this image is visibility. So we can hit bind and you see that we can now see that variable here. If I select that now, our image is now using that variable setting to determine whether it's visible. And you can see this has actually grayed out. Now, if we go to the Event Graph and select that variable we created, It's currently set to Visible. So if we hit Play, you'll see it's visible. And if we go back and we set that variable now to hidden in C, that is now hidden. And that allows us to control that images visibility just using that variable. And we can change that variable, have we like, so for example, we could set it, we could set it to say, hidden after certain amount of time. So we could add, say a delay here. After two seconds, I'm going to set our image to hidden. And we're going to set the default to visibility so it's visible at the start. Then after two seconds there'll be set to hidden. If we hit Play, you'll see it's visible now, and after two seconds it goes hidden. Now we can also control other properties of our widgets using variables. So if we head back to our HUD, go to the Design View and we have our image selected. You can see that we can also bind a variable to the brush. So we can use a variable to control all of these settings here. So if we go to the graph and I create a new variable, I'm going to call my brush settings like that. We're going to change the type to slate brush. And we're going to pick the top option here. And if we compile, you'll see that these options here actually match what we have in the design of view for our image brush settings. And if we click the bind, we can also set that brush settings variable here as well. So now we can control our images brush settings using that variable we just created. So if we select Brush Settings and then here we can pick on new image. For example, I'm going to pick this green face. And if we compile and hit Play, you'll see that we're now using that green face. And it was still disappear off to two seconds. Because if you remember, we have our visibility variable here, and that's what controls our images visibility. So you can have multiple binds for the different settings in here, for the same widget as well. Now so far we've just been using variables to control these binds, but you can actually use functions as well. So if we go to say the visibility option here, if we just click the bind and if you ever want to remove a bind, you can just click this and do remove binding, and that will reset it back to using this setting here. So now it's just set to hidden. So if I was to hit Play, you'll see it's just hidden. And even after two seconds it won't change because we're now using this visibility setting here again, and not the variable. But we can also use functions. So if we click the option here and click Create Binding, this will actually create a new function and we're still inside our bp HUD here you can see the return value will be whatever the binding requires. Because we're using the visibility option. It gives us a visibility output of our node. If I was to create one for our brush, for example, if I remove this binding, then create a new binding. You will see that now the return value is a slight brush value because that's the variable it requires for this bind. But for now, I'm just going to set that back to our brush setting variable here. So it will use that variable that we created earlier again over here and heading back to our new function. So if we go to functions, you'll see we've now got a get visibility option. And this is the function that we created when we created this binding here. Now we can add code here like normal to control what the visibility is going to be. So for example, we could do get player controller. From that we could do get mouse, will get, Show, mouse cursor. And we could drag out from our return value, you get slapped. Plug. Show mouse cursor into the indexer. So if the show mouse cursor is true, then I'm going to set our image to visible. And if it's false, then we're going to set it to hidden. If you remember in our previous lesson in the ThirdPersonCharacter, we set up this code here, which basically allows us to toggle controlling the camera or controlling the mouse. So now when we hit play, you can see, I can't see the immature at all, but I'm taking control of my camera. But if I hit Shift, you can see now I've got my mouse and my image is actually shown. And if I hit Shift again, you can see that it's now hidden. And the reason it's doing that, it's because in our HUD, this function is being run to determine our images visibility. That's saying if the mouse cursor is visible or if this variable is true, then we set it to visible. And if it's false, it sets it to hidden. Now there's one other example I wanted to give you and that's using the progress bar. Now progress bars are typically used for things like health bars and hunger bars or loading screen and bars. So what we'll do is we'll head over to the design view and we'll get the progress bar from the pallet. Drag that in. I'm going to make mine a little bit longer like that. Now we have a few settings for things like the style which control how it looks. But we're just going to focus on the percent value here. And if this is 0, it means the progress bar is empty. And if it's one, you can see as I move it up, it's now full. So our percent is always going to be a value between 01 and that determines how full the progress bar actually is. Now we can also use a bind for this property. So you can see we have the bind option here, so we can either set a variable or function to control this value. Now, currently at the time of filming, there actually is a bug in the engine where you can't bind this to a variable and give you an example. Normally you'd be able to bind this value to a float variable. So if I go and I create a new float variable in C, you say amount and set it to a float like that. And we'll just compile. If I go back to the design view and I click the bind option here, you can see that our flow is not here and it should be. If your variable is here, then that's great. You're using a newer engine version and the bug has been fixed, so you don't need to worry about this. But if you don't have it here and it hasn't been fixed yet, there is another way we can get around this, and that's just using the function. So instead of just selecting the variable, we can just do create binding. And in here you can see that the return value is a float. And we can just take our amount variable, plug that into the return value. And now we can use this float to control the amount. So I can set it to say 0.2. We can hit Compile and then hit Play. You can see that it's now at 0.2 on the progress bar. Now we can actually set up another widget that controls the amount variable we just created, and that will actually update our progress bar here. So if we exit out of play, go to the HUD. We can add in, say a slider here. And we'll make this a little bit bigger. I'm going to change this anchor point to the top right because that's the point that's closest to. So I'll change the anchor to that. And we can change the style just to be a little bit larger. So I'll make the ball thickness say for just so it's a bit easier to see in game. Then we'll compile. And down here you can see we've got an own value changed. And if we click the Plus button, that will create us an event that allows us to set a variable using whatever the slide is currently set to being just grab our amount variable here, connect this up. And now when we move our slider in game, you can see it's over here. If I hit Shift to enter the mouse mode here you can see our image is still showing up. We can't drag a slider and you can see that our progress bar is actually updating with our slider. That's pretty much it for how you can bind variables and functions to widget properties. If we head back to the heart here, I'm just going to exit out of planets to go to the Graph view if you ever want to find any of the bind function. So we've created, when we've clicked the bind option and done create binding, you can find those under the functions tab. Just like any normal function. The engine just automatically gives these names so you can rename them if you want. And you can also delete them if you're not using them, just be careful. If you delete one that you are using in a widget binding, it will give you an error, so just be careful with that. That's it for this lesson. Hopefully you now understand a little bit more about how bindings and widgets work and how you can use them in your future projects. 43. Widgets (Borders, Overlays and Grids): Hey everyone. In this lesson we're gonna be taking a look at a few more widget types. We're going to take a look at the border overlay and uniform grid panel. But before we get started, we're just going to clean up our project a little bit from our last lesson. So I'm just going to select these three widgets here, delete those, head over to the Event Graph. I'm going to take my construct node, connect that up to this node here. Then we'll delete these nodes that we're not using will also delete this slider. And if we compile, it should all be okay. Now heading back to the design of view, first thing we're gonna look at is the uniform grid panel. If we drag that in. And I'm just going to make mine a little bit bigger here. This panel works similarly to the horizontal box. The vertical box. The only difference is it can have both vertical and horizontal children. So to give you a quick example, if I just grab, say, an image here and I add it to the uniform grid panel. You can see it. It's in the top left-hand corner. I'm going to add an additional image here. You see that it's still, both are still in this top left hand corner. But you say if I select one of them, I actually get these arrows and I can position them in different locations, either down or horizontally like that. Now we can also control this over in the Details panel here you can see that currently this widget Row is set to one and its column is set to 0. But if I was to set the column to say three, You can see that it then moves it to the third column. Now unlike the horizontal and vertical boxes, you can also change the alignment. So up here in the Details panel, if we wanted to say B in the bottom right hand corner, we could do that using these align options. Now we can also add widgets to our uniform grid panel using code. And this is where they become really powerful because we can use uniform grid panels for creating things like inventories or more advanced lists. So to give you an example of how you would do that, I'm going to create a new widget that we can also use the border and overlay n. So we'll head over to the Content Browser. I'm just going to click the Add button, go to User Interface than Widget Blueprint will select use a widget and it will go down. And we went home and S2, BP and Scott grid slot. And we'll open that up. I'm just going to drag mine up to the top here like that. So to get started, we're going to add the border widget to the hierarchy, just like that. With it selected, you can see the settings for our border over in the Details panel. And here is where we can set things like if we wanted to use an image and this will basically just turn our border into an image. We can also set the color. So for example, if I wanted it to be gray, I could just turn the color here to a darker gray like that. And it also gives us options for padding. So this will affect any children that we add to this border. Now borders can only have one child. There are quite helpful to act as sort of backgrounds or containers for other widgets. And one of those widgets is the overlay. So if we grab the overlay and add that to our border like that, now, if I wanted to add another child to the border, I can't. So if I grab the image, you can see it won't let me add it to the border, but our overlay can have as many children as we want. So we're going to add our image to our overlay like that. Now, with the overlay selected, you can see that it doesn't really have any of it's own settings. And that's because it doesn't really do anything visual. All it does is allow us to add multiple widgets to it. And those widgets will overlay each other so they won't be moved in different a horizontal or vertical direction. They were just all stack on top of each other. So before we start laying out this widget, we're going to change the size of our preview here because currently it's 1920 by 1080, which is far too big. So we're going to change the full screen option here to desired like that. Now, what this does is it basically just tells the widget to take up as much space as the content inside it does. So right now it's very small because our image only takes up a very small amount of space. But if we select our image widget and set the image to something else. So I'm going to pick this little green face. You can see that it gets larger because our image is larger than we could increase this size if we wanted to, say 128 by 128 like that. Now you may notice if you zoom in that the top is closer to the edge and the side. And that's because if we go back to our border, the padding is set to 42. And if we click the Drop-down, you can see that the left and right values or four pixels. So it's four pixels from the edge for our image. And then the top and bottom is two. So if we wanted this to be all the same, we could do that. So I'm going to set mine to say ten like that. So we just have a ten pixel gap between our border and that overlay widget that's contained inside our border. So now we've got our icon image here. We're going to add some texts as well. So we'll grab some text and add that to our overlay. See that it just overlays on top of our image. Now, our text is quite large at the moment, so I'm going to select it and just changes font size down to say 16 or maybe 40. Like that. I'm going to change the text to just say 99, for example. And we'll set it to align to the top right-hand corner, so we'll use the right line and then we'll do, actually we'll just leave it as top line. So it's now in the right-hand corner. Now, maybe we wanted to add, say, a progress bar to our grid slot. We can do that. So we'll grab our progress bar at that to the overlay as well. Now I want this in the bottom center here. So I'm going to select the center alignment and then the bottom alignment, like that. Now we can change the size of our progress bar using a size box. So if we right-click it and we can do rap with, then do rap with size box. This is going to allow us to actually define the exact size we want our progress bar to beat. So we can change the width and height, set the width to something like 95, and the height to maybe ten. And now we've got a progress bar added to our overlay. That's the exact sizes that we want to use. Now, maybe I want to push it up a little bit from the bottom here. We could use the padding to do that. With our size box selected. We can click the padding drop-down and pad it from the bombs, say, five pixels like that. So now we have our grid slot widget all laid out using an overlay just allows us to overlap all of these different widgets in the same space while giving us control of the padding and alignment settings. So now we'll compile and we're going to actually add these grid slots to our uniform grid inside our hood using code. So before we do that, we're going to delete these images that we added to the uniform grid. With our uniform grid, we're actually going to select it. We're going to call this grid. Now. We need to take on is variable so we can access this grid in the code, will compile and head over to the graph view. So to start with, we'll move this code up and out of the way. And we're going to add a sequence now just so we can have both pieces of code one. So this will run this code first and then we'll add the rest of our code down here. So we'll start by dragging out and searching for for-loop. We want the for-loop option down here. And this allows us to basically just specify the start and end index, which controls how many times the loop body will actually run. So I'm going to set my last index. Do you say nine? So this will now run ten times because 0 is one essentially. So for every time this loop runs, we want to create any widget. So we'll drag out from loop body and do Create Widget like that. Then, like before we need to get an owning place. So I'll just drag out and do get Owning Player. Now we'll just provide the Owning Player of HUD. And then we need to set the class, so we'll set this to the grid slot. Then we need to get our grid panel and we're going to add this new widget to our grid panel. Now because children of a uniform grid can have a row and a column which defines how far, vertically and horizontally there. We're going to need to do some math to determine where our new grid slots should be positioned. So it will drag out from the grid panel. Would you add child to uniform grid? And we'll connect this up to the create widget there. Now the content is just gonna be the new widget we created, but we also have an n row and then in column, now we want to water me how this works. So what we're gonna do is first store the index. So I'm just going to drag out from the index value on our for-loop and do promote variable. I'm just going to keep it called index. And we'll connect this up to our loop here like that. Now we also need to know how many columns wide our grid panel is going to be. So we're going to create a new variable for that. I'm going to call mine columns like that. And it's gonna be an integer. So just set it to integer, then we'll compile. And then we need to say default value. So I'm going to set mine to three. So to begin with, our grid panel will be three widgets wide. Now using our index and column values, we can determine which row and column grid slots should be in. It will grab our index and we're going to divide this by our columns. So do divide, connect on up to n row. And we want to divide this by our columns like that. Now the reason this works is because when we divide the index by the columns, if this index value is below the column value. So if this is one or two, the return will always be 0 because two divided by three is 0, because these are integers. So there are whole numbers only until this index is free. This, the return value of r divide node will be 0. So that means that our widgets will stay in the 0 vertical height until this index hits free. And then this node will actually return one because three divided by three is one. Then that will actually move our widget now down into the next vertical row. Then we have the columns. And this actually works a similar sort of way. So we'll copy these two variables and we'll drag out from my index and do the percentage symbol. So that's the percentage symbol, hip. Now, this is the mode. So what this does essentially is still divide these two values by each other. But instead of giving us the result, it gives us the remainder. So if we connect this up to columns, if you imagine the index is one and the columns is free. Well, if we were dividing them, the result would be 0. But because we're getting the remainder, the remainder will be one. If our index is two and our columns is three, and our remainder will be two. And this is what pushes our widget along the horizontal axis. Now we've actually finished our setup for spawning our grids and then adding them to the uniform grid widget so we can compare it and actually see how this looks in game. So we'll hit play. See that now we have our grid. You can see it's three web and then it's adding ten widgets. So we have nine and then ten on the bottom here. Now currently there a little bit squished because our actual uniform grid is too small to fit all of these widgets sense. So what we can do is just go back to our HUD, go to the design of view, and with our uniform grid selected, we can just take on size to content in C, it's gotten really small because currently it doesn't have any content. But when we compile, we hit Play. You will see that now all of our widgets are the correct size. If we wanted to, we could go back to our HUD. We could change the columns value nice and easily by just changing the value, good to say five. And then when I compile and hit Play, you'll see that it's now five wide. Now perhaps you wanted a little bit of space between your widgets that are inside the grid. We could do that as well. So we can head back to the HUD. Then in the design of view, select the grid panel. And in here we can actually set the slot padding. So we can set this to say five. And we will have five pixels now between order to children of the uniform grid. So we'll hit play again. You can see that now we've got a nice gap between those widgets. If you remember, like our list, we can change these to be buttons. Currently they're just static images, but we can change them to be buttons like we did with our vertical list here as well. So if we head back to our grid slot, we can wrap our overlay here in a button, so we'll go wrap with du button. You can see that now we have a button and because we're still using the border as our background, you can see that the button actually has that ten pixel gap. So if we wanted to get rid of that, we can just select our button, do padding and set this to 0. And you see that now our button is actually going right to the edge of our border. But we've still got a bit of weird padding on the sides of our widget. And that's because if we select a button here and we scroll down, you'll find in the I believe it's installed. Yeah. If we open up the style, you'll see we've got normal padding and press padding now because we've got 12 here. If we open this up, you'll see on the left and the right, we've got 12 pattern and that's what's giving us that big gap. If we want to change this to be even on all sides, we can just change this top number here, say five, and then we'll do the same thing with the press padding as well. Change that to five and then we'll compile. You'll see that now we've got the correct amount of padding from each edge of our widget. Now we've added a button to our grid slot widget. We can have code run when that button is pressed so we can scroll down to the bottom here, we have our buttons selected. We can add a onclick events, so we can add that. And when we collect it, we can run some code. So I will just add a print string here. Now, when we compile this and hit Play, you will see that we've got our grid slots that are highlighted like a button does. And if I press them, you can see that that print string is running. Now, our uniform grid panel can also work in a scroll box. If we exit out of planets to hit head over to the hub, then if we select our grid panel and right-click, do rap with and we want the scroll box like that. Now, our scroll box, we actually want to set a size, because if we have up to size, content will actually never bring up that little scroll bar because it will just keep getting bigger. So we want to uncheck this and we want to pick a size. So I'm going to make mine a little bit wider like that, but I'm going to make it shorter. So we get our scrollbar come up. Then we'll compile. And we just want to make sure our grid panel is set to fill horizontally and fill vertically. Then we'll hit play. We should see that we've got our vertical scroll box here. And we can, if I press shift, we can scroll through our grid like that. Now, maybe you wanted to add a background to this scroll box. We can do that using borders. So if we exit out now and go back to our HUD, we can select our scroll box and wrap this with a border. So we'll do border. So now our scroll box is contained inside the border. If we zoom in, you can actually see it's got some of that weird padding going on. So if we select our border here and we find the padding, I'm just going to set mine to actually will sell it to say ten. Now will give us a nice big border. And then we'll change the color. So with our border selected, we can go down to the brush settings. And again, you can set an image here if you wanted to. I'm just going to use the brush color. And we can set this to say be this red color here. Now when we compile and we hit Play, you'll see that now we've got that nice background color that we selected and we can still scroll through our list just fine. So that's it for this lesson. Hopefully you now understand a little bit more about all three of these widget types. 44. Widgets (Drag & Drop): Hey everyone. In this lesson we're going to be taking a look at drag and drop operations using widgets. Now if you didn't follow along in our previous lesson, we created this grid here. We have these different widgets and put it inside a Scroll box. I'd strongly recommend going and following that last lesson, because we're actually going to be using these widgets for our drag-and-drop. So just to get started, I'm actually going to make this a little bit bigger, so we've got a bit more space to work with. So we'll go over to the hood and I'm just going to grab our scroll box or actually sorry, our border here, which is going to make this a bit larger like that. Then we're going to go into the Graph view, and I'm going to add a few more slots as well. So we'll set this to say 19. So we will have 20 slots this time instead, we can test this out, hit Play. You can see that we've got all of our slots here and our scroll bar is working correctly as well. So now we can X out of plane editor and we're going to go to our grid slot widget, then head over to the graph mode. Now over here in the functions, we actually have some functions that we can override. And these are functions are all widgets have built-in. As you can see, there's a lot of them. We're not gonna go through all of these because some of them are a bit more advanced. But if you hover over them, you get a little tool tip that says what these functions are responsible for. And there's a few ones that are handy to get familiar with. So we've got things like mouse button down. So this is going to be run if you press the mouse button down while your mouse is hovered over the widget and game, we've got things like the drag functions over here. We're gonna be using those today to create a drag-and-drop system. There's also functions for on mouse enter and or mouse leave. And that's, those are gonna be run whenever our mouse hovers over our widget and then stops hovering over our widget. But we're going to start with the and drag detected. And this is going to be the function that detects when we hold down our mouse while it's over this widget and we start to move it. That's when it detects a drag and this function will be wrong. So we're going to click on this to override that function. And in here we've got some inputs and outputs. So just to quickly cover these inputs, you've got my geometry and this basically gives you information about your mouse position relative to the screen location and things like that. You probably won't be using this too often. But what you may be using a lot more often is the pointer event. This allows us to get things like is mouse button down for example. And we can use this now to check which mouse button was actually pressed down when the drug was detected, because we can actually drag with both far left, right, and middle mouse buttons. So if we only wanted this code to run for, say, the left mouse button, then we would want to check is the clicks button, the left mouse button. And all I did was click the little button there and then click left mouse button to set it to left mouse button. We can also use this pointer event to get the name of the button that was pressed down. So we could do get affecting button. And from here we can do gets display, and we can get the key display name. And this will just tell us which key exactly was pushed down when this drug was detected. But for today, we're just going to be using the mouse button down. So just highlight these and delete these, and I'm gonna make it so that this code will only run when we left mouse button drag. So I'm going to add an if here, connect this up to our beginning node here. And then we're going to connect the rest of the code up to our true. So now we're ready to actually use the Create drag drop operation notes, we're going to right-click and search for Create, Create, drag. And we want drag drop operation like that. And we'll connect this up to the true like that. Now, we can use an existing widget, but I'm actually going to create a new widget that's gonna be used to basically follow our mouse when we drag and drop. So we're going to create a new widget. So we'll compile and save this for now. And we'll right-click in the Content Browser, go to User Interface. Do Widget Blueprint. Use a widget and scroll down and we'll name this BP. Move widget like that. And we'll open that, whichever. I'm just going to drag mine up to the top here like that. Now, when we actually drag from our grid slot widget, this is gonna be the widget that will be created and follows our mouse as we move the mouse around. So we're going to want, say, an image for this. So we'll start with an overlay. So it will grab an overlay, put that here, then I'll grab an image. The reason I'm starting with an overlay is just so we can have multiple widgets, like an image and some text for example. So we'll grab some text as well, which is zoom in here. Now I'm going to set my preview size to just the desired so we can see exactly how big our widget it's gonna be. I'm gonna change the image to say 64 by 64. We'll set it to be, make it this little red face. Instead, we'll change our texts to be a bit smaller, so we'll do like 14. Now our image is still quite a bit. There we go. We want to change its size again. We change it to 64 by 64, like that, and we'll make our texts a little bit smallest, still, like 12. And we'll set it to just be writing on, for example. Now I want my text to be in the right corner, so it will use right alignment. And that looks okay to me. Again, this is just a quick example, just showing you how we can set up a widget and then drag it. Now we'll head back over to our grid slot. And in the on drag detected, we actually need to create that widget that we've just made. And then we'll supply that to our drag drop operation. So it will move these along a little bit. And we'll drag out and search for create widget. And we want to set the Owning Player to the owning class. So we'll search for owning Player, connect that up and we'll set the class to the move widget that we just created. Then next we'll take our return value from our Create Widget note and plug that into default drag visual. And we'll connect our Create drag drop operation to the returned node. And we want to use the return value to provide the operation to the return. Note here. Now we do have some additional pins on our drag drop operation note here we have a class. I'm not going to cover that because that's mostly C plus plus stuff and you pretty much always be using the default one anyway, you can add some tags. So like in our tags lesson, you could add a couple of different tags to this. And then on the other end, when we actually drop our widget on, say another widget will be able to read those tags. And then we've got payload. Now payload can be any object you want. It can be an actor or whatever. And that object can be used to store variables or functions. And again, we'll have access to this on whatever widget we drop operation on. So you could, if you are passing information from this widget to the widget that we drop it on. You could include some tags or even an object that just has a ton of information that you can then read on that other widget. Now for now, we won't be using these because they're a little bit more advanced. But we also have a pivot option. Now this is basically just where the widget will be locked when on our mouse. So if its center, it means that our mouse, if it stood still, the widget will be around our mouse with the mouse at the center. And as we drag it, the mouse will always stay at the center of our move, which as we move around. And there's a few different options here that you can choose from. I'm just going to keep mine health center center. And then you've got some offsets so you can add some pixel offsets. So maybe you wanted the mouse to be at the center of the move widget, but you wanted to add, say, a ten pixel offset to the left. You could do that using these values. Now currently this code won't ever run. And that's because we actually need to tell the widget when there's something being dragged. So to do that, we actually need to go to the override and we need to go down to the on mouse button down. Now, this will run whenever the mouse button is pressed down on top of our widget. So to start with, we first want to check which mouse button has been pressed down. So we'll drag out from here and do get affecting button. And from that we can actually drag out and do the equals. And this allows us to check is this button equal to the button we set here. So I'm just going to click the little keyboard button here and then left mouse. So it sets it to left mouse button. And we'll add an if node. So it will do if like that. Now we can have, if you wanted to, if you add code that you want it to run for when the left mouse button clicks on our grid slot. And the different code that runs when we write mouse-click, you would want to add this in here so we could copy and paste this node, connect that up to the effecting button, and then we can change this to white mouse. So then we could have another if, if the left mouse button was pressed than the true pin here would run. And if the right mouse button was pressed and the troop, and here we're drunk. And then you could have different code depending on which one is pressed. Now because I only want my drag drop operation to run when we left mouse button, we're gonna be adding that code here. So we're going to drag out from true and we're going to search for drag detect. We want to detect drug if pressed, then we need the pointer events. So we're just going to grab the mouse event and connect up to the pointer of m. And then the drug key, which is going to click the keyboard and then left-click to set it to left mouse button like that. And this node is basically just going to detect, is the mouse currently dragging our widget. And if it is, we want to pass that to the returned node and the return value to return value. And this is actually what's going to cause are on drag the text function to run and then have all of the code that we added in here run as well. So heading back to you on mouse button down, we always want to have all of the pins return a value here that's important for mouse handling and things like that. So what we'll do is we'll just copy a written note, paste that down here. And maybe when we right-click on my mouse on the widget, sorry, we want something else to happen, so I will just add say, print string here. We can plug this into the return value, and then it will copy this and paste this down here. So if it's neither the left mouse button or the right mouse button, maybe it's the middle mouse button, for example. We just don't want anything to happen. Now we don't want to leave these return value pins empty like this. We need to either provide a handled or unhandled. So if we drag out and search for handled, now, if we return a handle that basically tells the engine, Hey, we've handled the mouse input. Don't let any other widgets handle it. So don't run anymore events because the mouse has been pressed. So we could use that for say, this code on our right mouse button pressed, but maybe not for the node down here. So we can drag out and do unhandled. And that just tells the engine, Hey, we haven't done anything with the mouse input. If something else wants to use that input than allow it. So we use unhandled here. So it should look like this. Now there's actually a change we need to make designer. So if we head back there, if you remember, we added a button that we're basically using as a background that allowed us to press this widget. Now we need to remove this button. And the reason for that is the buttons overrides the code that we've added here. So if we were to be pressing down on this button or on mouse button down, we'd actually not run because the button widget handles that instead. So to remove that button, it's actually a really easy way to do this. We can just right-click on the button widget here and we can go down to replace with, and there's an option for replaced with child. And basically what that does is it just deletes the button and then we tell the overlay to replace it. So we'll go to replace with replaced with child. And you can see our button's gone and we're back down to the overlay with all of its widgets instead. Now if you want to, you can add some more padding back to the overlay. So I'm just going to add say a five or ten actually, it looks a little bit better. We've got a bit more padding now between the overlay on the border. So now we can compile it and we can actually test this out. We've just got a warning because I've deleted that button. We can just go to the Event Graph and you can see that we've still got an event from that button, so we can just highlight it, delete those, and we won't have a warning anymore. So now we can actually go and play test this. So we will hit Play. You can see that we've got our widgets are a little bit squished because the scroll boxes a bit too small, but that's fine. We don't have to worry about that at the moment. If we click and drag on one of these, you can see that we actually get our widget show up. And I've got control of my camera at the moment. But if I hit Shift, you can see I can drag and if I let go, it disappears. Now, currently we're not doing anything with this drag drop operation information, but now we can actually drag off of any one of these widgets. And it gives us our little move widget here as well. And if I try to drag from my right mouse button, you can see we actually get that hello texts print out. So it's printing out hello because we added that hello print string to the press button event. So now we've got dragging setup. We want to be able to pass information between these different widgets. So what we'll do is we'll exhale planets and head back to the grid slow hip. And we're going to create a new variable, and we'll call this has item. And we're going to leave it as a Boolean type and we'll compile. Then we're going to head to the designer and we're going to set our little face icon here to be hidden if the boolean is false. So we'll go to the visibility down here, we will use a binder. So we'll do create binding. And in here we're going to return, if the item is false, we return that it's hidden. So we'll drag out from the turn value. Do a select US has item as the index. And if the item is false, we wanna be hidden. If true, we want it to be visible. So then we can compile that. Now, if we head back to play the game, you can see that all of our little face icons are actually missing now because all of them by default have no item. Then we're going to head to our HUD and we're actually going to change the code here so that the first slot always has its has item set to true. So we'll drag out from here and do an F. We want to check is the index equal to 0. And we'll connect up to condition. And if false, which connect that up to here. And if true, we want to get the return value from our Create Widget node. And we want to do set has item and we're going to set it to true. Then we'll connect the end up back to the Add child node like that. So all we're doing here is we're checking, is this the first index in the loop? If it is, then we set it has item to true. And if we can pull this and hit Play, you'll see that now our first slot has a little face icon, but the others don't. Now next we want to check before we do the drag operation, does the salt that we're actually dragging from have the item. So we'll X out of hip, go back to our grid slot, and we'll go to the on mouse to tap on, drag the texts, will add a new check, will just move this out of the way. We'll drag out and do if we want to check if has item is true, then we will allow the dry cooperation to be created. And if not, we won't do anything. And we can quickly test this as well. So we'll hit play and I'll hit Shift to release my mouse. And you can see if I drag from these sorts, it doesn't actually create a dry cooperation. But if I drag from this slop, it does. Next, we actually need to store a reference to the original slot that we dragged from. Because when we drop it on another slot that doesn't have the item, we're going to need to update the previous slot that did have the item to tell it no longer has that item. So we need a reference to this original slot. So to do that, we'll acts out of play and we're gonna go over to the Move wager, then the event graph, and we're going to create a new variable. We'll call this old widget. And we'll set its type to be the grid slot widget that we created. So that's the same one we've been working in. And we'll set it to an object reference. And we're going to take on the little eye here just so it's instance editable and we'll compile. Then we're gonna go back to the grid slop. Here in the drag detects, we want to set that variable for the new move widget that we've just created. So here we can drag out, we can do set old widget. We want to set this old widget to be self because we're setting our self to be the older widget. So we'll drag out from that and do self. And we'll connect this up like that, and then we'll compile. So now we need a function that's going to run when we actually release or drag on top of our grid slot. So we'll head over to the override and we want to find the drop function here and we'll create that. Now you can see we've got those same inputs that we had for our previous functions, but we have a new one now called operation. And this is basically all of the information that we provided from the on drag detect all of the information that we provide here we can access now in the on drop. So if I drag out and I search for drag visual, you can see I can get a reference to the drug visual, and this is a reference to the widget that we have plugged in here. So using that, we can actually drag out cost to the move widget because ours is a move widget. If you remember when we set it in the drug, this is the move widget. So we're going to cost to that. And using that cost, we can actually access the old widget, gets old widget. And that gives us a reference to the widget that we originally dragged from. Now we can also access the tags and the payload so we can drag out from operation and do get tags. And that gives us the tags variable and also the platelets. If we do get payload, we can also add access that object reference that we can provide over here in the Create drag drop operation node. So now going back to the On dropped function, we can delete these variables because we're not actually going to use them. Then it's going to set the old widgets has item. So it will search for set has item. We need to set that to false because it no longer has the item we need to set R has item to true, so has item. We're going to set that to true, like that. And we'll connect this up to the return value will take on return value because we've processed our code. So what we'll do, true, and we want to connect this up to our cost here. Then we can compile this and we can test this out. So if we go to the map, hit Play, I'm going to hit Shift to release my mouse. If I start dragging, you can see we've got our drag drop operation working. If I release it on another sock and see that that slots now visible and has its item set to true and the previous one is set to false. We can do this with any of our slots here, dragging this new operation around to the other widgets. If I grab my widget and I release it over here, say for example, over on these other widgets, you can see nothing actually happens because we haven't set up on drop functions for these other widgets. So nothing's going to happen when we actually release the dropped operation on top of them. So that's pretty much it for this lesson. Hopefully you now understand how you can create drag drop operations with widgets and also how you can transfer information from one widget to another using either the drag visual or the payload object reference. 45. Animation Blueprints (Overview): Hey everyone. In this section of the course, we're gonna be taking a look at animation blueprints. Now, Animation Blueprint. So how we tell a Skeletal Mesh which animations we want it to play? Now, a skeletal mesh is usually a mesh that's been rigged to a skeleton in a 3D modelling program. Then once in the engine, we can have that skeleton play an animation and that in turn causes the mesh to animate. Now in this lesson, I'm just going to take you through a quick overview of the Animation Blueprint editor, as well as the animation setup that comes with the third person template. Now, before we get started, some of you may have been following along in the previous lessons. All I've done here is created a new third-person template. So we've got a clean start for this section of the course. So to get started, we're going to head over to the Animation Blueprint, which is inside the character's folder, then mannequins, animations. You can see we've got a money and Quinn Animation Blueprint. So in this lesson we're gonna be using the money Animation Blueprint. And the reason for that is the Quinn animation blueprint actually uses the money one as its parent blueprints. So all of the functionality is actually inside our money Animation Blueprint. So we'll open that up. And I'm just going to drag mine up to the top bar here like that. Now you can see I'm currently actually playing an editor, so I'm just going to click the little stop button here to stop that. And now we've opened our animation blueprint. You can see that we've got the Event Graph. If yours isn't open, you can always open it up here on the tab at the top. Or you can double-click the event graph here to open up our animation. Event graph is just the same as any other event graph you've used and other blueprints. We have our code here in our event graph. We've got our My Blueprint panel where we can create and find our functions, variables, event dispatchers, and macros. Now, the main purpose of our Event Graph inside Art Animation Blueprint is to set variables that are then used inside our Anim graph. So to open that, we'll head over to the My Blueprint panel here and double-click and I'm graph and that will take us to our Anim graph. Now, this has actually changed quite a bit since the Unreal Engine four version. So you may notice some differences if you've used on ML engine for before, but we'll start off by just going to the locomotion state machine here. So we'll double-click that. You can see that we have a state and these are where we can set animations to play. So we've got an idle state and then we've got a walk slash run state. If we open up our idle state, you can see we've got an animation here using an animation sequence player That's actually outputting an idle animation. We can see which animation it's actually playing by the node name at the top here. Or if we select it, we can go to sequence and hover over the entry and you can see it says MM, underscore idle. We can also click this little browse to in Content Browser button that will take us to the animation that's being used there. We can see that this is the animation that's actually being played whenever our characters in this idle state. Now, heading back to our locomotion machine, you can see we can click the locomotion up here on the top bar. Now actually take us back there. We've also got a walk slash run state. Now if we double-click that to open it up, you can see that we've actually got a different type of node that's being used to play animation, sir. This is a blend space node and it allows us to input a variable like a float, for example, and have different animations play depending on that different flow value. So if we select this node and head over to the sequence or the blend space option, sorry, we can see that it's currently set to BSIMM walk run, and this is the blend space for our walking and running animations. We can go to that now by clicking the Browse to Content button. That'll take us to the blend space. And if we open that up here, now blend spaces allow us to add multiple animations together and have them smoothly transition between each other using a variable. So you can see down here we've got a speed value starting at 0. This is the animation that will play when our speed value is 0. And if I hold Control and I start moving my mouse, you can see that the preview speed actually increases and we start increasing our animations walk speed till we get to this point. Now this point here is currently set to the walk forward. So you can see when I move the preview point here, our characters playing a walk forward animation. As I keep increasing it, we start getting this running animation. And as we get to the end, you can see it's currently set to the run, and that's what we'll be played when we're out at the speed 500. So we can use this to smoothly transition between walking and running animations. When we head back to our Animation Blueprint, controlling which animation is being played in our side, our blend space using this ground speed variable that's then plugged into this blend space node. And depending on the speed that we have, will output a different animation to our output pose here. Heading back to our Anim graph. And I'm just going to click on them. Grasp on the top bar here. Any animation that's output from our locomotion is then input it into this locomotion cash. Now this basically saves the current animation that's being output by our locomotion, so we can use it later on. Now heading back into the locomotion state machine, you can see that we've got these arrows that go between our two states. Now these are transition rules and these are how we check whether we should be in the idle state. Or the walk slash run state. So if we hover over one, you can see that we've got this variable that shows up in the tool tip. And it's basically just saying that this rule is set to the should move variable. So if that variable is true, then we will transition from our idle state to walk slash run. And then if I mouse over the bottom one here, it's that same should move variable but with a not. So if that variable is false, then we'll transition back from Walk slash run to the idol. And we can double-click these to actually look at the code. You can see that it's just a variable plugged into the result. And then we can do the same with the code for the role that goes from walk to the idle state. So if we double-click that, you can see that we've got that same variable with a knot node and then that's plugged into the result. Now this should move variable is set inside our event graph using some code and we will look into that a little bit later. But if we head back to the locomotion using these two states and these two rules, we choose whether or not our character should be playing an idle animation or a walk or running animation. We then output that value from the locomotion state to the locomotion cashier. So we can use that animation later on. Now in our Anim graph here, if we go over to the right-hand side, we've got this output pose node. Now, this is the animation that we will actually see in the game. So whatever animation connects up to here is what we will see when we're playing our game. Now currently, these two nodes up here aren't actually connected to any of this chain down here. But if we open up our main state state machine here, now our main states state machine is exactly the same as our locomotion state machine. They do the same thing. It's just that our main states, state machine has different states insider. And if we take a look at the locomotion state here, if we double-click that, you can see that we're using a cash pose locomotion. Now this is the cash pose that we set in our Anim graph. So if you look up here, we're setting it here, and then we're using it in this locomotion state inside our main state state machine. So that's how these nodes up here are actually connected out to the rest of the code. Now, heading back into the main state state machine, you can see that we've got some states up here that aren't actually connected to our state's down here. Now, the reason for that is in Unreal Engine five, we have these new state aliases, nodes, and these allow us to connect up states without actually having rules connecting to them. Now we've got two aliases in here. We've got the two falling and the two land. Now you can tell it's an alias by the little icon on the left-hand side there. The way these work is if I select the two falling alias, for example, you can see over here on the right-hand side panel, we've got the locomotion on land states, tectonics. Now, you'll have a tick box for every state that exists in your state machine. So we've got one for locomotion, which is here, jump which is up here, full loop which is here, and then land which has here. Now if we had additional states, they would also be listed as well. Now, because the locomotion and the land of both text on this node will run all of the rules connected to it while we're in the locomotion or these land states. Which means that these two rules here will be run every single frame if we are currently playing the locomotion state or the land state. And it's the same for R2 land node here. This is also an alias and you can see that it's got jump for-loop ticked on, which means if we're in the jump state or the for-loop state, then this rule will be running every frame. And if at any point that rule becomes true while we're in either one of these states. The two land will then transition us from either one of these states to our landscape. And that's how these states up here are connected to the states down here. Now, just to cover the rules that are going on in here while on locomotion state is running and this will be running whenever our character is idle or walking or running. And that's because if you remember, we're using that locomotion cache, which has being set by the locomotion state machine. And that has our idle and our walk slash run animations being sat there. So while that locomotion state here is running, the two falling will be running all of its connections to see if either one of these rules are true. And if at any point we start falling, is falling becomes true, we will transition from locomotion to for-loop. And if we're falling and there's a velocity greater than a 100 in the z. So if we're falling past a certain speed, will actually use the jump animation state instead of just going to the for-loop. And then we actually have a rule that goes between our jump and our for-loop. And this just checks, is our jump animation almost finished. And if it is, then it will transition us from our jump to our for-loop. And the reason it does that is because we have this option ticked on here, which basically just checks is the animation that we're checking. Almost finished. If it is, then we will transition to the state that we're checking it for. Now, at any point when we're playing or jump or a for loop animation stays. This to land will also be running. It'll be checking is, is falling false? If it is, then that will transition us from Eva, the for-loop, or jump to land, and then from land to our locomotion again. So that's the basics of how our main states, state machine actually works. If we head back to our Anim graph now. Output wherever animation we're currently playing in our state machine. So if we're just in our locomotion state, this will output our locomotion animation. If we were to say falling, it would play our for-loop. So that would be output that would go into this, which is a montage slot. Now, we will have a whole lesson on montages in the future. But this is just a slot that allows us to play a montage. Montage allows us to overlay an animation on top of our movement animations. But if no montage is actually currently playing, all that will happen is our movement animations will go into the montage slot. It checks if a montage is playing. If not, then it just passes through and no changes are made. Unless a montage is playing. Then that goes from our montage slot into our control rig. Now, I'm not going to be going too much into control rig in this course purely because it's a massive system on its own, which could have a completely separate course, but we can see which control rig is running. So we'll select the node. And in the Details panel scroll down, you can see we've got a control rig class. Here. It's set to the mannequin basic foot IK. And we can find this by clicking the Browse to asset and content browser. And we can open up that control Rick, and you can see all of the code that's being run by that control rig. Now again, I'm not going to be going through all of these nodes because control rig is a pretty advanced system. But basically what this does is it does our foot placement for us. I can give you a quick example of what I mean. So we'll play an editor. And if I run over to this ramp and I put one on my feet up, you can see that the foot actually increases its height because the height of the ground is higher at that point. That's just a quick overview of what control rig does in this blueprint here. And all of this code is happening inside this control rig note here. So it takes in our movement animations, it applies those new foot positions for the height of the ground. And then it outputs that into our output posts here for our final animation that we see in game. Now as we've been going through the Anim graph it, you may have noticed some variables like R is falling variable here, all of the ground speed inside the walk slash run state. These are just normal variables that were then setting inside our event graph. So we can use them in our Anim graph. So if we head over to the Event Graph now just by clicking that in the My Blueprint panel, as you can see, we're saying some of those variables that we use in the Anim graph. So we've got our ground speed here, that's just getting the velocity from our movement component. Then we convert that into a float and set that to the ground speed. We've got another variable called should move, which determines whether we should be an idol animation state or our walk slash run animation state. And then we've got r is falling variable down here, which just uses the movement components is falling variable that's built-in. And then we take that and set that to the is falling variable. And these are all set by the event over here called event Blueprint update animation. This will run every frame and update these variables as they need to be. Then up here we've got the blueprint initialize animation. Now this will be run similar to a begin play notes. So this will run when the game starts or when our animation blueprint is created. That just gets the owning actor, which is usually the character blueprint. We cause to the character blueprint character variable. And then we also get its character moving component and set that as a variable so we can use it down here to set these variables. Now show you where we actually set which Animation Blueprint our characters using. We'll head over to the ThirdPersonCharacter. So to do that, we'll go to the Content Browser, then to third-person blueprints will open up the ThirdPersonCharacter Blueprint. Then we can select the mesh component over here in the Components panel. And if we double-click it, it will take us to the viewport. Now overheat and the Details panel. As long as animation mode is set to use animation blueprint, you should have this Anime Class option. And you can see here it's currently set to the eight BP Quinn Animation Blueprint. So if you did want to change that, you can just click the drop-down here and find your new Animation Blueprint. There are quite a few that are built into the engine, but you won't typically be using any of these. You'd use say for example, our money animation blueprint or our Quinn one here. Then lastly, as a side note, maybe in the future you create an NPC character that doesn't actually move anywhere, and you just want them to play a single animation. You can do that by selecting the animation mode here to use animation asset. And then you can set a single animation that you want it to play without having to have a whole animation blueprint. But for player characters, you'll pretty much always going to want this to be set to use animation blueprint. And you wanna make sure that the Anime Class is definitely set to your animation blueprint. So for us, that's the ABP Quinn here. So that's it for this lesson. Don't worry too much if you don't understand everything. In our next lessons, we're going to go into each system in a lot more detail. 46. Animation Blueprints (Montages): Hey everyone. In this lesson we're gonna be taking a look at animation montages. Animation montages, or how we tell our animation blueprint, the specific animation we want it to play. So for example, if your character were to reload or swing a melee weapon, you would use animation montages to play those animations. Now in this lesson on some of our future lessons, I'm going to be using animations that aren't actually included in the third person template. In the class description, I will put a link to download the animations that I use in this lesson and our future lessons as well. Once you've downloaded and extracted those files, you should end up with a folder that looks like this. Now we're going to add these files to our projects. So we'll click in the editor here, right-click our content folder and go to show in Explorer. This will show us a content folder. And we want to move our lesson animations here to the content folder like that. Now you can see that that's shown up inside our content browser. Now, if we open it, if the animations aren't there, don't worry. All you need to do is close and then reopen the project. So now I've restarted my project. And you can see inside the lesson animations, all of our animations are showing up correctly now. Now we're only going to be using one of these animations in this lesson. That's gonna be the reload animation. So if in the lessons Animations folder you search for reload, you'll see that we've got a reload animation. Now we're going to use this to create a montage. To do that, we'll right-click and go up to Create, then select Create and a montage. And we're just going to keep the same name. So I'm just going to press Enter. Now we have a new montage. Now if we open up our animation montage, you can see that actually looks pretty similar to an animation sequence. I'm just going to drag mine up the top here like that. Now the main difference is we have this montage slot and a montage shot is how we tell the Animation Blueprint which montage we want to play. So if we head over to our money animation blueprint, if you remember that's in characters, will get rid of this search, go-to mannequins animation and open up a BP money. Then inside our Anim graph, if you remember, we have this slot and it's currently set to default slot. Now if we take a look back at our reload montage, this is also set to default swap. Now this means if we were to play our reload montage, I Animation Blueprint would be able to play it. Now currently our montage and our montage slot inside our blueprint, or both using the same slope. But if we select the slot here over in the Details panel, you can click the down and see there's actually quite a few different sorts included with the third person template. Now, if we were to change this slot to use a different slot and play, our montage. Montage would no longer play because it would have a different slot to the slot here. Now the main reason that we can have multiple slots is because you can actually have a character play more than one montage at the same time. But each slot can only play one montage. So that's why we can have multiple slots and have montages assigned to different slots. But for this lesson, we're just going to be sticking with the default slots. So make sure you keep this slide set to the default option hip. And back in our montage makes sure that the default slot and the slot name is ticked on here. So now we're actually going to write some code to play our montage. So we'll head over to the Content Browser, go to the third person blueprint folder, then open up the ThirdPersonCharacter Blueprint. And in here we can add a little bit of code that tells our character mesh to actually play a montage. So we'll right-click. I'm going to search for input event one, and we'll create that input of them. Then we're going to grab our mesh component here, drag out from that and search for play montage. And that's going to create us this new node here. Now I'll take you through some of the inputs and outputs on this node. Start with, we've got montage to play. This is where we tell it which montage we want to play. So we're going to select our reload montage here. We've got the playwright. So if this is set to one, the animation will play at its normal speed. But if we were to set to say to the animation would play twice as fast. Next we've got start position now this allows you to set the exact time that you want the montage to start playing out. So for example, if you had a 10-second long montage and you wanted to start at two seconds, then you would set the starting position to two. Next, we've got the starting section. Now I will explain this a little bit later in the lesson. So we'll skip over this for now. Then for outputs we have the normal execution output. This will just run as soon as the node has finished running. Then we've got uncompleted. Now this will actually run when the animation finishes. Then we've got on blend out. Now a cool thing about montages is they blend in and out when we play them. So you get a smooth transition from the original animation you were playing to the montage. And then when the montage is almost finished, it will transition out back to your original animation. And this blend out will run when the animation starts transitioning out. Cover a little bit more about the transitions in a moment, but moving on, we've got interrupted. And this will run if we cancel or stop our montage playing. And I will explain how we can do that a little bit later on in the lesson. Then lastly, we've got some notify execution outputs and a notify name. I'm not going to be covering notifies in this lesson because we will actually have an entire lesson just for notifies. So we're going to skip this for now. So now we'll finish setting up our code to actually play your animation. I'm actually going to create a new variable. We'll call this reloading. I'm just going to use this so that if we spam the one input, it doesn't restart our montage over and over again. So what we'll do is we'll first check is reloading true. And if it's not true, then we'll set reloading to true like that. And we'll connect this up to the play montage. Then we want to set the reloading to false. When IVR, it's finished playing the reload animation or it gets interrupted like that. Now we're ready to actually test this out, so we'll compile and hit Play. And now when I press one on my keyboard, nothing actually happens. Now the reason for that is when we imported in our lesson animations, they actually came with their own skeleton. Now, even though both these skeletons are exactly the same, There's two skeleton assets now in our project, one that our characters using, a one that our new animations is using. If we exhale, have plain editor and go to the lesson animations, open up mannequin, then go to meshes. You'll see we've got SK mannequin. Now this is the skeleton or less than animation. So using, but if we go to the Characters folder, then to mannequins meshes, you'll see we've got another SK mannequin. Now this is the skeleton that are characters meshes using. This is why our animations on playing, but there's a new feature and underwear on Jim five called compatible skeletons. So if we go to the skeleton here inside our characters folder, open that up, go to the windows and we want to find the asset details and take that on. Now here you can find compatible skeletons. So we're going to add a new entry. We're going to select the drop-down here. We're going to find the skeleton that's in our lesson animation. So if you hover over, you can see it says less than animations, slashed mannequins slash meshes. So we're going to click on that one. Then we're going to save. Now all of the animations that work for our lesson. Animation skeleton will work with our character. So if we go back to the level here, hit play. Now when I press one, you'll see our montages playing just fine. If i spam one, you can see that it's actually not going to play the a montage again until we finished playing the original montage. And that's because of the boolean that we set up to stop that happening. Now one thing you might notice is while we're playing the montage, or feet don't actually move with our body. Everything is playing that montage. Now, in our next lesson, we will look into blending bones and that allows us to separate parts of the body off from each other. So for example, while playing our reload animation, we can have the legs. They'll be able to play the movement animations and we will be covering that in the next lesson. Now another thing you might notice is if we go over to the ramp here, you can see that my legs up on the ramp. And if I press one, you can see that the legs still stays up and the ramp, even though that montage is taking over the whole body. Now the reason this is happening is because our montage here is played before the control rig is applied. So the montage is played here. Then we apply the control rig, which deals with the foot placement, and then we output the final pose. So that's why our movement animations are being taken over by the montage, but the foot placement is not. So if I was to move my default slot here for a moment, two, in front of my control rig like this. And connect this all up. Now when I compile, hit Play, if I run over to the ramp, you can see that my foot placement is still working, but if I press one, you can see that it stops working while I'm playing a montage. So it will just go back to our Animation Blueprint and set this backup how it was. So it will just move this forward over here, connect this up, and connect our montage backup here. Like that. If you ever wanted to add a new montage slot to your anim graph, you can just right-click search for slot, scroll up here. You can use slot default slot, then select it. And if you wanted to use a different slot name, you can change that up here. But for now we can just delete that node and compile our animation graph. Now, montages also have other features. We can add multiple animations to one montage. So over here, we've got the asset browser. If you don't have yours that you can always go up to Window and take on the asset browser here. Now, using the asset browser we can drag in animations to use with our montage. So for example, we could use the rifle are idle hip far. We'll just drag that. Now you can see we've got both animations in our montage. Now currently these are both set up to use the default section. So what will happen is the rifle reload or play, and then our rifle idle animation will play. But using sections, we can actually divide up our montage into different sections and play them differently. So to do this, we can right-click on the bar at the top here and click new montage selection. And we could call this a loop section. Now we get this purple line and we can actually choose where this section begins. So if I put this say here, our section now for the loop section is this whole area here. And then our default section is this whole area here. Now currently all that will happen is our default section will play and then our loop section will play. But if we head over to the montage sections here, you can see that we've got some controls over how we can play these different sections. Now again, if you don't have this montage sections, you can go up to Windows and tick that on here. Right now, you can see that it's currently playing the default section. Then it will move on to the next section, which is our loop section. I'm just going to make my window a little bit bigger here. Can you see the button is actually now in the right place. Now if we wanted to, we could have these sections be completely separate. If we click this arrow here and do remove link, you can see that now these are two separate sections, so only our default section we'll play now. Because we've told it not to do anything after it's finished playing. Now if we wanted it to play our loop section again being click this little box and do loop section. And now it's going to play our loop section after the default section is finished. Now we can also make sections loop. So if we click this box next to our loop section here, we can select loop section again, and that will make our loop section here just loop over and over again. So once our default finishes loop section, we'll play and this will just keep looping over and over again. As you can see now. Now this can actually be useful for different things. Say for example, you were making a reload animation for a shotgun. Now, usually you can load individual bullets into a shotgun. So maybe when you're playing reloads, there's only two bullets missing from the shotgun. You'd only want the loop section to run twice for putting in the bullet twice. But maybe sometimes when the character reloads, they need to put in six bullets. So now you need a loop section to run six times. Now we can do this with the looping section and using blueprints to control how many times it runs. So if we head back to the ThirdPersonCharacter, I'll show you some of the nodes that we can use to actually control the different sections that are montage is going to play. So we'll head back to the third-person character here and start with, if you remember, we've got these starting section. Now, if we wanted to, we could just have our montage play that loop section straight away instead of playing the default section first, we could loop section here. Now if we compile it and play, it won't even play the reload anymore. So it will press one and you can see it just skips that default section and go straight to our loop section. Then we can head back to our ThirdPersonCharacter here. Now to get access to our different montage functions, we need to get an a reference to our animation blueprint. To do that, we'll drag out from the mesh components, search, for instance, and use the get anime instance node. Now, this gives us a reference to the Animation Blueprint we're using. So for us that's the ABP money. Now if I drag out, I can actually just get variables that exist in this blueprint. To do that, we would need to cost to it. So we could cost to ABP money. Then from that we could get variables that are stored inside that or functions if we wanted to. For example, get should move. That's a variable that exists inside our animation blueprint here. But to control our montages, we don't actually need to cost because these functions are built into all animation blueprints. So we can delete these functions for now, and we can drag out from the return value and search for montage. And this will give us access to all of the different functions that can be used to control montages. Now one of the more commonly used nodes with sections is the jump to section note. So if we create that, you can see that we get a section name input. So this is where we would put which section we want our montage to change to. We can also specify a montage. Now, if we don't specify a montage here, what will happen is if you have multiple montages playing at the same time, and they all have the same section names. It will change all of your montages to that section that we put her. Now if you just want it to happen to one montage, say our rifle reload, we would just specify the montage it, we want it to happen too, so we can select it here. And now we will only change this section for this montage. So we could set up a quick demonstration. If we right-click search for input. We'll add that and we'll take pressed plug this into the montage jumped to section. And we're going to change this to default. Default like that. Now when we compile and hit Play, if I press one to play, our montage can see that it's just skipping straight to the loop section. But if I press too, you in C, it's actually now playing the default section. Now there are lots of other things we can do with these functions. So if we head back to the ThirdPersonCharacter and delete this montage, jumped to section. We can drag out and search on touch. I'm not going to be going through all of these. Most of them are fairly self-explanatory. And if you need a tool tip, just hover over and it gives you a pretty good explanation of what they do. But an important one is stop montage. And this allows us to tell a montage to stop playing. So if we click on stop montage here, we get a node that allows us to set the blend out time. So maybe you just want the montage to stop instantly here. You could just set this to 0 and the montage will completely stop instantly. Or maybe you wanted it to blend out slowly. You could put a time here and it will slowly blend out of that montage. Now again, you can set a montage here. If you don't, it will just stop all of your montages that are currently playing. If you do, you can just specify which montage you want it to stop. So if we connect this up to our two input here, we've told it to stop the reload montage. So we'll compile, hit Play, press one to play that montage. And if I press to, it, instantly stops up montage plan. Now lastly, I wanted to show you how you can adjust the blending and blend out times for your montages. So we can test this out. We'll go to our montage here, and I'm going to actually just delete our loop section and delete this animation as well. Just so we've got the reload now playing over here in our asset details. And again, if you don't have this, you can just go to Window and find asset details to take it on. We've got the blending and blend out times. Now, the high these values are, the longer it will take for the animation to blend them fully and then blend out fully. So if I was to set these to say 00 like that, we'll go back to our third person template here. I'm just going to get rid of this styling section. And we're not going to stop the montage, which is kinda let it finish on its own. So we'll hit play. And if I press one, you'll see that it starts instantly. There's no transition a tool, and it ends instantly as well. So we'll press one and you see that it ends and starts very quickly. But if we want smoother transitions into our animation, we can increase these values. So say 0.30.3 here as well. If we go back, hit Play, and now when I press one, you'll see it transitions much more smoothly to and from the animation. So these are settings that you'll probably use quite a bit with montages, because if you have a quick montage, you might want the transition in and out times to be shorter. And if you have a long montage, you might want longer ones. The last thing I wanted to cover was the anime store manager. So if we x out of plane editor here and open up our SK mannequin, then go to Windows and open the anime slot manager that will bring up the animation slot manager. Now, here is where we can add new slots or delete or rename existing slots. Now you may notice that the name is shown up here are actually the same name. So sharp when we select the slop, no tip. These are the slots that are defined in our skeleton. So this is where we actually manage all of those slots. Now something to keep in mind with slots and groups is one group can only have one montage playing through all its slots at a time. So for example, if the full body montage slot was playing a montage, and then I played another montage using the upper body slot that would actually cancel the full body montage. And the reason for that is that both in the same group. So if I wanted my full body montage and my upper body montage to be able to play at the same time, I would need to move my upper body slot to a different group. So I could either create a new group or move it to an existing one. If you want to move a slot to an existing group, you can just right-click, do set up a body group two, and that will give you a list of all of the existing groups that you can move that slot two. Now that's it for this lesson, but we will be using montages a lot more in our future lessons as well. 47. Animation Blueprints (Blend Nodes): Hey everyone. In this lesson we're gonna be taking a look at blend nodes. Now blend nodes allow us to play multiple animations on our character at the same time. They also allow us to use variables to control what section of our Anim graph is playing. So before we get started, I am gonna be reusing some of the stuff that we set up in our last lesson, the montages lesson. And if you remember from that lesson when we hit play and press one to actually play our animation, if we start moving, our lower half of our body doesn't move. And that's because I reload animation is actually taking up the whole body. So today we're gonna be using a blend know to split our body in half so that we can have our movement animations play on the bottom half while the reload animation plays on the top half. So we'll start by exiting plan editor. Then we'll head over to our animation graph. So we'll go to characters than mannequins, animations, and we'll open up the ABP money animation blueprint. Right now here in our animation graph, what is happening is our locomotion state machine is outputting either an idol or run animation. We're caching that animation in this locomotion pose node then inside our main state machine or locomotion state as playing. And that is just playing what we cached in the locomotion cash. Then if we head back to the Anim graph, that locomotion caches output from our main states machine into this montage slot. And if you remember from the montage is lesson, this is what's actually playing our montage. Now, once the montage has been told to play, this will actually just output our montage animation. It's not going to play are idle or running animations anymore. Then lastly, it goes into our control rig and that's why our foot placement actually still works when we're playing the montage, because this happens after the montage has been taught to play, and then we output the final pose. So basically what we need to do is here we need to add a blend mode that will allow us to blend the top half of the body playing the montage slop and the lower half of the body playing the locomotion cash. So to do that, we're going to right-click and search for blend PER. We want layered blend per bone like that. So now we need to connect this up. I'm just going to move these nodes back a little bit like this. And we'll drag this node in here and we'll disconnect these two nodes. I'm just holding Alt and then clicking less pen here. So first we will take the output pin and just plug this into our control rig like that. Let's move these up. Now the base pose input here is gonna be the animations that will play on the lower half of our body. So we don't actually want this to be the locomotion cash because that won't have our jump animations. We need a cash from our main states. So to do that, we're going to disconnect the slot here, move this down. We track out from mainstays. I'm going to search for cash and click New, save cash pose. And we can select this node and call it whatever you like. I'm going to call mine, say main states, cash like that. Then I'm going to move these up here. So they're a bit more out of the way. Then we'll compile. Now, don't worry that we've gone into a T-Pose here or that we've got a note here That's just because we don't actually have any animations plug vignette. So now we're caching or mainstay pose. We can drag out from our base poster, search for main. And we can use the use cached pose, mainstay cash like that. Then we want to copy this, paste it. And now we want to plug that into the source of our slot and plug that into the blend pose is 0. Now blend pose is 0, or they're going to be the animations that play on the top half of our body. Now, all we're doing here is we're getting our base animation. So our main state animations, this is our Idle run and jump animations. These will always be played on the lower half of our body. And then for the top half of our body, we're saying, if we're playing a montage, use the montage for the top half. But if we're not playing a montage, we just want to use those same main state cash animation. So again, Idle run and jump animations. So now we can compile just to get rid of this note here and you can see our animations are planning again. But right now, our animation is actually won't split like we want. They won't split in the middle. We actually need to set that up in the layer setup here. So if we select the node, go to Layer setup, then click these little dropdowns. You can see that we have some filters and this is where we actually define at which bone we want our body to be split. So we're going to add a new entry here and click the index drop-down. And this is where we actually set the bone that we want the split to happen up. So for us we want to turn on our bone names. We can find exactly which bone we want to use. So we'll go to Character, then down to bones and we want to take on show bone names. So we'll take that on. And now we can zoom in and we want the split to happen on the spine. So we're going to zoom in a little bit here. And I think spine one is probably the best one to go for. Our logo animations will play below spine one. Then our upper body animations will play above that. Now, depending on your character, you might have different names in the future, so you don't always put spine one. You'd need to check what the spine bones are for your specific character. So for now, we're going to use spine one and we need to make sure that we spell the name exactly the same as how it is in the skeleton. So spine underscore 01, like that. Now there are some other settings for this note that I will go into in a little bit. But for now, we're just going to compile and we'll test this out and game so we'll hit play. And if I press one to play our reload and I start moving, you can see our reload animation is playing and our lower body animations playing. And when we're not playing that reload animation or upper body animations are just playing normally. Now this is just a simple example of how we can actually set up different animations to play on different parts of the body. Now, to explain a little bit about the blend depth, this is basically like a blend effect. So currently it's 0, which means from spine one and including the spine one bone, all of the bones above it. We'll just be using this animation output here. When I reload montage is playing a 100% of all of the bones above. We'll be using that montage and only that montage. Now, if we were to set this to say three, for example, what would happen is our spine. One would be using about 33 per cent of this animation outputs. So 33% of our reload montage, then spine two would be using 66% of our reload montage and 33% of just our main state cache. And then by spine for it would be fully using the montage for reloading. So you can basically use these as a way to blend the effects of the blend node between multiple bones. Now if we wanted to exclude part of the upper body from actually playing the reload montage, we could do that. So if we added in another branch filter, open this up and set this to say lower arm. So I'll say lower underscore. I set the bone depth of two minus one. What this means is we're telling the blend note that we don't actually want the lower arm bone or any bones below it to use our blend state pose 0, we want it to use our base pose. So if we hit compile and test this out, if I press Y and you can see that my right arm isn't actually moving with our reload animation anymore. It's just staying there. Now, the arm, the upper arm is still moving because we're only affecting from the lower arm. But you can see that it doesn't actually animate the way it should anymore. So this is how you can exclude parts of the body from playing an animation. Now, don't worry too much if you don't fully understand that when you're getting started with animating, most of the time your bone depth will just be 0 and you won't really be using this minus one option very often either. So for now, we'll just remove this lower on one just by clicking the little down arrow here and doing Delete. Now we can add multiple input blend poses. So if we click Add pin, you can see that's added as a new blend pin posts. And if we go to the detail, so you can see that we've now got a new index here on the layer setup. This just has the same settings that are index 0 has its just that these settings now for this pen. So maybe for example, you wanted the reload animations play on the top half of the body, but you had a second animation that you wanted to play on the face, for example, you could then add that in here, add a new bone to the filter on the branch filters, and then have the head play a different animation. Next up we've got the blend weights. Now this is the amount that the blend pose will actually affect the base posts. So, for example, currently is just set to one, which means that if for any bones that want to play the blend pose one animation, it will play at a 100% of that animation. If I was to set this to 0.5, we'll remove this blend pose one pen for now. So what's right-click and do remove blend pin. Then we'll compile if we hit play now and I play our reload animation by pressing one, you can see that it's not fully playing the animation. It's basically using half of the effect of that on our base pose. Now we can also use this to disable a blend, for example. So we could set this to say 0 and compile. And now if we hit Play and I press one, you can see they are no longer plays a montage because we've set that Alpha here to 0. This is just a normal float input. So we could drag out, use a remote to float option, and that will just create us a float variable that we can change and control inside our Event Graph. Now, moving on, if we head back to the Anim graph and select the layer blend per bone node. Over here we have an option for mesh based rotation blend. This basically means that the rotation of our bones or use the mesh space instead of the local space. Now this option can be helpful if your animations look a bit weird when you're playing them. More often than not, I find that I actually have this turned on, but it's going to depend on your character and the animations that you're playing. This does the same thing, but we've scaled so it will use your meshes, bones scale instead of the local scale. Most of the time you'll want this turned off. Now there are other types of blend nodes. So if we delete this one for now and we'll delete this variable, right? Because I can search for Blend tool and there's a blend poses by Boolean. So if we create that, you can see we've got a true and a false pen. So it will plug in our source, it like that. Now, this allows us to basically control which animations they're gonna played depending on a Boolean value. So if this active value here is true, that the animation is connected up to true will run. And if this is false, the animation is connected up to folks will run. And we can actually see this in the preview here. So you can see that the value is false. So only the animations coming from our folks pen here are being passed through to our control rig. If I was to take this on and compile. I will say now only the animation from our true pen, it's being passed through to our control rig. And then we have some blend times. So if you were to change this value during gameplay, the high these values are, the more time it takes for it to smoothly blend from the true poses to the folks poses and then back from false to true for the false been time. So this node can be really helpful for say, if you had a bunch of animation, so only play when your characters swimming and then other animations when the character is walking around on the ground, you may have a variable called his swimming that connects up to something like this. And then that can smoothly transition between you're walking on ground animations and you're swimming animations whenever that Boolean gets set to true or false. Another similar node is the blending. So if we search for Blend and then int, we can use the blend poses by int. Now this works similarly, but instead of a boolean, it's a int value. So we can add multiple inputs right now there's only two. So if I was to set this to one, then our one post would be used. So we can connect these up like this. Hit Compile and you'll see that the one is used. But if I change this to 0 and we compile again, you'll see that now the 0 inputs being used. And the good thing about this is we can have more than two inputs. So if we right-click and do, or we right-click on the node, sorry, and do add blend PIM. You can see that adds a new option. Now, if I was to just copy and paste these nodes, paste them, connect them up to here. And now let's set this to two, will compile. You see that now the two pin is being used. Again, we've just got these been times and they work the same way as our Boolean node. So whatever value you put here is how long it will take to blend it into that pose. Now we can also use a blend node using an enum. So if we delete this and we can pull out and we'll just leave it like that for a moment. We'll create a new enum, so we'll right-click and go to the blueprints, Then go to enumeration. I'm just going to call this E underscore animation types. We'll open this up and we'll create a new anion. And we'll call this say swimming. And we'll add another one for walking and another one for say, car. Now these are just examples so I can show you how the code works, but we'll close this for now. Go back to our animation graph and then we'll search for EA underscore animation. You see at the top here we've got blend poses E underscore animation types. And that's because that's what we called a union. So we'll create that. You see that we get this node here. And if we right-click on the node, you can see that we can add pins for swimming, walking, and in cost. So we'll do that for each one like that. And now we've got an anion pen instead of a boolean or an integer. So we'll connect the output up to our control recap. And we'll connect these up safe for swimming, walking, and capos. Now currently this is set to 0. So if we compile, it will just pick the swimming post because that's the first one. But we can also use a variable to control this. So we can create a new anion. We'll call this animation mode for example. And we'll set it to E underscore animation type. That's the union we've just created. We'll compile. Now we can plug this variable into our node. We can actually control which one's gonna be used using this variable. So we can say, I want in car, compile it and now it's using the ink up. And we can change this during gameplay in our event graph here to control which animations we want our graph to play. And then lastly, if we delete this node and we search for the land, we can just use a blend mode. Now, this is a simple node that basically just takes an a and B input and allows us to blend between them using an alpha value. So if this is 0, it'll be, the output of this node will just be 100% of a. And if this is one, it'll be a. 100% of B is 0.5, then it'll be half and half of both of those animations outputted. For now, we'll just delete this node and we're actually just sat back up our layer blend per bone nodes. So we'll search for lead and we can use lead brand per bone will connect this up to here again, this up to our control rig. We'll delete these nodes because they're not using them anymore. Then in our note here, we'll just set the branch field curb backup for spine one. So it will set this to spine, underscore a one. And we'll delete these variables down here as well because we're not actually using those and just compile. So now when we hit play and we run around, we can press one and it will play us a reload animation while our movement animations are still working with them for this lesson, hopefully you now understand a little bit more about blending animations together and how we can actually play two animations at the same time on one character mesh. 48. Animation Blueprints (Notifies): Hey everyone. In this lesson we're going to be taking a look at animation notifies. Now animation notifies a really handy tools because they allow us to run code a specific time in an animation. Now we've already looked at some notifies earlier on in the course. We looked at the play sound and play effects, notifies which allowed us to play sounds or play particle effects at specific points in our animations. I will quickly go over those again in this lesson just to refresh your memory. So to start with, we need to go to either an animation sequence or an animation montage. We can add notifies to both. So I'm gonna be using the reload montage that we've been playing in our previous lessons. So we'll head over to the lessons animations. And if you don't have this folder, I explained how to add these in the montage lessons. So you might want to go have a look at that. Now, we'll scroll down and find our reload montage, which is here at the bottom. We'll just open that up. Now. Down here we have our notifies timeline and this is where we will see all of the notifies for this specific montage. To add a new notified, we just right-click on this bar here that says one and we can add a notify. Now the engine has some built-in notifies already. And that's how we can play sounds or play particle effects or Niagara particle effects. Now there are other notifies, as you can see here for Clothing Simulation and stuff like that. I'm not going to be covering them in this lesson because they're pretty specific and a little bit more advanced and what we're gonna be covering. But we'll just add a play sound notify. And now with that added, we can position that at any point in the animation. So say we wanted to sound to play at this very point. We could add our notified to this point. Then over in the Details panel, we can set a sound, volume and pitch modifiers. We can change what the notify color is, and this is just for organization. So you can quickly, at a glance see what a notify is by its color. Another useful setting here is the trigger chance. Now, maybe you only wanted this sounds play sometimes when this animation plays randomly. So what we could do is instead of sending it to one, which means the sound will always play when the animation plays. We could set this to say 0.1. Now, this sound, we're only play ten per cent of the time that this animation plays. An example of how this could be handy is maybe you have an idle animation and you wanted to add a cough sound to that idle animation. Now, you probably don't want that sound to play every single time the idle animation plays. So you could set the trigger chance for that sound notify to 0.1, and that sound will play 10% of the time that the animation is played. Now, moving on, we can do the same thing with particle effects. So I'm going to delete the sound notify here, right-click and do add notify. Now we can either add a nine to five for Niagara, political effects will cascade. I'm going to select Niagara just because that's a newer system. So we'll click that and select that notify. Then up here in our Details panel, we can set which Niagara particle effects we want to choose. I don't currently have any of my projects, so there's one coming up here. But if you did, this is where they would show up. Then we can set the location and rotation. Now, this is the offset from the root. So the root bone on our character here is right where my mouse is currently. So if we were to add, say, 50, Hi, our particle effect would move up to about this height because it's increasing the height of the particle effect by 50 from the root. Now, we can also say whether or not our political fact it's attached to something. So currently it's attached and that means it's going to just attach to the root. But we can specify a bot name if we want. We wanted the particle effects be attached to the head. We could do that by searching for head. And you can see that gives us our head bone here. So now when we spawned this particle effect or will actually be attached to the head bone. Unlike before, we can say notify color. And we can also change whether or not the notify will run every time or say half the time if we put 0.5, for example. Now, using this type of Notify to play effect, it'll basically just tell the effect to play once and then the effect will be destroyed. But maybe you wanted the effects you run from say here to here in the animation. Well, we can do that. So we'll select this notifying, delete it, right-click and we'll go to notify state and go down to time to Niagara effect. Or if you're using cascades, time to particle effect. So it will select the Niagara option here. And you see that now we've got a 12. We can actually drag this to value here by clicking the little dot at the bottom and drag that out. So we can add this to say 50. So now the particle effects we set for this notify I pair one from the one value to the true value. Now something to keep in mind with this is your Niagara effect will be, will need to be set up to loop. If it's only set up to run once, then the particle effects will just run once and then it won't do it anymore. So you will need to Niagara particle effect That's actually set up to loop for this to work. Then we've got the same settings as we did with our previous notify type. We've got the template that we want to use. So this is where we set the effect that we want. We can choose whether or not it attaches to a bone or socket. We can set its location and rotation offsets. We can choose whether or not it destroys immediately. And basically what that means is, say your effectors looping as we play the animation. Once it gets here, if destroy immediately is ticked on. It doesn't matter what stage the particle effect is insets halfway through running. It will be destroyed instantly. Whereas if this is ticked off, then once we get to this point, if the, if the particle effect is halfway through, then it will let it finish. So maybe your pot, a cool effect takes two more seconds to finish, then it will allow that. So it's up to you whether or not you have this tectonic depending on the type of effects you're using. Now when working with notifies, you might end up with quite a crowded timeline if you have a lot going on in a specific animation. So you can always just add new notify tracks. So we can click this little drop-down here to add notify track. And that gives us a second track that we can add notifies two, it doesn't change how they run or anything like that is purely for organization. Now, so far, we've been using the default notifies that come built-in with the engine, but we can actually create our own that allow us to run at events and run code when an animation notify is run. So what we'll do is we'll select this notify and delete that. Now, maybe I wanted a piece of code to run when my character say grabs the magazine or pose the magazine from the weapon here. Well, we can do that with notifies. So what we'll do is right-click and do add notify. Then we'll go up to new notified and that'll let us name the notifies so we can pull call this detach magazine like that. You can see we've now got a notify that it's called the Touch magazine. We can move it about like our previous ones, but I'm going to keep mine here. So now this notify will allow us to call an event inside our animation blueprint whenever this animation plays this point. But we are going to run into a small problem here, and I'll show you why if we head over to our Animation Blueprint, which if you remember, is in characters, mannequins animation. And then we'll open up money. Now, normally if I right-click and I searched for my detach, I should find an event for our detach magazine, but I'm not. And the reason that's happening is if you remember, are less than animations and this folder here actually have their own skeleton. And then our character has a different skeleton. Now this is why our notify. It isn't just showing up in our animation blueprint. We can easily fix this. So what we need to do is go to our Characters Folder, then to our mannequins, then two meshes and open up the SK mannequin. And in here, we're gonna go to the Animation notifies tab. If you don't have it open, you can go up to Window and find the animation, those FISA and take it on. And we're just going to right-click and do new. I'm going to call this magazine, oh sorry, detach magazine. And it needs to be spelled exactly the same as the notify in our montage. And now we've added that new notify to our skeleton. So now when we go to our animation blueprint, we can right-click search for the touch. And you can see we've now got a then anime notified to touch magazine and we can add that. Now if you were to add a notify to an animation that is using the same skeleton is your character. So to give you guys an example, we'll go to the Characters Folder, mannequins, animations. Then we'll go to money and we'll just find the will find the land animation for example, I open this up. Now if I right-click in the notifies here to add notify, new notify. And I'm just going to call this jump. And now if we go to our Animation Blueprint, I right-click and I search for jump. And you'll see that that's just shown up right away. And that's because I'd jump land animation is actually just using the same skeleton as our character. Now, in our reload montage, we've got our detach magazine notify, and then we've also inside our Animation Blueprint got that event here as well. Now, this event will run every single time that this montage is played by our character and the animation gets to this point. So to test this out, we can just add some code to this. I'm just going to drag out and do a print string. And we'll just leave this sang Hello. And we'll compile, hit Play. And now when I press one, you'll see that we get that hello print out when our reload animation gets to that specific point. And we can also check that the jump end is also working. So we can right-click search for jump, and that creates us a new event. We can drag out from that and do a print string for that. And if we compile, we jump when we land, you can see that that Notify is also running as well. Now, just heading back to our characters skeleton for a second. We'll go to mannequins than meshes and open up the mannequin here in our animation notifies tab. Here's where you can delete animation notifies. You can create new ones so we can right-click and do new. We can also rename as well. So we can right-click and select Rename to change the name of a notify. Another helpful tool is the find references, and we can use this to find all of the animations that have this notify in it. So if we click this, you can see that it's giving us the exact animation that uses the jump and notify. We can double-click this and you can see that's the animation that has that notified. So it may be, for example, you have an animation that's running and notify that you don't want to. You can always just come to the skeleton, right-click the Notify and find the animation that's playing that notify. If you want to get rid of the search here, we can just right-click the remove filters and you can see that now it's showing up all of our animations again. Now we can also create our own custom notifies the work a little bit like the play sound or play particle effect notifies. So if we head back to the content browser here, I'm just going to go to the Blueprints folder. So third-person blueprints, we'll right-click and click Blueprint class. Then we're going to go to all classes and search for notify. And we want animation notify here. So if we click that and do Select, that'll create us a new blueprint. I'm just going to call mine example. Notify like that. And we'll double-click to open that up. I'm just going to drag mine up to the top bar here like that. Now we've got a new editor layout. You can see that we don't actually have an event graph where we have is our My Blueprint Panel and then the Details panel over here. Now we've got some functions built into this blueprint that we can override. And these are the functions that will actually be run when the Notify here is run. So what we'll do is first of all go to our reload montage. If we right-click in the Notify, but go to add notify. Over here you can see that we've now got that example notifies. So if we click this, you can see we've got a new notify type. That's the same as our blueprint name and we can position it where we want to say here, for example. So now when our animation gets to this point, it will run the events inside our example notify here. So using this, we can run custom code inside this notify. Whenever that notify gets ROM, we can go to overwrite receive notify. This function will run whenever I notify inside our animation gets run. And it provides us with some useful information. So it provides us with the animation that actually called the Notify and also the mesh component. And the good thing about this is we can access, say, our animation blueprint or even the character that played the animation using this. So we can drag out and we can do gets owner, like this. Now, the owner of the character mesh will always be the Character Blueprint. So using this, we could drag out and do cost to character, for example. And now we can easily access our character blueprint. We can also access our Animation Blueprint just by dragging out from the mesh components, searching, for instance. And that will give us a reference to our Animation Blueprint. So just to give you an example of how this actually works, we'll delete this for now. I'm just going to add a print string here. And we'll put say hello. This is a test. We'll connect this up to the return value like that will compile. And now when we hit play and I press one, you'll see that hello and also runs out hello, This is a test and that's because inside I reload animation, we have our new example notify. And inside on example notify. The received notify of them runs and it runs our print string here. Now a common example of what these customer or Pfizer used for our footsteps. Now you may be thinking you can just use the play sound to notify that's built into the engine. But the problem with that is if you have different types of sounds for different ground types, you would need to detect what type of ground your character is walking on and then play the appropriate sound. Using a customer notified like this, you could write the code that maybe does a line trace underneath your character to detect the ground and then play the correct sound for that ground type. But this is just one example. You could use these for all sorts of things in your projects. We can also add customization settings to them as well. So if we add a new variable here and we'll call this say sounds, for example, we'll go down to the variable type and we'll search for a sound base and select object reference. Now, we'll compile and we'll just click on the little eye here. Or you can take on instances editable here, does the same thing, will compile. And now when we go to our reload montage and we select our notify, you can see up here in the settings we now have that sounds variable that we just created. We can set a sound and then inside are received notify function. We could use whatever sound is set inside the montage it and play it. So to do that, we'll just drag out from our return note here and we'll make some space. So we'll drag out and we'll search for play sound. We use play sound at location. We'll grab our sound value and plug that into the sounds variable. And for location will get the Mesh Component location. So we do get location. We won't get world location. Plug that into location. So then we'll compile it and you'll notice, I'm going to leave my sound here as none, and we'll use the montage to actually set that sounds. So we'll select the example notify here and pick a sound up here. So I'm going to pick the compile failed sound. And you'll actually notice while the animation plays in here, it actually plays a sound for it. So we'll stop this plane because it's getting annoying. And we'll test this out. So we'll hit play and the game and we'll press one to play that sound, will play the animation. You can see that our notify is running and it's playing that sound that we sat inside our montage here. You can do this with all kinds of settings. So if you wanted to, you could add a Boolean, for example here. And as long as you take instance editable, that'll be accessible from our montage. You can see that now we've got that new variable here, and I can access it if I select my notify. And we can also use multiple of this animation notifies. So I can move this over here, right-click. Add enough one example. Now if I select this and now we can pick another sound. So I could pick the compiler success, for example. Now, when we hit play and I press one to play the animation, you should hear both sounds. Lastly, I showed you how to create new animation notifies, but I didn't actually show you how to reuse them. So if we exit out of plane editor here, go back to our reload animation. You can see we've got a detached magazine. Now, maybe I want that event to run as well over here, we can right-click, do add, notify, go to Skeleton notifies. And over here you can see we've got all of our existing notifies and are detached. Magazine is just at the bottom here. So we can create that. Now the event inside our animation blueprint here will run twice for this animation, once here, and once here. And we can also use this detach magazine notified in that other animations, it isn't locked to this animation. So if we wanted to, we can head over to say, the Animations folder underneath the mannequins, then goto money. And we could add this to the land animation for example. So we can right-click and notify, skeletal notifies. And then we can go down to the detached magazine here. And now that event will also run when we play this jump land that animation as well. So that's it for this lesson. Hopefully you now understand a little bit more about animation notifies and how you can use them in your future projects. 49. Animation Blueprints (States): Hey everyone. In this lesson we're gonna be taking a closer look at the animation states inside our Animation Blueprint. Now in our first lesson, we did a quick overview of these animation states. But in this one, we're going to take a much closer look of how they work and how you can add new ones. So to start with, just open up your animation blueprint and head to the Anim graph. So we will just open that up. Then we're going to start by going to the locomotion state machine here. And if you remember from before, here is where we have our idle state and then I'll walk slash run state. And within these states is where we actually have our animations place. So in the idle state we have the idle animation and then the walk slash run. We have our walk slash run, London space. So to begin with, we're just going to add a new state to this locomotion state machine. So to do that, we'll just right-click and click on state. And that'll create us a new state similar to our idle and our walk slash run states. I'm just going to call mine aimed and we're going to create an aim state today. So why now we have a new state called aimed, but it will never actually be called at the moment because we don't have any rules that will transition to it. So to create a new rule, we need to drag from a different state towards our new stapes. So we're going to drag from idle to aimed. That's going to give us an arrow that points from idle to aimed. Because this rule determines if we're in the idle state, whether or not we should move into the aimed state. Now we need to actually add some code to our rule to determine when the idle state should switch to the aimed state. So what we can do is double-click on this little button here. And that'll take us inside that rule. And depending on whether or not this return value is true, is whether or not we will transition from idol to the end state. So we'll start just by creating a new variable. I'm going to call mine aimed, or sorry, we can't call it aimed because we have a state name name, so we'll call it is aimed like that. I'm going to change mine to a Boolean like that and we'll compile. Now you might get a warning here. All that's doing is telling us that our rule here has no code in it. And we're going to add some code to that now. So we're going to double-click this to open it up. And we're gonna take our is aimed and just connect that up to the result here. Then we can compile like that and we should get rid of that warning now as well. Then we'll head back to the locomotion. So now we have a rule that will allow us to transition from idol to aim to whether or not r is aimed variable is true. We can actually test this out. So if I take this on, you can see that our character T poses and it's doing that because we haven't actually set an animation in our state yet. So now we'll open up our aimed state and actually add an animation for it to play. So we'll drag out and search for play players, and we will use the Sequence player. Now, this allows us just to set an animation that our aim state complaint. And we can do that over here in the Details panel will set the sequence to something like the ADS. And we should find the rifle idle ADS. If you don't have this animation, we actually went through how to import them into your project in the montage lesson. So you can take a look at that and that will show you how to add those animations. And so now we've set the animation if we compile, because our aimed or is aimed is set to true, you can see that it's now playing a rifle aimed animation. But the issue now is if we head back to our locomotion state machine, if I was to change or is aimed to false, our animation doesn't actually switched back to idle. That's because we still need to create a rule that goes from our aimed to our idle. So we'll drag from aimed to idle, and this will be checked whenever we're inside the aimed state. So now we need to add some code to this rule that makes us change back from our in-state to our idle state. So we'll open this up. We're going to grab the is aimed variable. Now we want this to return true if this is false. So we'll drag out and search for naught, will find the NOT Boolean here and connect that up to the results. So if is aimed is true, this will convert it to a false and then return a false value. And now we can test this out. So I'll go back to the locomotion view here. We'll select is aimed and we'll take it off and out. Firstly, we need to compile. So now when we take it on and we take it off, you can see it's switching between our two states now. Now our transition metals have a few other settings. I'm not gonna go through all of them, but I'll go through some of the more important ones that are here. So to start with, we have the priority order. Now the higher the value here, the higher priority that role has. So for example, if you have multiple rules like we do here for the idle, we have this one and we have this one. Say both of these were to be true at the same time, then the engine will pick the one that has the highest priority here. This setting can be useful if you have a much more complicated locomotion system with a lot of rules going from say, one state. Next we have the transition duration. Now this is how long it takes for idle animation to smoothly transition into the aimed animation. Because if you notice, when we select our name to, it doesn't instantly snap. We get that smooth transition between them. So if we increase that duration time here, say the transition rule from aimed to idle, we change it to say one. Now, when we compile and we select as aimed, if we turn it off, you can see that you get a much smoother, slower transition from the aimed animation to the idle. We can do the same thing for our overall as well. So we can select that, set the duration to one. And now whenever we take on AMG will get that smooth transition after we compile. There we go. So all combined now. And you can see that now we get that much slower transition between the two animations. Next, selecting our rule here. In the blend settings we have a mode. Now this is how the animation will transition to the new animation. You'd have to try these out to see how they work. But these give you different effects of transition between the two states. Next, we have the notifications. Now these actually allow us to run events in our Event Graph whenever this rule does something. So we can have start transition and we can have an event in our event graph that will run whenever this transition here starts. So whenever the rule becomes true, this event that we name here will run. We've got end transition. So when the transition is finished and we're moving into the new state, this will run. And then if it's interrupted, this will run. So if, for example, we will 1 second into transitioning from idle to aimed, and we canceled it. The rule became false and we went back to idle than are interrupted, event would run. So to give you a quick example, we could just write test here. For example, compile, go to the Event Graph and if I right-click and search for test, or sorry, event test will find that new anime notify underscore test and this event will run whenever our rule here begins its transition from idol to MD. And if you can't find your event and the event graph, don't forget that you do have to compile your blueprint after you write a name here. Now we have similar settings for our state. So if I actually select my aim state here, you can see that we've got those same settings, so we've got a custom event that we can run it in our event graph for when our aim stay is entered and also when that aim state is left. So again, like before, if I add a new event, I'll call this aimed started. We'll compile, go to the Event Graph and I'll search for event aimed. And you can see we've got our event aimed started here as well. So now we've added a new state, so our locomotion, and we've added the rules to transition to and from that state, but we haven't actually set up any code to control this variable. We've just been manually changing it in here. So I'll show you a couple of ways that we can control variables in our animation blueprint from the Character Blueprint. So to start with, we can go to the Event Graph. It will find the blueprint, update animation, and this will run every frame and update the variables that we connect to it. So we can add a new branch here. Then we'll get our character because we want to get some information from our character will drag out and we can do cost to the person, connect up to the sequence it. Now we actually need to add a naming system to our character. So we'll compile it and go to our character blueprint, which is in the third person blueprints than third-person character. Now, don't worry too much if you don't have this code. This is from our montages lesson. So we'll just scroll up here. I'm going to right-click and search for left mouse. And we're going to use left mouse button. And we'll create a new variable called is aimed. Like that. We want to get that drag out from it and do f. And if our aimed is currently true, we want to set it to false. And if it's currently false and we want to set it to true. So I'll just copy and paste that and connect up to folks and take it on here like that. And we'll compile, head back to our Animation Blueprint. And now we can just get r is aimed from our character blueprint. Use that to set R is aimed in our blueprint here. Then we'll compile, and now we can test this out so it will hit Play. If I left mouse button, you can see that we transition into that animation and we've still got that 1 second transition time. So it's going a bit slow. So we'll head back to our locomotion. It's like the rule. Change the duration, say 0 to do the same for the other rule. So 0.2 here as well. Then we'll compile it, and now we can test it again. And I'll hit left mouse button. You can see that we're now transitioning to that animation. Now, this does work, but maybe you have a lot of code going on in your animation blueprint. And you don't need this code to actually be run every single frame. So what we could do is if we delete this, we can actually set the code from our ThirdPersonCharacter. Instead. We'll go to the ThirdPersonCharacter. We'll get our Mesh Component, drag out from that and do get an M instance. If you remember, this gives us a reference to our animation blueprint, but we still need to cost to our ABP underscore money because that's our animation blueprint. And we're going to have both of these nodes run this code. So it doesn't matter if we aim or unnamed. Then we want to drag out and we want to do set ain't. Now allows us to set our aimed variable. That's the Animation Blueprint. And we just want to get r is aimed from this blueprint and use that to set it. So now we can test this out if I can pull, hit play, and when I left mouse clicking and see that it's still working using that new code that we've just written. Now you may notice if we left mouse button and start moving around, we don't get any movement animations anymore. Now that's because we didn't actually set up any rules to transition from our aimed. If we head back to locomotion from our aimed to our walk slash run. So it's just gonna be stuck in our aimed until we get rid of left mouse click and then it will switch to idle. And if we are moving, it will then switch to walk. So we could add some new rules here that transition from aimed to walk slash rump. So we'll drag out from aimed and go to walk slash run like that. And we're going to use the same code that we use from our idol here where it says should move. So we'll open up that rule. We will get the should move variable. This will be true. If our character is moving, then we'll head back to the locomotion and will compile. And now when we hit Play, if I left mouse button, you can see we aim and if I start moving, we transitioned back into our walk slash run animations. And you see it if I exit out of the walk slash running, we go back to our aims and we can uname, like we did before. Now, lastly, I just wanted to cover stay aliases. So if we exit out of plane editor here and head back to our Animation Blueprint, stay aliases are really handy to keep your animation states little bit tinier. So we'll set up a quick example of one. We'll right-click and use a state alias and we'll just call this aimed checks. For example, we have our aim check selected here. We're going to connect to our aimed. And we're going to use this new rule to determine whether or not we should enter the aimed state. So we'll get aimed and connect that up like that. Then we're going to delete these rules here that connects to our idle, to our aims. We're also going to delete the rule that connects it to the walk sash run. So now these two blocks aren't connected. But if we select our aim checks here, we can take on which states we want it to run for. So we could take on idle and we could take home walk slash run. What this means is if we're in our idle state or our walk slash run this alias, we'll run this check. So we don't actually need to have direct connections from either one of these states. Two are aimed because we're now using this alias with these two states tectonics. So that when we're in these states, this will run any of the rules that are connected to it. Now we need to set up a way to go from our aimed animations to our idle or our walk. So we'll right-click Add a new state alias. We'll call this movement checks. Using this, we're going to create a rule to our idle. And this will be, is aimed, needs to be false. So we'll drag out from his aims and we'll do not. And we'll scroll up and do not be limb and connect up here. And then for our movement will drag out and we'll connect up to our walk slash run. And we'll do the same thing we want. Is aimed, is actually we'll use should move. Because when we start moving, we want to just use our movement animations to want should move to true. Now, one thing we do need to add to our rule, entering our aimed as we also need to add that we don't want it to run if we're moving. So I'm going to open up our here. We're just going to add an end. So we'll do and we'll connect the output to our results. So we want and should move, should be true or should not be true. We want this to be a NOT, NOT Boolean like that. So our rule here will only be true if it is aimed, is true and if should move is false. So just to give you a very quick summary of what this does when we're in our idle or our walk slash run states are aimed to check run. And it will do that because we have those two states ticked on here. And it will run all of the rules connected to it. So it's going to run this check. It will check is aimed to true and is should move false. And if it is, then we'll run our aimed animations. And then while we are aimed animations running, this movement checks will run because we've got, oh, I forgot to actually take that on. We'll select that and tick are named. So because we've ticked on our aimed whenever we're in that state, movement checks will run and that'll check both of these roles here to see FEV1 are true. So now we will test this out. We'll compile, hit Play, and now we can aim. And if I aim and start moving, you can see that we start running those movement animations instead. If we stop, we go into the aimed animations again. That's just a brief overview of the aliases. It doesn't really make a lot of sense when we've got a small locomotion state machine like this. But if you have something that's becoming more complicated, maybe you have a lot of rules going all over the place. You can use these to tidy up your animation blueprints. So that's it for this lesson. Hopefully you now understand a little bit more about animation states and rules. 50. Animation Blueprints (Blend Spaces): Hey everyone. In this lesson we're going to take a closer look at animation blend spaces. Now, if you remember from our Animation Blueprint overview lesson, blend spaces that I was to smoothly transition from one animation to another. And we can take a look at an example of this by going into our money Animation Blueprint. Then we'll go to the Anim graph than the locomotion, then walk slash run. And then here we've got a blend space per node. Now, this node takes in a value like our ground speed here and uses that to determine which animation it should play from our blend space. If we select this node and go over to the Details panel, we can find which blend space it's set to use over here in the blend space option. If you hover over, save the name of the blend space. So ours is the MM walk run. We can also click this button here to take us to that blend space. So we'll do that and then open it up. Now as you can see, we've got this graph view down here, and this is where we define our animations for the different speeds. So here you can see that the speed is 0, and up here the speed is 500 For 0. If we hover over this dot, you can see the current animation is the walk-in place animation. Then further along at the 230 value, we've got a different animation and that's our walk forward animation. And then lastly at the end, speed 500, we play or run animation. If I hold Control and move my mouse along the timeline here you can see as the value increases, our animation changes. So as we get closer to our run animation here, you can see that it gets closer to that animation. So this is what allows us to smoothly transition between say, a walk animation and I run animation and it uses that speed value, which our animation blueprint here is supplying, and that's our ground speed value. Now, I'll walk run. Blend space is a 1D blend space, which means that only has one variable that controls which animation is playing. That's our speed value here. But we can also have blend spaces that use two variables. We can have a direction and the speed that controls which animation is going to be played. It for this lesson, we're going to set up a 2D blend space. So to do that, we're going to head to the Content Browser. I'm just going to go to the Animations folder. Inside the mannequins folder, we're going to right-click, go to animation. And then you want to find the blend space option. You can see there's the 1D option here, or the blend space here, which is the 2D. So we're going to select that one. Then we're going to pick a skeleton. I'm going to use the skeleton that comes with the third person template. So that's this top one here you can see that the path is four characters, mannequins and then meshes. So we'll select that and that will nameless to aimed walk blend space. And we'll open that up. Now in here you can see we've got a similar looking graph you to our 1D. But instead of just having the horizontal value, we also have a vertical value that allows us to set animations anywhere on this graph. And then we'll be able to control them both with a direction and a speed variable. So to start with, we need to rename and set up these axis. So we'll start with the horizontal axis here. You can click the drop-down if it's not open for you, we're going to name ours to direction, because this axis will control the direction that the animations we want to play use. Then we want the minimum axis value to be one or minus one AT and the maximum value to be 180. And that means we can set an animation for every possible direction that our character goes. Then we need to set the vertical axis so you can just open that down here. And we'll set this one to speed. Now, the maximum value I'm going to set to say 600, and we'll leave the minimum value to 0. So any animations we place down here at the bottom of the graph will be used when our character is idle or not moving. And then as we move up, the animations will be used for faster movement speeds up here. Now something I like to do is to take on the snap to grid option in the horizontal axis and then the vertical axis. And what this will do is when we drag in our animations, they will actually snap to these grid points. Now, this is personal preference, but I recommend having these turned on. It just makes setting your animations a lot easier. Now we're ready to actually set some animations in our blend space. We're going to start with the animation is used when we're at 0 speed. So for that, I'm going to search for idle in our asset browser here. And I'm gonna be using the rifle idle ADS. Now if you don't have these animations, you can watch the beginning of the montage lesson and I'll show you how to add these animations to your project. But if you do, we can just drag this in and we want this to be at the center bottom, so I'll just drop that here. We're also going to add it to the bottom left and to the bottom-right as well like that. Now the reason we do this is because this is when our speed is 0, so our character is not moving, so our direction value doesn't actually matter. All we need to do is have our idle animation play. Next, we need a walk forward animation, and this will be the animation that's played when our direction is 0. So it will be at the top here. So for that, I'm going to search for FWD and the asset browser, and we're going to use the rifle walk forward animation. So drag that in and drop that in at the top here. Now if we hold control, we can drag about and we can actually see our walk animation now working as we drag our value up to the walk forward animation. Next we need our backwards animation. So for that, we're going to search will be WD. And we're going to use the rifle walk backward. And we're going to plug that into the far left point here. And also to the far right point here. Now the reason we do that is because wherever our characters at 180 direction or minus one AT both of those are going to be going backwards. So either one we want to be playing that backwards animation. Next we want our left animation. So in our asset browser, we're going to search for left and we want the rifle walk left. So I'm going to drag that into this point hip. And then we want the right animation. So we'll search for right. And we want the rifle walk, right? And that's gonna go up here like that. Now when we hold control, we can control which animation is going to play depending on our direction and also our speed as well. Now we're going to use this new blend space inside our animation blueprint. So to do that, we're going to head over to our money blueprint. Now we're going to add a new state that's gonna be used when, where aimed and while we're moving. So to do that, we're going to right-click and add a new state. I'm going to call this aimed movement like that. Now we're going to need a rule that goes from our aimed to our aimed movement. And inside this row, we're going to check is aimed to true. And we're also going to check, are we moving? So we'll do an AND Boolean and we wanna get should move. So if both of these are true, then we return the result. And that will allow us to move from aimed into our aimed movement. Now we want to transition back to aimed from our aimed movement. We stopped moving. So we'll open up that rule will get is aimed. And we want to check is should move false. So it will get should move. We want to use a NOT Boolean nodes. So NOT Boolean. And then back in the locomotion, we need to add a row going from our aim to check two are aimed movement because if we're already moving and we start aiming, we want to transition to the aimed movement state. So we'll drag from aimed check to aimed movement. And we'll open up our Rohit. And again, we're going to get is aimed. And we also want to check is should move true as well. So we'll get should move like that. Then we'll head back to locomotion. So, so far we've got a set up so that when aimed checks is running, it will check all we aimed. And if we are, we'll go into our aim state. And if we're aimed and moving instead, we'll go to our aimed movement. Now if we're in aimed and we start moving, it will move from aimed to aim to movement. And if we're in aimed movement and stop moving, we'll transition into the aimed state. Now there are a couple of other changes we have to make. We need to select our movement checks, stay alias. We need to take on the aimed movement hip and we're doing that. So we check if were aimed and if we're not, then we want to transition back to our normal idle or normal run animations from our aim states. Now, we need to change one of our rules connected up to our movement check here, and that's this one here. So if we open that up currently, this is just checking if we're moving. We want to change this because now we have a movement state. We don't want to transition to walk slash run if we're just moving. So we need to add a check to make sure that is aimed is false. So we want a Boolean know for this. We'll drag out again and will return this value here. So now if we head back to locomotion, if we're in Ames movement and we stop aiming, it will transition back to our walk slash run because we have this check here that checks is aimed false and it should move true. And if it is, then it will transition us from aimed movement or aimed to walk slash run. Next, we need to actually set up our blend space and are aimed movement. So we'll open that up. We'll drag out from the result and I'm going to search for blend space player. And we'll use the blend space. Play a note. Then we'll select it and we'll scroll down to the blend space option at the bottom here. We need to set this to our new blend space. So that's the aimed walk blend space here. You see it's actually updated our inputs for our direction and our speed variables. So for speed will just drag out and do get ground speed like that. Now, for direction, we need a new variable. To do that, we'll head over to the Event Graph. And in here we're going to create a new variable. So we'll do that now and we'll call this direction. And we want this to be a float. So we'll set that to a float and compile. Now we need this to update each frame, so we're going to add it to the code down here. So we'll add a new pen to the sequence, will create a set node. And we'll connect this up to our sequence. I'm just going to double-click on the line to create a reroute. Now, just to keep things tidy. So to get our direction, we need our speeds. So we're going to right-click and search for velocity. And if we scroll down, we should find the velocity option. Then we need our current rotation. So let's do that. We're going to right-click and do gap character and use the gap character variable. Drag out from that and do get rotation. And we'll use the gets active rotation. Then we're going to right-click and search for calculate direction. And this is a function that's actually built into all Animation Blueprint, which is really handy. It just allows us to plug in our velocity. Rotation and that gives us our direction that we can just plug straight in to our set note here. Now we can head back to our Anim graph, then to the locomotion. And then two are aimed movement. And we can grab that direction variable, plug that into our node here. So now we can compile and we can try this out. So we'll hit Play. If I left mouse, you can see that we're aiming correctly and if I start moving, we're actually playing on new aimed walk animations. If I left-click while moving, we transition back to our normal running animations. Now if yours isn't working, you can go back to the locomotion state machine and just make sure that all of the rules that you've set up our correct. So they look like mine do right now. The one down here. And make sure that in movement checks you do have aimed movement ticked on. Now currently our character isn't actually using our left, right or backwards animations. And that's because of a setting we have turned on in the Character Blueprint. So we're gonna go to the third person folder, blueprints, Then ThirdPersonCharacter, and inherit. We're going to select the Character Movement Component. Then we're going to scroll down to the rotation settings and we're going to untick orientate rotation to movement. And this stops our character facing the direction that we're moving in. Now we can test our animations, will compile and hit Play. And now when I moved to the right, you can see we plow right animations, left or left animations, and then backwards or backwards animations play. Now you may notice if you left-click and we start moving to the side, our character doesn't actually move to the side anymore. He's just moving forward. Now the reason that's happening is in our animation blueprint. The walk slash run state is only using a 1D blend space, so it doesn't have a direction input. All it has is a speed input. And that's why the third-person character has on by default, the Oriente rotation to movement. Now, there are a few more settings in the animation blend space that I wanted to show you. So we've got the grid divisions now, this controls how many spaces we have on our grid. So if I increase this to say, eight to eight here as well on our vertical axis, you see that we now have more blocks on our grid. This is helpful for if you're using the snap to grid turned on. And this just gives you more points on the grid to snap to say if you wanted an animation in a specific place, you can increase these values to get a snap point there. Then we've got the smoothing time. Now this is how long it takes for an animation to transition to another animation. If we were to set this really high, say five seconds, for example. Now when we hit play and I moved to the right, you'll see that it takes five seconds for me to actually transition into our move right animation. So usually you'd want to use smaller values for this. Say, for example, 0.250.25 down here as well, just to give a little bit of transition time between moving between animations. But by default these are set to 0, so the animation is just transition instantly to each other. So we can just set those to 0 for now. There's also some settings inside our Animation Blueprint. So if we had that, then we'll go to locomotion, aimed movement. And if we select this node and scroll to the bottom, you can see there's a few additional settings here. We've got the play rape. So this is how fast the animations in our blend space will play. One is normal speed, two would be twice normal speed. Next is loop. Usually you want this left on for blend spaces, but if you ever want to turn this off, you can turn that off here. We also have the start position. So if you wanted the animations to start at different time other than 0, you can change that here. Then lastly, we've got our blend space setting. This is how we change which button space we're actually using on this node. So that's it for this lesson, but we will be using blend spaces in our future lessons. 51. Animation Blueprints (Aim Offsets): Hey everyone. In this lesson we're going to take a look into aim offsets. Now, aim of sets allow us to actually have our character look in a specific direction. This can be helpful for if you have a weapon and you actually want the character to look in the direction that your camera is pointing. Now, aim of sets actually work very similar to blend spaces. We have a graph that we can place animations in, and then we use two variables control which animations we want to play. Now let's do this. We're going to need some animation, so I'm going to X out of playing NetTutor here, I'm gonna be using some animations that are included with the lesson Animations folder. If you don't have this in your projects, I show how to add these in the beginning of the montage lesson. So if you go take a look at that, that will explain how you can get these animations into your project. Now if we scroll down to the bottom, we'll find the EO animations. Now this stands for AIM offset, and you can see that we have quite a few of them. And these are animations for each direction that the character can be facing. If we open up this down facing animation here, for example, you can see that it's a single frame animation, meaning it doesn't actually animate the character, is just a single frame of our character looking down. Then if we close this and go to another one, say our animation here. This is an animation that's just single frame, but our character is looking left. Now, using our aim offset, we're going to recombine all of these animations and then control which one we want to play depending on the two variable inputs. And those inputs are gonna be the rotation from our camera. And that will allow us to control which direction our characters facing using our camera. To start with, we will close this and we're going to create a new AME offset. I'm gonna do this inside the mannequins, then animations. So we'll click the Add button here, then head over to animation and you want to find a more offset now, similar to the blend spaces, that is a 1D option which allows you to control the aim of sets with just one variable, but we're gonna be using just the normal aim offset, so it will create one of those. And now we need to select our skeleton. I'm going to select the skeleton that comes with the third person template. So that's this one here in CSS path mannequins meshes. So we know that's the right one. That's going to create a new A-Master. So I'm just going to call this aimed A0. So we know this is the aimed at animation offset. And then we'll open that up. I'm just going to drag mine up to the top bar here. So now we're inside our aim offset. You can see it looks very similar to a blend space. We have our graph down here. We have the same horizontal and vertical axis settings here, and we get our preview at the top here. So to get started, we need to set our graph up by naming our variables down here. So our top one for horizontal, we want York. We're going to set the minimum five, U2 minus 90, and the maximum value to positive 90. So that'll give our character the ability to play an animation when we're looking all the way right and all the way left. Then we do the same for pitch. So we're going to name our vertical axis pitch. And the minimum value will be minus 90, and the maximum value will be positive 90. And this means that we'll be able to set an animation for all the way up and all the way looking down. Next slide, our blend space is, I'd like to take on the snap to grid option here and also down here, just so when we drag our animations and we know that they are snapping to exact values. Now before we start adding animations to our aim offset, I just wanted to explain a little bit about what it actually does. Now, aim of sets use additive animations, which means the animations that we play using our aim offset don't replace the current animation is being played on the character. They actually add to those animations. This means that we can have our aim offset playing with our character, looking in a direction while still also playing, say, an idle animation for the character breathing. But for us to do this, we actually need to change the animation. So we're gonna be using an offset into additive animations. Now, we have to do this anyway because we won't actually be able to place those animations in here until they're set up as additive. And I can show you that if we scroll down to the bottom, we should find our A0 animations down here. If I try and drag one in, you'll see it won't actually let me, and it says invalid additive animation type. That's because currently all of our A0 animations here are not additive yet. We need to go into them and change them to use additive settings. So there's a couple of ways we can do this. I'm going to show you how to change these settings in one animation. And then we're actually going to use the matrix editor to change all of them to the same settings. It will start with the top one here. This is the A0, C, C. So this is our center animation. I'm just going to double-click that to open it up. Now, in our asset details, we're going to scroll down until we find the additive settings here. And currently you can see it's set to no additive, which means this is just a normal animation, not set up as an additive animation yet. Now, for AIM offsets, we actually need to change this to the mesh space, which means that this animation will calculate the changes. So that should be made to the character and the mesh space instead of the local space for AIM offsets, you always want to use MSS space because that's the only one it supports. Then we're going to change the base pose type to the selected animation scaled here like that. Now this allows us to set an animation that we consider to be the default starting point for this additive animation. So for this animation, we're in the center, and that's the actual one we want to use as its reference. So we're actually going to set this to the animation that we're inside right now. We'll search for CC and we'll use the MM rifle idle hip, FAI, AOC. See, this is just our center single frame animation. Now, that's the animation we're actually going to use for all of our aim off set animations here, because that's the center point and that's where we want our additive animations to add onto. So now we've set this animation up as additive and we will be able to add this to our aim offset now, but we still have to do this for all of these animations down here. Now we could go through each one at a time and set these settings up the same, but there's a quicker way to do this. So what we'll do is save and go over to the lesson animation folder. We'll scroll down to near the bottom, and we're just going to select all of our aim offset animations apart from our center one because we already just set that up so we'll hold control and select all of these here and keep going down until we've got all of them. Then we'll right-click and we want to go to asset actions, then to bulk edit via property matrix. And that will open up this window here. Now if you haven't used this tool before, it basically allows you to select multiple assets in the Content Browser and change all of their settings at the same time. So to do this, I'm just going to click on the assets and do Control a, and that'll select all of our assets here. Then in the property editor, you can see that we've got the same settings we had when we were inside the animation. We're just going to scroll down to the bottom here. We want to find the additive settings. So we're going to change this from no additive to the mesh space like we did before. Then we'll change this to selected animation scaled. Then we want to select the animation and weekend. We want to set this to the CC animation for our aim offset, so we'll select that. And now we can close this and all of our animations will now be using those settings. So if we pick one at random like our left down here, you can see if I scroll down, we find the additive settings. You can see that there are now set up for us. So now all of our aim offset animations are set up as additive. We can go back to our aim offset. So I'm just going to close these two animations for now. And we'll go to the mannequins than the Animations folder and open up our aimed. I'm just going to drag this up to the top again. So the last thing that we need to do before we start adding animations to our aim offset is set a preview animation. And this just gives us an animation that will preview on top of our aim offset so we can see what it looks like. So it will scroll down to the bottom here. Now for the preview base pose, we don't want to use an additive animation, otherwise, we just won't see a preview. So we're going to search for idle. And we'll find the, I'm going to use the rifle idle hip FAI here because our aim offsets are actually for the hip fast, so we'll select that. Then. I'm just going to save and then close and reopen our aim offset like that. Now we're ready to start adding animations to our graph down here. In the search bar, I'm going to search for the center animation because that's the animation that we want to use. When are your pitch is 0, because that's gonna be the center point. I'm going to search for CC and we're going to drag it into the center like that. Now you might get this issue where the preview disappears. There seems to be a bug if you scroll down and we just reset the value for our preview and then we select, say a different animation. We'll just search for idle again. I'll select MFA idle, and then I'll search for idle again. We'll select our rifle, idle hip, FAI, like we did before and you can see now it's working. I don't know why that happens. I think it is an engine bugs, so hopefully it gets fixed soon. Next we need to add any other animations. So over here in the search bar, I'm going to search for CU, and that stands for Center up. So we're going to add that animation up here because we want that for our characters centered in the your butt, it's 90 in the pitch. So I'll add that here. You can see our previews broken again, that's fine. We'll fix it once we've finished adding or animations. And so we'll do another search and we're going to search for c, d. And that stands for Center down. So we'll add that to the center at the bottom here. And again, this is for when R is 0 and our pitches minus 90. Next we'll do the left hand side. So I'll search for L, C, that stands for left center. So we'll add that over here. This will be for our pitch, or sorry, are you're being minus 90 and our pitch being 0. Then we want left up, so LU, and we'll add this the top up here, then Aldi and add that to the bottom. Then we'll do the right-hand side. So we'll do LC, RC, That's right center than we want. Right up. And that's that one down hit add up to the top right hand corner. And then we want our D, which is right down, and we'll add that to the bottom right hand corner like that. And now we can save this. Next, we can fix our preview, so we'll do what we did before, which reset the value. Then we'll search for idle. I'll set this to our idle animation, and then we'll search for idle again. And we'll use the hip fire ideal like that. Now this bug won't affect how our aim offset works in game. It's just a preview issue, so don't worry too much about that. But now we can actually test this out. So we hold control and move our mouse around and you can see our characters now using those aim offsets that we've just set up. You can also see that our idle animation is still playing, even though we're adding on top of that animation our aim offset. And this is how additive animations work. They add the additional information to the currently playing animation. Now we're ready to actually set this up inside Art Animation Blueprint. So what we'll do is save this and exit out of that. So it will open up with the money Animation Blueprint and we wanna go to the Event Graph. So if you're not there, you can just double-click that and will enter the event graph. And we're going to need two new variables. So we're going to need a variable for our pitch and yaw. So we'll add a new variable, I'm going to call this pitch. And we want this to be a float. So we're going to change that to float type. And we'll do the same for your super cool issue. And it's already set to a float for us. So then we can just compile. Next, we need some code to actually set these variables. So it will go down here and we're going to start with the character. So get character. And we want them to get character variable. And we need to get the control rotation. So do get controlled rotation. And this is the rotation of our camera. And then we want our characters rotation, so do get actor rotation like that. Then from our control rotation drag out and we're going to search for Delta. We want the Delta rotate a note, and we want to plug b into our axis rotation like that. Now, the delta node basically just gets the difference between our control rotation and our axis rotation. And this is the direction we want our character to actually face. Now from the return value, we're going to search for our intercept. And we want our interp2. And we want this to be the target because that's the target direction we want our character looking at. And then for current, we're going to use our pitch on your values. Now, we can right-click and do split struck pen like that. We can plug the values indirectly. Or if you recombine these, we can drag out and do make and use a make rotator node like that. We can plug those into here as well. So I'm gonna get the your, plug that into the your input and then pitch, plug that into the pitch and put like that. Then for delta time, we want to use the world's deltas time. So we're just going to drag out and search for world. And we want get world Delta settings. And then for internet speed, this is how quickly the value, returned value will transition from current to the target. So the higher this is, the faster a or B, I'm going to set mine to 20. We can come back and adjust that if we want to. Next, we need to clamp the pitch and yaw angles. So to do that, we're going to drag out and do break. Rotator from our pitch will drag out and search for clamp. We want clamp angle. Now the reason we're doing this is if you remember in our aim offset, we have a minimum value of minus 90 and a positive value of 90. We don't want our pitch or you're going above or below those values. So for them, we're going to set minus 90 for the max we want 90. And then we'll copy and paste this and plug the angle degrees into the Z or the output here like that. Now we're going to use these to set our variables. So for the top one, for pitch, we want to set pitch. And when we use our set pitch node, and then for the bottom one, we want set your will use the set your node like that. Connect these together. And then we're going to connect these up to our sequences. So add a new pen, drag out from that and connect that up to our pitch. Just going to double-click it to add a root node. And we'll just drag that along here just to keep things tidy like that. So now we're actually ready to add our aim offset to our Anim graph. So we'll head over there now. We only want our aim offset to affect the top half of our body, not the bottom half because of effects the bottom half, it'll mess up our movement animations. Now if you remember from our blend nodes lesson, we set up a blend per bone note here that will separate our lower and upper body and allows us to have animations only play on the top half. And that's what we're doing here with our montage slot. So we're going to add our aim, the offset to this code here because that's gonna be the code that's played for the top half. So we're going to drag this out just to make a bit more space. Now I am going to have my aim offset played before my Montage slot. The reason we do this is if we play a montage, I don't want it to, or I don't want our aim offset to affect the montage. So if we do it before, then when we do play a montage, it will overwrite our aim offset from our mainstay cashier. We're going to drag out and search for AIM offset. And we want the aim offset plane. So we'll just create that like that. Now we need to set which aim off set we actually want to use. And this is the same as setting blend spaces. So over here on the Details panel with the notes selected, we'll scroll down. You can see it's actually says blend space, but it's meant saying offset. But we can click this and you can see are aimed A0 is there. So we'll select that. Just as a side note, it might say a offset for you if Epic fix this. So for me it says blend space for you. It might say a offset, but you can just set your aim offset here anyway. Then you can see our notice updated. We've got our your own pitch inputs, so we'll grab those variables and plug those into our aim offset node. So we'll grab your pitch and plug that into pitch like that. And now we can compile and test this out. So we'll head over to our level press Play. You can see that now when I am and I look about our character actually looks in the direction my camera is facing. If we start moving around, you can see that our blend space is still working with our character's movement animations, while also our aim offsets working. And if you look closely or idle animation is still playing, even though we're aiming in a different direction with our aim of SAP. But now if I exit out of my aiming view just by left clicking, you can see that my normal animation for not holding a weapon is kind of weird. And that's because we're playing that aimed offset. Even when we're not aiming, we can change this in our animation blueprint pretty easily, so we'll head over there. Now, in here you can see that our aim offset has an Alpha value. Now, one means that the aim offset is turned on and 0 means it's off. So if it's 0.5, it would take half the influence of our aim offset. Now we can actually change this to a Boolean to just turn it on or off. So we'll select our note it, go over to the Alpha value in C Alpha value, sorry, alpha input type is currently set to float value. But if I change this to Boolean value and see that now we've got this total enabled tick box. And now we can just grab bar is eight. Plug that into the enabled here. And now when we compile and we hit Play, you can see now I'm not aimed. You'll see are, idle animation is behaving correctly. But when I start aiming, you can see that our aim offset then begins working again. Now there is another way that we can turn on and off our aim offset. So if we exit out of here and go back to our Animation Blueprint, instead of just turning on or off this node specifically, we could actually have a whole section of code run only when is aimed as true. So to do that, we can search for Blend tool, and we can use blend poses Bible. And we use this in our blend nodes lesson. So if you remember, we can take this, plug this into our default slot here, and then we'll take disconnect heart is aimed. Plug this into the active value. So if it's aimed as true than the true code here will run. And if it's false, then the folks code will run. So when we ain't, we want our aimed codes rump. So we'll connect this up to true. I'm going to click on Enable tests. So it's always enabled. If we're not aimed, we can just copy paste our main states cash. Plug that in here. This will work exactly the same as it did before. So we can compile hit Play. You'll see when I aim our characters doing our aim or separate filename, you can see our animation is working correctly. So as you can see, both ways work. Which one you use, It's completely up to you. This way can be a little bit easier if you had, say, other nodes that you want it to run when it is aimed as true, because you could just connect those up to here and have them run. When is this true? So that's it for this lesson. Hopefully you now understand how you can set up a name offset and how you can use them in your projects. 52. Animation Blueprints (Curves & Metadata): Hey everyone. In this lesson we're going to take a look at animation curves and metadata. Now essentially, curves and metadata allow us to add additional information to our animations that we can then read inside our animation blueprint when they play. So to get started, I'll show you how we actually create a new curve. So we'll go to an animation. I'm going to choose the run forward animation. So for us that's gonna be in the Quinn folder then under the r14. And the reason it's in the Quinn folder and not the money is if you remember, our character blueprint is actually using the Quinn Animation Blueprint. And in that we have the Run 4D animation set. We'll open that up. And in here you can see we've got a curves timeline. Now to add a new curve, you can just click the drop-down here and we can go to AD curve. Now as you can see, the third person template comes with a bunch of curves built-in. These don't actually do anything by default until we use them and actually set them up. But for now we're just going to create our own curves. So we're gonna go up to Create curve, and we're going to name it. I'm going to call mine example curve like that. And you see that that's now added our example curve to our animation. Now this curve allows our animation to output a value depending on what time in the animation we're at. So currently you can see it's just set to 0. So when we play this animation, all our curve is gonna do is output a 0 value. But we can actually edit this curve to output a different value depending on what point of the animation that's currently playing. To do that, we'll head over to the curve drop-down for the example curve, then we want to select Edit curve. And if you remember from our timelines lesson, this actually works a lot similar to that. So currently, this value is just gonna be 0 the entire time the animations playing, but we can add in new points. So if I middle mouse click that adds in a new point for us. And then up here at the top, we've got the time that that point is currently at and its value. So if I set this to 0 or 0 is currently at 0 time and has 0 value. Now if I add another point, say at one seconds. So about here, we'll middle mouse-click. Now with that selected, you can see the time is one and we can set the value to something else like ten, for example, you can see my point is gone off the graph, but if we click this little box here, it will actually bring all of our points back into view. Now when this animation plays at 0 times the value will be 0. But as time moves on, the value will increase along this line until we get to 1 second and it will be ten. Then as the time increases again, the value will stay ten because we haven't got any additional points. So now we can read this value inside our animation blueprint by going to the third-person map here. Then we want to go to our Animation Blueprint. So animations then go to the money Animation Blueprint. And in the event graph, we're going to add a new node. We're going to right-click and search for curve. We're going to use get curved valley. You can see we can put a curve name. So this needs to be the exact name we're using for our curves. So this is example curve spelled exactly the same with the capital letters as well. Now, if an animation plays that uses that curve that we've set up, this will output is current value. So we'll add a new pen and just add in a print string for example. And we'll plug the return value into our print string. And we'll compile. And we can test this out. So we'll hit play. And you can see currently no animations that use that curve are running. So our value is just 0. But if I start running forward, you can see our value increases to ten. Now it's resetting back to 0 every time the animation loops. Because if you remember at the start of our animation, it's 0, then it goes to ten. And then once it reaches the end of our animation is going to loop. It will start again back at 0 and r value will be 0. Now again, similar to our timeline, we can highlight these points here. We can change how they transition from each other. So up here we can choose which types of fall off will be for the point. For example, we can select the automatic and you see now we get more of a curved effect to our value increase. And we can use these little handles to actually adjust how our line changes. We can also move our points just by selecting them and dragging them around. Now, I've got both selected, so it's moving both of them. But if I highlight just the one here, you can see I can move that point around to change what our value is gonna be at that specific point in time. If you ever want to see that value, you can mouse over or you can find that here. And then the time value is here. Now currently we are in the curve editor, as you can see here. But if you want to get back to the normal view, you can just click this tab and that brings us back to the tab that we normally see. Now if you ever want to get back to the Curve Editor, say you've closed it by accident, you can click curve and just edit curve. That will bring us back here. If you want to remove a curve, you can just click that and click Remove curve and that will actually get rid of our curve for us. Now you can have multiple curves and an animation. You can just hit the curve and another curve, you can either create or reuse one of the curves that are in here. Now we can add this same curve to other animation. So if we head out and we'll go to the money and open up, say the jump animation. We could have that same curve to here as well. We can go to AD curve. And instead of creating a new curve, we can just search for the name. So we'll search for example. And you can see our example curve is already there because we've created it already exists. So we can reuse it, will create that. And you can see it starts off with the default values of 0. Now, maybe in this animation we want a dark curve to have totally different values. So for example, we could middle mouse-click, set this to 0. We could set the starting value to something like minus 100. And we'll click the little box just to bring it back into our view. Then we can middle mouse click at, say, 2.5th and have this value go to 500. And we'll collect the box again just to bring out both into our view. And now when this animation plays or output totally different values from our curve. So in test this out, hit play and see if I run forward that's still playing our curve from that animation. But if I jump, you'll see it goes up two completely different values. Next we have metadata, which is basically a curve that's just got a one value. So it show you what I mean we can add to the jump here and we'll go back to the tab up here. Now we can remove this example curve for now. So we'll just do remove curve, go up to curves and you can see we've got metadata. Now in here you can see, again, there's a lot of default ones that come with the third person template. But if we search, for example, curve again, you'll see that that's there as well. Even though it is a curve, it's also just metadata as well. So we can search for curve and we can add our example curve like that. Now as you can see, its default value is one. And if we go to the curve dropdown, there's no option to edit this. Now that's because metadata kind of acts like adding a Boolean to your animation. If it's added to the animation than the Boolean is the equivalent of being true. And if it's not in the animation, then it's false. In our animation blueprint, this return value will either be one or 0, depending on if the animation has this metadata with this name. Now when we hit Play, you'll see when I jump increases to one and then decreases back down to 0. Now animation curves are used for all sorts of things like controlling facial animations or properties inside of materials. We're not going to be covering that in this lesson purely because it's a little bit more advanced. But what we can also do with animation curves is read them inside our Animation Blueprint, like we've been doing with our curves on metadata. An example of what you could do with curves in the future is maybe you have a project that has shooting in, but certain animations you don't want the player to be able to shoot. Well, you could create a block shooting curve. That's the animations that you want to block shooting in. Then inside your animation blueprint, you could read that curve. And if the value is above 0, you know that you should block shooting in your code. Now one thing to keep in mind is if we head back to our jump animation, because we've got our example curve here added as metadata. We can't then go and add example curve as a curve as well. If we had to add curve, we searched for example, in C, It's not going to show up until we delete this example curve. So we'll remove that, then go to Add curve search for example. Now, you can see that it's showing up and we can add it as a curve. Now, if you want to find out where all of these curves are actually set and you can manage them, rename them, or delete them. We'll head over to the Content Browser. Then we're gonna go to the mannequin folder, then meshes and we're going to open up SK mannequin. Now this is our characters skeleton. And over here you can find the anime curves. If yours isn't open, you can go up to window and select on anime curves here. Now, over in the anime curves as well, we can delete curves so you can right-click column, hit Delete. You can rename them, or you can add new curves just by selecting Add new curve and enter in a name. Now, lastly, if we try to add our example curve to the lesson animations over here and the lesson animation folder. We won't actually be able to find our example curves. So if we open up, say the rifle, walk forward, I go to curves and I go AD curve and I searched for example, see that it doesn't actually show up. Now if you remember these animations in our lesson Animations folder or using a different skeleton, them from our character. So we actually have to manually add our curve to this skeleton for these animations to find it. So to do that, we'll just go to mannequin than two meshes then to SK mannequin. And in here we'll go to anime curves, which is going to right-click add a curve. I'm going to call this example curve exactly the same as the name we gave our curve before. We'll hit Enter, and now we've added that curve to our skeleton. So now we can close this and head back to our rifle, walk forward, then two curves. And we can either add a curve or metadata, and we can search, for example, and we can find our curve now. So I'm just going to add our example curve. I'll edit it to add some values. Will middle mouse-click word and a value at say 0 for ten. And then we'll recenter the graph. I don't have a value, say one for 500, like that. We'll recenter it just to make sure everything is correct. Now we can test this out. I'll hit play and I'll aim and walk forward. And you see our value is increasing that like that. Now if yours doesn't and it just keeps reading 0 when you walk forward, try just saving everything from restarting the engine. This is a bug at the moment with compatible skeletons. If you remember, that's why our character can play the animations from our lessons. We saw pay compatible skeleton in the montages lesson, but it's a little bit buggy as it is a new feature. So sometimes you just need to save and reopen the project and it should work correctly, then that's it for this lesson. Hopefully now you understand how to add metadata and curves to animations and then read those values inside and Animation Blueprint. 53. Gameplay Systems (Interaction): Hey everyone. In this section of the course, we're gonna be using everything that we've learned in our previous lessons to create some common gameplay mechanics. Now, in this lesson, we're going to be creating a basic interaction system. This will allow us to run code inside of other objects when our player interacts with them. Now for those of you that have been following along in previous lessons, I have created a new third person template just so we've got a fresh start for this section of the course. So to get started, we're gonna go into the ThirdPersonCharacter Blueprint and that's just inside the third-person folder, then blueprints. So it will open that up. And inhale, we're going to create a new function and we're going to call that look at actor will compile. Now this is a function that's actually going to detect which actor we're currently looking at. And to do that, we're going to use a line trace, so it will drag out and we'll search for line trace. And we want line trace by channel. If you remember from our line traces lesson, a line trace allows us to detect objects between the start and end locations. So this makes it ideal for things like an interaction system because we can detect, is the player currently looking at an object. So to do that, we're going to need a little bit of math to determine where our line tray should start and end. So we're going to right-click and do get control rotation. And that gives us the current rotation of our players camera. From that, we want to get the forward direction. So we want to search for get rotation x vector. Then we want to drag out from that and do a times or multiply node. And we're going to change the input here to a float. So we're just going to right-click do convert pen and then select the flow and we want double-precision. So we'll do that. It's going to move these back a little bit. Now, the value we set here is how far from the start location our character can interact. So say I wanted It's interacts and distance to be four meters. I'm going to put 400 here and we will be able to change this later, but for now, we'll just leave this at 400. Now we need a start location for our line trace. Now we could just use the characters actor location, but if we go to Viewport, characters acts or location will be in the center. And I would rather have my line trace come from the head. So we'll head back to look at actor and we're gonna get our head bones location. So to do that, we can grab the mesh component from the Components panel, Drag out and search will get socket location. We can use this node with both socket names and bone names and it will give us the location of that socket or bone. I'm going to put the head bone naming which just just head like that. And I'll just move this back a bit. Then we'll plug the return value into the stock because that's where I live. Trace is going to be starting from. Then we're going to need an odd node. So we'll drag out from return value, do I add node? And we're going to add the output value of r times note it to the Add Node from the app node two and input on our line trace. So just to explain, our line trace is going to start at the head bone location and then the end of our line trace is going to be again at the headphone location, but we're adding four meters in the direction that our camera is facing. So now we can test this out. We'll set the Draw Debug Type two for one frame, so the line trace will be visible for one frame. And then we actually need to run this function. So we'll just head to the Event Graph, Right-click and search for tech. And we'll add an event tech, which is going to do this temporarily to test everything's working. Then we'll grab the lookout actor and connect that to here and compile. Now we can test this out so we'll hit play. And it's kind of difficult to see the line trace because our heads in the way. If we press F8 to reject our mouse it and we move around, you can see that the line trace is starting our head and he's going four meters forward in the direction our camera is pointing. So next we want to store what the line trace is actually hitting. So we'll exit out of planets to here, go back to our ThirdPersonCharacter, and then back into our lookup actor function. And we'll move along here to the end. Now we want to add a new variable that stores are hit result from our line trace. So we'll just drag out from out here and do promote to variable. And we'll name this, look at hit result like that. Now, we can use that variable later on to detect what our character is currently looking at. Now I'm also going to create a variable for this 400 value here. So we'll drag out and do again promotes variable. And that will just create a float for us. And I'm going to call this interact distance. Now, we'll do this just so we can easily change our Interact distance for our line trace. So you can see that it's actually just set itself to 400. And if we wanted to later on, we could adjust this in the class settings here. So instead of having to go into function to change the distance, we can just go into here and change it easily. And to keep things organized, we could give it a category as well, so I'll select it and we're going to change the category name to interaction like that. You see now it's got a little interaction category that we can keep all of those variables. And if we go to class defaults, we should have a interaction category, if we can pump, will compile first, then go to class defaults and you'll see we've got now an interaction category and our interaction distance variables in there. Next, we're going to change our lookout actor to run on a timer instead of doing it on tech. And if you remember, on tech will run every single frame. So if you're getting, say, 200 frames a second, this will be running 200 times. Which is a little bit excessive for our locker actor. So instead we're going to use a timer. So I'm just going to get the begin planet. From that, we'll drag out and do func function by timer. We want set timer by function name. Now we can delete our local actor here. And this allows us to have a function run at a certain time. So we'll set that function name to look at AXA. Now the name needs to be spelled exactly the same with capitals, otherwise this won't work. Then we're going to take on looping. Then we're going to set the time to 0.03. Now this means that our lookout actor function will run 30 times a second. Now that might seem like a lot, but for a single trace, it isn't a big deal. And it means that when we are looking around with our camera, we get the most up-to-date information. Now, another thing we can do is store this return value and that's our timer handle, just in case we ever want to stop this timer, maybe for our character dies. We don't want the lookout act to trace running anymore, so we can use the timer handler to stop it. So we'll just drag out to promote the variable, and we'll just call this look actor timer like that. So now if we ever wanted to stop it, we can use that variable to do that. So now we've got our look at active functional setup. We need to now add a new interface that we can add two other blueprints to actually run events and code when they get interacted with. So what we'll do is we'll just compile and save this and go to the Content Browser. And we'll right-click and we're going to add a new Blueprint Interface. So we'll go to blueprints and then we want the Blueprint Interface here, and we're going to name this, I'm going to call mine BP underscore interaction, interface like that. And we'll open it up. And I'm just going to add mine to the top bar here. Now if you remember from our interface video, we don't actually do any coding in here. All we do is add new functions and give them inputs and outputs. We've already got a new function that starts with the interface. So we'll just right-click and rename this. I'm going to call mine interact like that. And we'll compile and we can add new inputs now. And this is information that we're going to send from our player character blueprint to whatever blueprint we're interacting with. So what I like to do is add a character reference just so we can access information from the character that interacted with the blueprint that we're running this code. So we'll search for character, will use the character type object reference. I'm just going to name this character. Now of course in the future, if you wanted to send them information from the character to the blueprint it's interacting with. You could add new inputs here. So now we have our function that will run whenever our player interacts with a blueprint, but we can add some additional functions as well. So I'm going to add one. And we're going to call this allow interaction. And we're actually going to add an output for this one. So we'll add a new output. And we'll set this to be a Boolean, and we'll just name this return value like that. So now this gives us a new function that we can check before we run the Interact function just to make sure that the blueprint we're interacting with does have its interaction turned on. Now we're going to add one more function. So we'll go to add function, and then we're going to call this interaction name. Then we'll add a new output. And this is going to be called name. And we're going to set the variable type two texts like that, and then we'll compile. Now this allows us to set a custom name in any blueprint that we add our interaction interface tube. And then we're going to add a little bit of texts to our screen so that when our player looks at an object, it's going to display the name that we provide using this function. So now all of this has added. We can compile and save it. Now, heading back to the third-person character, we need some input events to actually run our interactive code. Now we could just right-click and search for the temporary input events that we've used before. But instead, we're actually going to go to our project settings and properly add an input. So we'll go to Edit Project Settings. And in here we want to go to the Input category. And now we want to add an action mapping. So we'll go to Action Mappings. We'll click the Add Action Mapping button. And we're going to call this interact like that. Then we'll click the keyboard and you can pick whatever your key one, I'm going to press E, so that sets out to E. Now that's set up, we'll head back to our character right-click and search for interact. And we want the interact underneath the action events here to add our input. So now we're going to add the code that actually tells the object that we're looking at to run its interaction interface. So to do that, we go up the lookout, hit resolved, and we'll drag out from that and we'll break it. And we'll click the little down arrow here to get all of the variables or drag out from Hit Actor. And we're going to search for Interact. And we want the Interact message here. Now I'm going to click this arrow again just to make this smaller. And we can tie this up a little bit. Now before we run this, we will first want to check is the act of violet. So we'll do is valid. We'll connect this up to pressed. And we also want to check is allow interaction true. So we'll drag out again and search for Allow. And we can use the allow interaction pair. Plug that into is valid. And then we want to run a branch node. So we'll drag out from the return value and do IF. And then from that, if our return value is true and allow interaction is true, we want to run our Interact so we can plug it in like that. Then for our character input because we're inside our ThirdPersonCharacter, we can just drag out and do self. And that will pass a reference to this character through the Interact function. Now let's keep things tidy. We can actually highlight all of these. Note it, not the input event, just the code that we've got highlighted right-click and we can do collapsed function. And I'm just going to call this interact like that. We can just move this here. Now, all of that code is just inside our new interact function. So if we double-click that, you can see that here. We can just move this up here, so it's a bit tidy. Now we need to set up an actor that our character can actually interact with. So it will compile and will go to the Content Browser, just going to create a new blueprint class. We'll set it to an actor. I'm just going to call this BP underscore interaction example. Like that. We'll open it up and we'll add a new component. I'm just going to add a cube component. Like that. Just gives us something that the line trace can hit. But you could use a skeletal mesh or a static mesh component and have a custom measure if you wanted to. Now one thing to keep in mind is if you use a static mesh or Skeletal Mesh, it must have collision because if it doesn't align, trace won't hit it. So to check if your static mesh has collision, you can just go to its stack mesh in the Content Browser. So for example, what are Coupa? We can just click the Browse to and content browser to go there. We can open this up. Now in here, you can go to show and then go down to where it says simple collision. And then if when you take that on, you get this light green outline here, that means you're all good. It has collision. If you don't have that, you can go up to the collision drop-down here, and you can try these different options to add some collision to your object. So we're using this cube so we know it does have simple collision, so we're all good. We can add back to our interaction example blueprint. Now in here we need to add our interaction interface. So we'll go to Class Settings then to implement it interfaces, and we'll add a new one. We're going to search for interaction. And we want the BP interaction interface. And then we'll compile. Now, if we go to our My Blueprint panel, click the drop-down for interfaces, you can see that we've got all of our new interface functions that we add inside our interaction interface. Now you may notice that this one is yellow, but these ones are great. Now that's because if you remember, our Interact doesn't actually have a return value. If I click this, it will just create an event on our Event Graph. But if I click or allow interaction, for example, if you remember that did have a return value. So it opens this up in a function editor. So that's the main difference or interact doesn't actually have a return value. If you remember inside the interface, if we select our Interact, you see it has no outputs, but both of our other ones do have outputs. And that's why they're different colors. And if we click interact, it creates an event. And if we click on Allow interaction, it comes up with a function. So to get started, we just want to enable, allow interaction. So we're just going to take this on. But in your future projects or function like this is handy because you may have an object that you want to be interactable some of the time and some of the time you want to disable it. So you could just return a different value when you want to disable its interaction. Next we have the interaction name, so we'll just double-click that to open it. Now we can just manually enter a name in here if we wanted to, but I'm going to drag out and promote it to a variable. So we'll do promotes a variable. I'm going to call my name and leave it as texts. So then we'll compile and I'm just going to add a default value such as default. Name. Won't be able to change this later on. So we'll just component. So now we can actually add some code to our event interact. So we'll head back to our event graph. And now because we double-clicked interact, it's actually just added this to our event graph. But if we didn't have this, we could also right-click search for event interact. And we could create that this way as well. Now this is the event that will run when our character looks at this object and press a-z soap. For now, we'll just drag out and do a print string. We can print string the name value for example, and just plug that in like that. Now the good thing about this event is we have access to our character blueprint. So maybe you had a component on your character blueprint that was an inventory or a health system. You can just drag out from the character here. We could use get component by class. And we could use this to check does our character have a specific component? If it does, then we can use the return value to access any of that components variables. Or we could just cost to our character. So we could do cost to ThirdPersonCharacter. And then using this, we could get variables or functions from our character. So we could get, say, the interaction distance if we wanted to for some reason or if you add health variables, are. Whatever else, you could use this to access those. But for now we're just going to run our print string. So I'm going to delete these and connect this backup to the print string like that. Now one of the thing we wanna do is with our name variable. We just want to take on instance editable. And if you're a member, that just means that when we drag our cube into our level, will be able to change this name for each cube that we drag in. So now our interaction system is actually pretty much set up. But I did want to add in a HUD that we'll say the actors interaction name whenever our player looks at that actor. So to do that, we'll just go back to the third-person folder here, then blueprints and we're going to create a new HUD widget. So we'll right-click, go to User Interface. We'll do a Widget Blueprint. I'm going to select use a widget. And we'll call this BP underscore HUD, like that. And we'll open it up. Now because this is our main HUD. We're going to add a canvas panels. So just search for Canvas and we'll add that to our hierarchy here. Then I'm going to want some text actually displays the interaction name. So we'll search for text in here as well. And we'll add that to our canvas panel. And we're going to have it so it's up at the center. So I'm going to change the anchor for text to center like that. And you can see our position is messed up. So what we'll do is select this to 000 like that. So now you can see where centered. I actually want the center of the text to be in the center of the text. So what we're gonna do is do alignment, do 0.50.5 like that. So you can see that the text is now centered. Now I want my text to be a little bit higher, so I'm going to hold Shift and drag up. And that will actually allow me to move our texts and a direction and lock it to that direction so you can see I can move it up. Say here. Now I'm going to change the font just to make it a little bit smaller. So we'll make it say 20. And we'll compile. Now, you can spend as long as you like setting this up so the text looks nice. I'm just doing this quickly so we can get it running. So first we need to hide our texts when we're not actually looking at an object. So What we're gonna do is we're going to use the visibility here. We're going to create a new binds. So we'll do or click on bind and do create binding. With that open, we need to determine when we should set this text visible and then hidden. So to do that, we're going to need some variables from our ThirdPersonCharacter. So we're going to need a reference to that. So we'll start by going to the Event Graph. We're going to delete this node and this node here. We're going to get the player character. And from that we want to check is it valid? So do is valid. And we'll connect this up to construct. Then we'll drag out again and do Cast to ThirdPersonCharacter. So we can then use the output of this to store as a variable. So we'll do promotes variable. I'm just going to call mine character like that. Then I'm actually going to highlight these nodes. And we'll right-click and just do collapsed to function. And we'll call this set up references like that and actually keeps things nice and tidy. And we can reuse this later as well. So now we're ready to go back to our get visibility function. And we want to get our character. And we just want to make sure that this is valid before we run any code. It will connect this up to here. And if it's not valid, then we can actually run our setup references like that. And we'll use this return node, plug that in here. We'll just set this to hidden. So if our character isn't valid when this runs, it will try and set the character variable again. Now if the character variable is valid, we want to get it again. Then from that we want to drag out and get look at hit result. We would drag out and do a break. We will extend this node and we want Hit Actor. We do is valid. And if it is valid will make this smaller again. So we've got a bit more space, which tidy this up like that. So if this is valid, we then want to check is it interactable? So we'll drag out and we'll do allow interaction like that. And if that is true, then we want to set our visibility to visible. So we'll copy this and paste it here. So this too visible. We'll plug it in like that. So once you're done, it should look a bit like this. Now there is actually a couple of one or more nodes we need. So what we'll do is we'll copy our return value, paste it here, and we'll set it to hidden. Now, if allow interaction is false, we want to hide our texts, so we'll do that. And also if the hit actor isn't valid, we also want to hide our texts, so we'll plug that in like that. So that covers setting our texts visibility, but we also want to change what it says to the interaction name. So what we'll do is we'll actually copy this code because there'll be the same. So we can copy all of this and this as well. And so it makes sure you have all the nodes highlighted here do Control C. Then we'll go to the designer, select our text here. And we want to go to the text and bind, then create binding. And in here we're going to paste in those notes. And I'm gonna get the beginning node connect up to r is valid like that. Now we need to return some sex. So this one would just plug into here. And we don't want to return any texts for this, so we'll just leave that empty. We'll copy this and paste this over here. So now, once we know allow interaction is true, we want to actually get the interaction name. So we'll drag out from the reactor do interaction name. And we'll connect this up to true. Now, if the interaction is false, we just want to return an empty value. Let's do that. Then we'll copy and paste this again, paste this here, and connect name up to the return value like that. Then we can compile. And once this is done, it should look a bit like this. Now the last thing you need to do is actually add our hard to play a screen. So to do that, we'll go to the ThirdPersonCharacter Blueprint, that event graph. We're going to add this to our Begin Play. We'll right-click and do Create Widget. Connect this up to our notes. And owning Player, we'll just do Control, get player controller. Like that. We need to set the class to the hub that we just created. So BP HUD. Now, it's always a good idea to store this return value when you're creating your main HUD. So we'll drag out and we'll probably this to a variable, we'll call this HUD. And that's just that if we want to use it later on. And then from the output of this set node, or just search for Add to Viewport like that. And that will actually add our widget to our players screen. So now we're ready to test this out. We'll compile and head to our map. We want to add some of our interaction examples to the level. So I'll add one here and one over here. And if you remember, because we set our name to instance editable inside our interactable example, we have that value here. So for this one, I'm going to set this to say sword. For this one. Set it to be something like pipe like that. So now we can hit play. And if we run over to this cube here you can see it's printing out sword. And if I press C, you can see it's printing out the name of our sword interaction example, and it will do the same with var pi example over here. Now we could spend a little bit more time tidying up our HOD texts x, it's a little bit hard to see. So if we exit out and open up our hood, we can select our texts in the hierarchy here. And first we could center it so our text nice and centered and we could add a background as well. So what I'll do is right-click do rap with, and we'll do rap with a border. And then for our border, we'll select that and we're going to set size to content, so it will resize to the size of our text. We can change the color, so I'll change the brush color to say a gray. So it's just a little bit easier to see like that. And we could also add some padding. So we'll select our text and we'll set the padding, appear to say eight. So it gives us a little bit of padding around the edges. And now we've added a new widget. We actually need to set its visibility as well. And we can reuse our visibility function that we use for our texts. So we'll scroll down, go to the visibility option here. We'll just click bind and you can see that our visibility function from earlier is that we can set it. And now our text border here will change their visibility whenever we're looking at an object we can interact with. So we can test this out. We'll compile and head back and hit play. And now we can see our text is centered and it's a little bit easier to see because we've got our gray box when we're not looking at something, you can see that our boxes hidden along with our text. Now currently what we're doing when we presi and selecting one of our interaction examples is printing out a name. But of course this is just an example. You could change this to whatever you like. So we can go to our interaction at example here and have the actor say destroy when we interact with it. So we could add Destroy Actor. Now, when we compile it and hit Play, if I interact with the cubes now, you can see that they both get destroyed. So that's it for this lesson. Hopefully you now understand how we can use Blueprint Interfaces to run code in other blueprints, like for example, when we need an interaction system. And in our next lessons, we're gonna be adding more gameplay features to this project. 54. Gameplay Systems (Damage): Hey everyone. In this lesson we're gonna be setting up a health system and we're also going to be using the damage system that's built into Unreal Engine. So to start with, we could just add our health variables and functions directly to our third-person character. But instead we're going to create a health component. And the reason we're gonna do that is because we can reuse it and other blueprints if we wanted to later on. So let's get started. We'll click the Add button in our content browser, go to Blueprint class and we're going to select an actor component. We're choosing act component instead of seeing component because our health component doesn't need to exist in the world. It just needs code, so we'll use active component. I'm going to name mine BP underscore health component like that. Now we'll open this up and I'm going to drag mine up to the top bar like that. So we'll start by creating some health variables. So I'll add a new variable. I'm going to call this current health like that. And I'm going to set mine to an integer. You could use a float if you wanted to. Personally, I prefer to use integers for health because it's a whole number. So we'll start with current health and that's gonna be an integer. Then we're going to create another one. This is going to be called starting health. And we want another one, and this will be called max health. Then lastly, we want another variable called and take damage. And we're going to change this to a brilliant because that's true or false. Then for these three variables, we're going to take one instance editable. So we'll just do that now. That just means that when we add our health component to another blueprint, when we select the health component in their components panel will be able to edit these values. So now we'll compile and we'll set some starting value. So for starting health, I'm going to set this to 100. For max healthful set this to 100 as well and can take damage will take on as well, and then compile. Next we're going to create some functions are actually going to change our health variable. So we'll add a new function and we'll call this increase health. Like that. We'll add a new input and we'll call this increase amount. And we're going to set this to an integer like that. And then we'll compile. The first thing we wanna do is make sure our current health isn't going to be greater than r max health. So we get our current health and we check is this less than r max self? So we'll get maps, health. And we only want to run this code if it's, if this is true. So it will move this down here and add this to our input node like that. Next we want to check will adding the amount, the increase amount to our current health make her over r max health. So to do that, we'll get current health will add our increased mountain now we could just drag out from here and plug this in like that. Or we can drag out from here and do get increase amount. And you can see we can actually get that value from our input node without having to create a variable. It just lets us use that here. And if that doesn't show up, just make sure you can pull off divided the input and you should be able to find it. Next we want to check is this value less than or equal to max out. So it will get max health. And if it is, then we can set that amount to our current health. So we'll do this and then we can copy and paste these nodes pasties over here. We'll do set current health. That. Then if false, which means the increase and current health values are gonna be greater than r max. How often we just want to copy and paste this and say, I'll help to max out like that. We could add a reroute note here, just keep things tidy. So once you're finished, should look like this. So next we want a decrease health function. So I'm going to search for it, or I'm going to create a new function and call this the grease, like that. And again, we're going to add an input to this, so I'll make my window bigger here. Why the new input, and we'll call this decrease amount. And we'll set this to an integer as well. And then we'll compile. Now, we want to check is our current health greater than 0? So the current health greater than 0. And if it is, then will allow or decrease health to run like that. Next we want to check is our current health minus r decrease amount greater than 0. So we'll do get current health and we want to do minus or subtract. We want to subtract our decrease them out. Now again, we could plug this in like that or we can drag out sexual get decrease amount and we can add that here. And then we want to check, is this greater than 0? If it is, then we can allow that amount to be decreased from our current health. So we'll do this. We'll copy this, paste this over here. We'll do set current health. And if the amount is less than 0, we just want to set our current health to 0 because we don't want our health going below 0. So it will just add a note here, just tidy this up, and once you're done, it should look like this. Now one thing I did forget to add is we want to check can take damage before we increase the health. So we'll drag this out further, which is going to grab our can take damage. And if this is true, then we will allow this function Trump. So it will just plug this in here and true into here. Now we're also going to add some event dispatchers and these can be helpful for if we add our health component to different blueprints, we may want something different happened in one blueprint than another when our health increases or decreases when the health hits 0. So we'll start by creating an event dispatcher. And I'm just going to call this on health increase. Like that. We'll create another one called on on health decrease. Then we want on health 0. Like that. We could add some inputs to our own health increase and decrease. So we'll go to the Details panel here and add a new input. I'm going to call this increase amount. And we'll set it to an integer. And we'll do the same thing for unhealthy decrease. So we'll add a new input and we'll call this the crease. Spell correctly, decrease amount. There we go. And we'll set that to an integer as well. So inside or decrease how function we can run our own health decrease here. So we'll do cool. Plug this in here, and then we want to get a decreased amount. So I'm just going to copy and paste this and plug that in here. Then for health 0, we want the non-health 0. So we'll call that, plug that in here. And we didn't add an input for this, so we don't need to plug anything else. And then we'll go to our increase health. And over here, we want unhealthy increase. We'll plug that in here. And we'll get the increase amount like that. We'll plug in this up here as well because when we set our max health, we will be increasing it as well. And that will create one more function. And I'm just going to call this apply starting health. Then here what we're gonna do is go our current health and set this to our starting health. Then we'll run this function in our Event Graph on Begin Play. So we'll grab that applies starting health and plug it in here like that. And then we'll compile and save this. Now we can go ahead and add our health component to our character. So we'll head over to the ThirdPersonCharacter Blueprint. Then I'll make this window a little bit larger like that. And we're going to add a new component or search for health. We'll add the BP health component and then we'll compile. And with our health components selected in the Details panel, you can see we can set our starting health or max health and whether or not the health component can take damage. Now as you can see, our current health is set to 0, but don't worry, that will get set to 100 or wherever you're starting. Health value is when the game starts. And we can easily access these variables as well as our functions just by dragging in or component dragging out, we can do get current, for example, that gives us access to that variable we can call our function so increase health that will run our functions. And we can also, if we wanted to bind events to those event dispatcher. So we created, so we could do a sign, we could assign on health increased for example. And that gives us a event and the buying event for that. And this will run whenever our health increases. And it also gives us the increase amount here as well if we ran our Bind event at the top. But for now, we'll delete these. Next. We need to setup our damage event in our third-person character. So to do that, we'll right-click and search for any damage. Will use event and the damage. And we're going to grab our health component and we want to decrease our health by the damage amount whenever this event runs. So we'll drag out and we'll search for decrease health. And we'll connect this up to the any damage. Then we want damage and plug it in to decrease amount. And you'll see it gives us this node that converts the float into an integer. This will round the value down. So for example, if I damage was 1.5, this would round it down to one. But we could drag out and do round and use a round node. And this will actually round it to the nearest integer. So if it's 1.5, I believe it will round it up to two. If it was say 1.2, it would round it down to one. So we'll use around node for this just because it's a little bit more intuitive. And now, whenever another blueprint calls the apply damage event for our character, this event will run and it will decrease our health and our health component. Now we'll set up a damaged zone in our level that when our character enters it, our character will actually lose health. So it will compile this. But first actually, we'll just add a print string here because we don't currently have a health bar. So we just add a print string. And every time we take damage, we want to just get our current health. So we do get current health, will print out the current health value so that when we take damage, we know exactly how much health we've got. I'm going to make the text stay around a little bit longer. So I'm just going to set duration to five like that. And then we'll compile. Now we'll head over to the Content Browser. We're going to add a new blueprint, the blueprint class actor. And I'll scroll down and we're just going to call this BP underscore damage zone. Like that. We'll drag this into level and open it up. For this, we're just going to add a box collision so we know when something overlaps it. So we'll add a box collision. I'll drag it up a little bit so it'd be flush with the ground. Then we'll head into the Event Graph and we're going to delete the beginning play and the tech. And we're going to use the event actor began overlap. And we'll drag out from other actor, which is going to call the Apply damage. This is the event that will actually call the damage inside our third-person character, we can set the damage amount. So I'm going to say to him like that. Now we can provide an event instigator, and this is a player controller. We won't be using this for damaged zone purely because There's no player that's causing this damage. It's just an environmental effect. Then we've got damaged coarser. And for this we will drag out and do self. And this basically just allows us to know which actor actually apply the damage to our character or not any damage you can see damage cause. We also have that instigated by pen as well. Next we have the damage class. Now, this is a little bit more advanced. I'm not going to be covering it in this lesson, but basically you can create new damage types and add variables to them. So for example, you could have a fire damage class on ice damage class, and then you can set that class in here, then on the receiving end. So on your any event damage, you could drag out from the damage type and you could actually get those variables, say the is ice damage or is fire damage for example. But for now, we're just going to leave that as the EMT class. But for now, one last thing we'll do before he says, is select the box components, search for hidden. And we want to untick hidden Endgame just so it will be able to see or damaged zone. So now we're ready to test this out. We'll compile head to our third person map. And I'm just going to make the damage zone a little bit bigger and move it over here. And now when we hit play, we can run into the damage box and you can see I, health is decreasing by ten each time we actually enter that box. So that's basically how we can set up a health system and we can use that house lists them in other blueprints as well. Now I wanted to give you a quick example of how we can set up those bind events in our character. So say for example, every time your character took damage, you wanted to play a grown sound. You could do that nice and easily with the bind events. So we'll go to the ThirdPersonCharacter, find the beginning, play them. On the end of here, we can add some new code. So for our bind events to run, we actually need to bind them. So we're going to do that on Begin Play. And we're going to grab our health component will drag out and search for bind on Health decrease. And we want this one hit. Like that will connect this up to our viewport. And now we need an event that will actually cool when I health decreases. So we'll drag out and we'll do custom. And we want add customer. Then we will call this the crease, like that. Now, this event will run every time I health decreases and we can just add a sound so we can do play sound location. I'm gonna do it at my characters location, so it will just get back to location. And we can set this to a sound I don't have like a grown or unknown sounds, so we'll just pick compiled failed for example. We'll just compile. Now when we hit play, we run into are damaged box. We actually get that sound play. And it will play every time we take damage. Now, playing a sound is just an example. You could have particle effects happen. You could run totally different code completely up to you. This is just how you would run code in your character or any other blueprint that you're using the health component. When the health decreases, we can do the exact same thing with health increase and with health 0 as well. So now what we're gonna do is we're going to add a health component to our cube or interaction example that we created in our last lesson. So we'll go to that blueprint, open it up. I'm going to add the health component here. And just like we did before in our character blueprint, we're going to add the apply or sorry, It'd be any damage, the event any damage node. We'll grab our health component. From there. We wanna do decrease health. We're going to drag out from DynaMesh and just search for around. And we'll use the round node. Plug that in to decrease amount and connect this up here. Just like that. Now, our cube can take damage, just like our character. And what we'll do is we'll get our current health again like we did in the character. And we'll add a print string. I'm just going to add an append here. So we'll do append and we'll put a cube. Health Is like that. And then we'll plug our health into here just so we know the difference between our character health and our cube health when it prints out on the screen. Just like that, r cubed now has health. We can use those bind events if we wanted to like we just did in our character. So we can do bind, health decrease and we could have something totally different happened in our cube when it's health gets decreased. So this is the power of components. You can add them to other blueprints. And assuming that you've set them up in a modular way, you can just add them and have them work very quickly. Instead of having to create new health variables on every blueprint that you want to have health and then new functions to affect those variables. We can just add one component and we can do all of that straightaway. So next we're going to be setting up a projectile that our character is going to fire out in the direction that we look at when that project I'll hit something that has this damage node. We're going to apply some damage to that object. So to do that, we'll head to the content browser. We'll click Add and create a new blueprint class. I'm going to select Actor. And we'll scroll down and we'll call this BP underscore projectile like that. And we'll open it up. Now the first thing we will add is a sphere collision, and this will be what actually detects what our projectile setting. So it will do add, will search for sphere, and we'll use these fair collision. I'm actually going to select it and drag it on top of the D for default seen route. And this will make us fear the root of our blueprint. Now, next we want to add a new component. I'm going to add a sphere and spoke correctly. There we go, sphere. And this is just what the players will see during gameplay. This is our visual representation of our projectile. You could use a static mesh component. If you wanted to, say you had a bullet or a rocket, you could use that instead. I'm just going to be using the sphere here, so we'll do that. And I'm going to make mine a little bit smaller. So I'm just going to scale it down a bit like that. I'm also going to make my sphere a little bit smaller. So I'll select the sphere component and we'll change the sphere radius, just drag it down a little bit like that. And now, because our sphere here is going to be dealing with the collision sphere, Static Mesh doesn't actually need to have any collision and we don't want it to. So we'll select the sphere stack measure, scroll down, and we will find the collision presets. We're going to set this to no collision and we're going to turn off Can character step on to know and we're going to take off generate overlap events. So now our sphere static mesh has no collision at all. And all of the collision is gonna be handled by the sphere collision that we added at the beginning. Just to make things a little bit less confusing, I'm going to select these fears Static Mesh, and I'm just going to rename this to mesh like that. And then we'll rename our sphere collision component to collision like that. So we know the difference between the two components now. Now we also need set up some collision settings for our projectile. So what we'll do is we'll go to the collision, will select, it, will go to Collision Presets. So for our projectiles collision, we're actually going to turn this to custom. Then we're going to make sure Collision Enabled is set to query only. Then for object type, we actually don't have a projectile object types, so we're going to add one in our project settings. So let's do that. We'll go up to Edit Project Settings, and we want to go to the collision category here. Then in the object channels, we're going to add a new object channel. I'm going to call this project title. Like that. We want the default response to be blocked because most objects in the world are going to block our projectile. So we want to start to block and then we'll hit Accept. Now the reason we're doing this is because we want certain things to ignore our projectile. So in our character, for example, if we go to the viewport, we don't want our capsule here to block projectiles because it's actually larger than our character is. We want our character mesh to block the projectile's instead. So we're adding a new projectile object channel because then we can tell our Capsule Component here to ignore that. And then we want our mesh to block that. So heading back to our project, our blueprint, we'll select our collision component. Over here. We want to select the object type and we want to change this to protect. You can see mine isn't showing up. We can try compiling and see if it shows up there. It does. If you're still doesn't, you can try just saving everything and restarting the engine. Sometimes they do take a bit to show up. So you can try that if yours isn't that, but mine is. So we'll select that and then we'll compile again. And then we want to set this to block everything. So we'll take the Block option at the top. And then we want this to actually ignore ****. So we'll do ignore point. And the reason we're doing that is in our character, this capsule here is considered the **** object type. We want our projectile to completely ignore the capsule and only hit the mesh. So that's why we take on ignore for ****. Now the one last collision saying we want to set to ignore his camera, we're just doing that because we don't want our projectile to affect our camera boom. Because if a projectile passed through the camera boom, it could make your cameras zoom in really quickly and then zoom out and it wouldn't look very good. So just make sure you set this to ignore for camera. We also want to set Can character step onto, know that we'll stop our character kind of trying to stand on this object if it gets too close to our character. Now we're ready to actually write some code for our projectile. So we'll head to the Event Graph. If you don't have this tab, you can just open it up here. Now inherent, we're going to right-click and search for event hit. Now, this event will run whenever our objects are our projectile here or hit another object. And that gives us some output. So when we do hit something, it gives us a reference to the component within our blueprint that actually hit the other objects. So for us this will be the collision component because that's the only one that has collision. Then we've got other, and this gives you a reference to the other actor that we hit and we will be using this to apply damage. Then we've got other component. This gives us a reference to the component in the other actor that we hit. And we've got hit location. This just gives us the location of where we hit. We've got hit Normal, which is the direction that the surface that we hit, we won't be using this. It's a little bit more advanced. And then we've actually got down here a hip results. So if we drag out and do break hit result in C, this is actually the same hint result we get for tracers. So we can access all of this information about the object we hit with our projectile. Now, again, this is a little bit more advanced. We're just going to be using the other pen here to apply damage to the act of that we will drag out from event here, we'll search for it, apply, damage will use that node. We want the damaged actor to be the other pin here. So we're saying we want to apply a dimension to the actor that we've heard. We can set the damage amounts. So I'm just going to set ten damage cause. Like I said before, this will be the actor that actually is doing the damage. So we're in the projectile, this is our self, so we'll drag out and do self. And then event instigator. We actually will plug this in because a character is gonna be sporting our projectile. So what we can do is get instigator. We won't get instigator controller. And we can plug that into event instigator like that. And the way this is working is when we actually spawn our projectile will have an option to provide an instigator, and we will do that and that'll be the character. And now when we apply damage to another object, we're getting that instigator value that we set when we spawn our projectile. We're providing that to the other blueprint that were damaging just in case they want to access who actually damaged them. Now, we'll add the print string here is just so we've got a little bit more information about who we hit. So we'll add the print string and we'll drag out from that do append. And we'll just put at the top projectile hit. And then in the second line, we'll plug in our practice. So we'll get over actor and plug that in here. I'm just going to add a space to the end of a hit. So it's two separate words like that. Now the next thing we need to do is we don't want our projectile to hit the character that spawned the projectile. So to do that, we're going to create a beginning play note like that. Um, we're gonna get our collision component, drag out from that and do ignore actor while moving. Now this basically just tells us collision component, an actor that we want to ignore when the component is moving. So we'll plug this in. We want to provide an actor. We're going to use get owner. And we'll plug that in here. And we're going to take on should ignore. Now, get owner is another variable that we set when we actually spawn up projectile. And then we're accessing that and we're telling the collision, Hey, we want you to ignore hitting the owner. Next we're going to add a new component. So we'll go to Add, and we're going to search for projector. And we're going to add the projectile movement component. This is a component that's built into the engine and it's going to do all of the calculations for us that will allow our bp projectile to actually move like a projectile. So to start with, we're going to set the initial speed to 3 thousand. This is the starting speed of an object. Then we'll set the max speed to that same value as well. Of course, if you wanted the object move slower or faster, you can increase or decrease these values. You'll probably want to keep these the same. And then down here we've also got velocity. I'm going to set the first value here to free thousand as well. So if you were to change the speeds up here, you'd want to make sure you do the same for her as well. Right now if we were to spawn our project, how it actually wouldn't destroy itself once it hits something. So we're going to add a destroy to the end of our code here. So I'm just going to destroy actor. And that would just mean that when our projectile hits something, it will become where it will be destroyed. So now we can compile and save this, and we've set up our projectile, and now we need to actually spawn up. So to do that, we're going to go to the ThirdPersonCharacter, then back to the Event Graph, will add in a new input event. So to do that, I'll go over to Edit Project Settings. Then we'll go to the inputs category and we'll add a new action mapping. So we'll just add a new option. And I'm going to call mine fire. And then we'll head back to the ThirdPersonCharacter would do event fire. And we'll find that under the action, events like that. Now we need to spawn are actors. So I'll just move this over here so we've got them more space. We'll drag out from Pressed. We'll do spawn actor. We want the spawn acts from class. We'll set the class to our projectile's projectile in CPP protector. Now, the spawn transform we'll drag out and do make, make transform. Now the location, I'm just going to be using my actors location. But later on, if you're making a weapon, you'd probably want to use like its muzzle socket for example. But for now we're just going to use the characters actor location. So it gets, it gets mapped to location. And we'll plug that into the location. And then for rotation, we're going to use the cameras current rotation. So do get control rotation. So our protects how far is in the direction that we're currently looking for collision handling. We want to set this to always spawn ignore collisions. And then if you remember, we're using both the owner and instigator inside our projector for. This node here and also for this node here. So we need to set those. And we're just going to use a reference to our own character. So we'll just use self. And we want to plug this into both of these here and here like that. Now we're actually ready to test this out. And there's one thing I forgot to do inside our project settings. So if we go back there, I created a new action mapping, but I didn't actually set a key. So we need to make sure we do that. I'm just going to click the keyboard button here and then left mouse button click, and that will assign that to that. Now we can actually test this out, so we'll hit play and we'll left mouse button. You can see that our projectile is spawning and it's flowing out and the direction that we look. And if we shoot our cube it, you can see our cube health is going down. Now, make sure you are hitting the cube and not the ground, for example. So it should say projectile hit BP interaction example like mine does. The same with R1. Over here you can see it's got different health value from this one and it's going down as well when we hit it. Now, there are some other damage events built into the engine. So if we head to the ThirdPersonCharacter, will just explain those. If we right-click and we can search for point points damage, you can find the event point damage. Now, this works similar to our any damage. If we move it over here, you can see that we've got some additional inputs. Now the reason for that is if we call the Apply points damage, you can see that this works a lot like the applied damage node, but it gives us some extra inputs. So we've got an input for the direction and also for hip info. So this will then run this event and it will provide us with hit Info. It will provide us with a bone name and this is built into the hit Info and things like the hit direction. So this node is a little bit more advanced than the applied damage and the MD damage, just purely because it provides us with a little bit more information that we can receive on the actor that gets here. And then we provide that information using the apply point damage node and we can input those values here. Now there are some other damage nodes, so it will delete these if we right-click and search for radial damage in find the event radial damage. Now this will run whenever our character receives a radial damage type. And if we right-click and search for Apply radio, you can see that there's two options here. We'll start with the top one. So we've got apply radial damage. Now this is a really cool node because it does all of the work for us, for things like explosions. So what we do is provide an origin and this is kind of like the explosions center. We can set a base damage and we can set how large the damage zone is. So all objects within the, say, 300 centimeters of the origin will actually take the base damage. And we can provide actors to ignore like a line trace for example. So if we just do make re, we can plug in actors that we want to ignore having take any radial damage. We can also take on do full damage. That just means it doesn't matter where the objects that are in our damaged ranges that will take the full base damage value. Then we have the damage prevention channels. So you may have an explosion go off and there's a wall between you and the explosions origin, you'd probably want the damage to be blocked. So here is where we set which collision channel actually blocks the damage that our radial damage does. But for example, maybe you had a window between you and the explosion. You wouldn't want the glass to block all of the damage. You'd have your say glass, ignore the Visibility channel and the explosion damage would go through and hit your character. And then we have another type of radio damage so we can right-click search for radial damage. Again. We will use apply radial damage with fall off. Now this works pretty much the same. It just allows us to have a inner and outer radius. Now, objects within the inner radius value from the origin, we'll take the full base damage and then objects within the outer radius, but outside of the inner radius will take a reduce damage amount. That damage amount will depend on the damage fall off. So the higher this value is, the less damage you'll take, the further away you are from the origin. If you're still within the outer radius value, then you can set a minimum damage. So say this was 600 and our player was say, 590 centimeters from the origin, you would probably have a minimum damage, say five. And no matter how far away you are from the origin, if you're within the outer radius, you'll always take at least five damage. And then we've just got the same inputs from our previous node down here. Now, both of our radial damage nodes or apply radial damage nodes, we'll call this radial damage event. So you can use this one event and that will be called by both of these nodes I've just shown you. Those are all of the additional damage events you can use in the engine and they're built into the engine as well So you can always access them. Now one thing to keep in mind is this event and the damage will run no matter what type of applied damage node you use. Even if we use, say apply radial damage, it will call this event to run, and this will run, but this will also run as well. So if you have both of these events in your blueprint, both of them will run whenever you apply a radial damage. And this is the same for the point damage. So if you use the point damage apply node, it will call the event point damage event. If we find that the event point damage event, this will run, this event, any damage will also run. So both of them will run. This is just something to keep in mind. If you have, say, both of these, have all of these events in your project, this will run whenever you take any type of damage. So just be careful with that. If you have health being decreased here, and then again on these two events, you could end up with your health being decreased twice. So we can just delete these nodes as we're not using them. And we're pretty much done for this lesson. So hopefully you now understand a little bit more about the built-in damage events that come with the engine. And also how you can create a health system and add that to other blueprints. And in our next lessons, we're going to continue adding more features to this project. 55. Gameplay Systems (Health Bar): Hey everyone. In this lesson we're gonna be adding a health bar widget that's going to use the values that we've set up in our health component. And then we're going to add our Health Bar to the BP HUD that we created in the interaction lesson. So to get started, we're going to create a new widget. So we'll go to Add then to user interface, and we're going to select Widget Blueprint. Then select usual widget. And we'll scroll down and I'm just going to call mine BP underscore health, like that. We'll open it up. I'm just going to drag mine up to the top pick. For our Health Bar. I'm going to create some texts that just says health. Then underneath we're going to have a progress bar that's going to display how much help we have. We're also going to add some text to that, that will say our current health and also on Mac self. Now, to start with, we're not going to use a canvas panel because remember we're going to add our Health Bar to our HUD. So we'll use that to choose where our Health Bar is positioned on the screen. So in here we just need to add our Health Bar widgets. So we'll start with a vertical box. So I'll go to panel and then we'll grab the vertical box and just add that to the hierarchy. We'll grab some texts, so I just search for text. We'll put that in the vertical box. Then I'm going to get an overlay. So we'll search for overlay and we'll add that to the vertical box as well. And the reason I'm using an overlay is because I want to have a progress bar and then I want to overlay some text on top of that progress bar. So we're going to use the overlay for that. Now we'll grab our progress bar, so I'll just search for progress and add that to our overlay. And then I'm also going to get some more text and add that to the overlay as well. So we'll start by selecting our top text here. And I'm going to just change this to say health like that. We can change the settings. So if you want to, I'm going to make mine a little bit smaller, like maybe 20. That then next I want to set the size of my progress bar, but we don't have a size box. So to do that, we're going to select our overlay right-click Wrap with. And then we want to find the size box here. So that's just added in a size box for us. Now we can choose what size our progress bar is going to be. So I'm going to turn on override width and override height. And I'm going to set the height to save 30. And then we'll set the width to say three-fifths. For now. Now we're going to select our progress bar and just tell it to use up all of the available space so we'll fill horizontally and also vertically. Now currently we're previewing for a 1280 by 720 size screen. So we're going to change this to from Phil screen to just add desired size onscreen like that. Just so we can get a better idea of how big or which it currently is. Next, we're going to select our textbook here that's over our progress bar. And I'm going to change this just to say 50 slash 100s so we can see what it will look like. I'm going to change the size to be a lot smaller. So we'll start with, say, 14 to 16. And we'll align this on the right-hand side. And we also want to align at center like that. So now we're going to be editing this text using code. So to do that, we're going to need it to be a variable. So I'm going to take on is variable and I'm going to change the name to health text. Like that. We're also going to be changing our progress bar. So I'm going to just rename this. You can see it's already ticked on as is variable. So I'm just going to call this health bar like that. Now I'm also going to add a little bit of padding to the right-hand side because I don't want the text to be right up at the edge of this progress bar, will open up the padding and set the right to say five pixels. Oh, sorry, we need to select our texts there, so make sure you've got text selected. And then we'll set the right side to about five pixels, or maybe four. And that just gives us a little bit of space between the edge of our progress bar and our text. Now we can compile and save this. And we're ready to actually write the code that's going to control our Health Bar. So we'll head over to the graph view. Now to update our Health Bar and our health texts, we're going to need to get a reference to the health component that we added to our character. So to do that, we're going to add some code to our Event Construct who start just by deleting these two notes because we're not going to be using them. And then we'll get our owning place or do you get Owning Player? And this gives us the controller that owns this widget. So from that we can do gets controlled ****. And this gives us a reference to our character, but as a point object reference. And then from that we can do get components by class. And then we can check, does our **** have the health component? If it does, then we want to set that. We'll drag out from return value. Do you promote a variable? And we call this health component like that. Now, before we set this, we wanna do some checks. So first we want to check that we are controlling something. So we'll do is valid here like that. And if it's valid, then we will allow setting the health component like that. So now we're ready to create our bind function. So we'll compile and head back to the designer view. And we'll start by selecting our health bar here. And we'll go over to the Details panel and find the present value. Then we want to use the bind option and do Create Binding. So to start with, we want to check is our health component valid? So we'll get the health component and do is valid like that. That would just stop us from getting any errors. Then we need to get our current health and also our max offer. So it will drag out and do get current health and get max health, like clap. And then we need to divide our current health by r max health. And this will give us a value from 0 to one. That we can then use for our progress bar. But first we need to convert these to be floats. So we'll do to float. That will give us this note. It will just copy and paste that here. Plugger whole fin or imax health in here. Then we'll use our current health and do divide. Divide, and we divide our current health by r max out. And this will give us a value from 0 to one. And that will tell our progress bar how far to be. And then we can just plug this in here like that. Then if our health component it's not valid, we can just copy and paste this return value and plug it into not valid and we'll just return 0. Next, we need a binder for our texts. So we'll go back to the designer and we'll select the text inside our progress bar here. Then for the text value will select bind and do Create Binding. And we'll do the same thing with our health components. So we'll get that and we'll check is valid. And connect this up to our beginning node like that. Then we want to get our current health. So get current health and get the max health like that, which is line, these are a bit better. Now, we need to actually return some texts. So we'll drag out from our return value and use the format text node like that. Then we need an entry for our current health. So we'll use open bracket, we'll call this current health. And then close bracket. And we'll hit Enter and you can see that adds a new value for us. So I'll plug our current health into there. And then in our format texts value here, we will do a slash and then we'll do open bracket, max health, and then close bracket and then enter now. And that creates us a new Max healthfully. And we'll plug that in here like that. Then if it's not valid, we're just copy, paste or return node and we'll plug that in and just leave that value empty. So now all of our code is set up. If we head back to the designer, you can spend as much time as you like editing this and making it look how you want. I am going to do one thing and that's changed the color of our Health Bar. So I'm going to select it and I'm going to go down to the Fill, Color and Opacity. And I'm just going to select this and I'm going to change it to a nice green color just to stand for health. And then I'll hit OK, compile and save this. Now we can add this to our hut, so we'll go back to the content browser and open up the BP HUD. In the palette, we'll search for health, and we'll drag in our BP Health Bar like that. And I'm just going to put mine in the bottom corner there. I'm also going to change the anchor. So because this is the closest anchor point, that's where I'm going to use. So we'll set it to the bottom left-hand side like that. Now, you can resize the switch it. So if I drag it out, you can see our Health Bar gets larger and smaller. Or you can take on size to content. And that will just make sure that the widget is always the same size as it was inside this widget editor here. So now we can compile and test this out. So we'll hit play. And you can see that our value is showing up at saying a 100 out of 100 if I run into this box here, you can see that our health decreases each time I entered the box. If we exhale plan editor and go to our character blueprint and change our health settings here. So if we select the health component, say I set the max health to 500 and we set the starting half to 250. You will see that when we compile and hit play, I hope by just automatically updates, it says 250 out 500 and our progress bar is halfway through as well. So now I'll just X out and I'm just going to set those values back to their default. So a 100100. Now if you want to make any more customizations, you can just go to your health bar here and make any changes you'd like. If you want to change the size of the progress bar, you can select the size box and we can change these values here. If you want to change the size of the text, you can just select those and you can change the font sizes here. And also here. We're done for this lesson. Hopefully you now understand a little bit more about how we can get values from other blueprints and then display them in a widget. 56. Gameplay Systems (Respawning): Hey everyone, In this lesson we're gonna be setting up a response system. And that's going to include a HUD that will display when we die, we'll be able to click respond button, and that will create us a new character that will take control of. So to get started, we'll create our respondents. So we're going to go to the Content Browser, do add, and we want to add a user interface and a Widget. Blueprint is gonna be a use of widget. And we'll scroll down to the bottom. And I'm going to call my BP underscore, respond HUD like that. And we'll open that up. I'm just going to drag mine to the top bar like that. This is going to replace our normal HUD. So we are going to use a canvas panel for this. So it will search for Canvas and add that to the hierarchy like that. Now, I'm just going to add a simple button to this that we can collect a response. So we'll grab a button. I'm just going to drag this in. I'm going to change the anchor point to the center because I want my button near the center. I'm also going to change the alignment to 0.50.5, just so our location is in the center of our widget hip. And I'm going to set this to 0 and the x. And I'm just going to hold shift and drag it down a little bit so it'll be about here. And now I can add some texts, my buttons, so it will search for text. I'm just going to drag out on top of my button. And we'll have this say re, sport like that. Now I'm going to stop my button again and just do size to content so it gets bigger to fit the text here. I'm going to change the text color to be black just so it's a little bit easier to see. Again Start button. Now you could spend as much time as you want in here making this look how you want. I'm just glad a bit of text, I'm going to have again anchor at the center will change its alignment again to 0.50.5. And we'll set the x to 0. And I'm going to hold Shift again and just move it down. And I'm just going to have this texts say you have like that. And we'll have this aligned in the center and size to content. Now we're ready to add some code to our third-person character. So we'll go to the content browser and open that up. Now in here connected up to I begin play, we've got some code that binds a play sound whenever we take damage, I'm just going to delete this because it's a little bit annoying. So we'll delete that for now. And we're going to create a new bind for when I hit 0. So we'll grab our health component, drag out from that and do bind on health. And we want Bind Event to on health 0 here, like that. Then from event, we're going to drag out and do custom. And we want to add a customer. Then we will call this character died. Like that. Next we're going to add a due once notes, so we'll drag out and do, do once. And this will just mean that this code only runs once. Then we want to check, is our HUD currently valid? It should be, but we want to check anyway. So we'll do is valid. And we'll connect this up to here. And we're going to remove our hub now. So we'll drag out and do remove from parents. And this acts as a way of destroying a widget. So we'll add this to as valid. And then we want to actually spawn our response. So we'll drag out from here, do create widget, and we'll set the class to respond. We want it to be respond HUD, winning player will do get player controller like that. Then we want to actually set our responded to a variable. So we'll drag out from the return value, do promote the variable. I'll call this respond. Then we need to add this to the player screen. So we'll drag out and do Add to Viewport like that. Then we want to make sure that the is not valid PIN is plugged into our Create Widget node. And now to keep things tidy, we're going to highlight all of this and collapse it down to a function. So we'll right-click and do collapsed function, and we'll call this create respawn, HUD like that. So all of that code is now contained inside this function here. And we can move this to be a little bit tinier. We can add some reroute nodes. Two are not valid. Wire here like that. Just to tidy things up. Then we'll compile and save this. Next, we'll head back to the Event Graph. Now after we've created our responded here, we want to disable any movement inputs for our character. So we'll right-click and search for disabled. We want disable input. And then we'll do get player controller and connect this up to the player controller and put her. Now if we wanted to, we could have a deaf animation play here. Now I don't have any, but what we're gonna do instead is set up a rag doll. So when we die, our character would play like a rhabdo effect. So to do that, we'll get our mesh components. So we want the mesh component from the Components panel we're going to drag out and we're gonna do set simulate. We want set simulate physics. And we'll connect this up to disable input. We want to take this on. Then we'll drag out from Michigan and we want to do is set all bodies. Spell correctly, Bodies Simulate Physics here. We want to take that on as well. Then we want to change its collision profile. So for that we're going to drag out and do Set collision. And we want Set Collision profile name. Connect this up here. We want to set this in collision profile name to rag doll. So capital R and then rag doll spelled exactly like this. This code is actually what's going to make our character rag doll when we die. So we're going to collapse this to a function as well. So we'll right-click and do collapse function. And we'll call this start Greg, though, like that. And again, let's just keeps things nice and tidy and all of that code is just contained in that function. Now, like that, we could also add a note in here for our Character Movement Component. So we could grab that and do stop movement. And we could do stop movement immediately. This just means that our character won't continue to receive any movement inputs. So once you're done, should look like this. Now back in our Event Graph, we might want our character's dead body to disappear after some amount of time. So to do that, we can drag out and do lifespan. We want set lifespan. And this is how many seconds after this node is run, the actor will exist for before we destroy it. So if I set this to say ten seconds, after ten seconds, our character's body will disappear. Now you may want a dead variable that's just a Boolean that's true when the character is dead. We won't be using it in this example. But if you did, we could create a new variable, call this dead. We could set this here as well, just so we've got a variable that tells us that we are dead. And you could use that in other code if you wanted to. Next, we're actually going to set up a custom controller. And the reason we're doing this is our character's body could disappear after ten seconds and then maybe we start idle on the response screen. Now, if our response code was in the character and it had been destroyed, if we click the respond button, nothing would happen because our character would have been destroyed, but the place controller will always exist. So we want to put our response code in that. So to do that, we're going to create a new custom controller, will go to the Content Browser, then add Blueprint class, and then we want the player controller. And that will create us a new blueprint. We'll call this BP underscore example controller. Like now. We'll open that up and I'm just going to drag mine to the bar here. Then we'll go to the Event Graph. And then here we're going to create a new function to actually find the location where we are going to respond our character. So we'll create a new function. I'm going to call this random respond point. Like that. We're going to add an output. This will be a location. So we want this to be a vector and we'll call this location like that. Then we're going to do or work disconnect this return note for now. We'll drag out from this and do get or actors of class. And with that, we're going to use the player start. Now, this is an active that's built into the engine. So we haven't created that actually just comes with the engine. Then from that we want to drag out and do length. We'll do is greater than 0. So we're just checking that there are at least one star in our level. So we'll do f. And if true will run at our random check. And if false, we'll just have to get to a location. So for this, we can do something like 300 and the Z just to make sure we don't fall through the ground. But this will only be used if we don't have any player starts and the level, ideally you always want to have at least one in your level. So from that, we can actually make a local variable to store this just to keep things tidy. So we'll drag out from here, do promote a local variable. We'll just call this player Scott. I'd like to put a L at the end of local variables just so it's easy to tell that they are local. So I'll do players start capital L like that. Connect that up to here. And I will take the output and plug that in here. Just keep things tidy. And then we'll get the plaster. We want to randomly pick one of the entries in this array for our player, spawn up. For that, we're going to drag out and we're gonna do get length again. And then we want random integer. We want random integer from a random integer in range. And then for minimum, we want this to be 0, and then maximum we want this to be the length minus one. So subtract one. This will be our max like that. So this will get us a random number between 0 and whatever the current max number of entries that are in our player starts. And then from that we can do, we can copy and paste this variable, do gap and get a copy. And then we'll plug this into the integer. This tells us which players start we want to get. Then we just get its location. So we do get back to location, will return this. So I'll just copy and paste. I return node, plug location into the location and plug this over here into true like that. We can make this a bit straighter, tie this up, and then we'll compile and save this. Now this function will get a random player start for our character to be respond that we'll head to the Event Graph now. And we're going to delete both of these because we're not going to be using them. Then we're going to create a new custom events or right-click and do custom. And we want to add a customer. Then I'm going to call this respawn character like that. And we're going to start with our random respond point. So we'll get that like that. Then we want to respond our character. So we'll drag out from here and do spawn actor from class. Now, for the class we want this to be whatever our default **** is in our game mode. So what we'll do is we'll search for get Game Mode. From that, we can do get default poem. And this will be whatever Default Pawn Class we have set in our game mode. So we'll plug that into class. Then for spawn transform, we'll drag out and do a make transform. I'm just gonna move this back a little bit so we've got a bit more space. Then we'll take the location from our random respond point and plug it into location like that. And we'll set the default collision handling to try to adjust location, but always spawn because we always want our character to be spawned. Then we'll click the down arrow here and we'll set the owner to be our controller. So we'll just use self and we'll plug that into owner as well. Now, because we're in the controller, we just want to possess this new character that we've responded. So I'll drag out from return value, do you possess? And we can possess that character and we can leave the target itself because we're inside a controller. So now we'll compile and save that. And we're gonna go back to our respond hard because in here we need to add some code that's going to run when we press R respond button, it will select the button here and we'll go down to the unclicked in the Details panel. Click that. And then here we need this to run our response event inside our example controller. So to do that, we'll right-click and search for Get Owning Player. And this gives us a reference to our controller. So all we need to do then is cost to the example controller. Connect that up to here. And that will allow us to call our response character event. Now when we add all respond hard to play a scream, we want it to release our mouse so we can actually collect our response button. So to do that, we're going to add some code to the Event Construct, just going to delete the event tick and the event preconstructed. Then we're gonna do get player controller again. So we'll do get Owning Player. And from that, we can use show mouse. We want to set show mouse cursor to true. Then we want to set the input mode to game and gy. Then we'll plug that in here. And we want the widget hair to be self, so we'll search yourself. And this is just telling us that our mouse cursor is now visible and we're using this widget as our focus. I'm going to uncheck hide mouse during capture because all that does is when you hold the left mouse button down and drag while the widgets visible, it will hide our mouse. So personally, I don't like that, so I'm going to uncheck that. Now once we've clicked, I'll respond button. We want our mouse to be hidden again. So we'll copy this code here, and it will paste that in here. And we'll set our mouse cursor to not be visible. And then we want to set the input mode to game. So we'll do set input mode to game only, will connect up here. And then lastly, we want to hide our respond hard once we've collected respond. So we'll drag out and we'll do destroy or sorry, not destroy, remove parents moved from parents. And that acts like a destroy node. So when we click our respond, berm will tell our characters code in the controller to respond or hide our mouse. And we'll enter game mode only, and then we'll remove our respond heard from the screen. Now, we're not actually using our example controller yet, so we need to go to our game mode. So we'll head to the content browser and find the third-person game mode. Open that up, you can find the player controller or the default player controller class here. And we can change that to be the BP example controller. Then we'll compile and save this. Now another thing we need to add is our characters collision for when they've died. Now, we don't want our character to keep blocking things once they're dead. So we're going to add a new collision profile. So we'll go up to Edit Project Settings. And then here we wanna go down to collision. And then presets. We're going to add a new preset. I'm going to call this dead ****. We're going to Set Collision Enabled to query only. We're going to set object type to **** them for everything else which is going to take ignore. And then we're going to take block for both static and dynamic. We're going to use this collision profile for our capsule. So when the player dies, heel rag doll, but his capsule will still be where we died. Now we don't want, if we respond that us to run over to our body and hit into the capsule. So what this will do is make our capsule not interfere with our player's collision. But it will stop our capsule falling through the ground because we don't have wild static and dynamic blocked. Our capsule might just fall straight through the ground. And now we actually need to set our capsule to use this. So we'll hit Accept and then go to third person. And we could add this into our code here, but I'm actually going to add mine to the start rag doll. So we'll open that up and we're gonna get our capsule components. So that's it from our components panel. Drag out and do Set collision. And we want the circulation profile name. And we'll just add this to the anterior. This is gonna be dead ****, spelled exactly like this. Now another thing we're going to change in our character in the Event Graph is this code here is all being run by our event begin play. But now we have a response system. We want to change this to be only run when we possess the character. So we can right-click and search for event possess. And we can use Event possessed and plug this in here. And then we can actually delete the beginning play. And now whenever this character gets possessed by a controller, it will then run this code. Now another thing we can add is if you remember, our lockout actor Tracy is going to be running 30 times a second, but we want to stop that when we dive because we're no longer going to be interacting with things. So if you remember, we created our look at Act a timer and we can use this to stop it. So over here, we can just add this onto the end. We'll get our look at timer, drag out from that and do clear and invalidate time I buy handle. And this will actually stop our trace like that. And we'll compile this. Now one last thing that we need to changes in our health bus, so we'll head over there and our content browser will find it at the top here. Open that up. Then we'll head to the Event Graph. And if you remember, inheres where we get our pawns health component. The problem with this right now is now we have a response system or control or may not have taken control of the **** when this code runs. So all we need to do is add a one frame delay. So we'll search for delay and we use delay until next tech. And all this does is add a single frame delay to when this code will run. And by then, our controller will have taken control of our ****. Now we're ready to test this out. We'll compile and head back to the Content Browser. I am going to change the damage that are damaged zone does so I'll open that up. I'm going to increase this to say 40 will compile. And now we can hit play and test this out. So if I run into the damage zone, you can see we're taking 40 damage. And now when I run in for the last time, you'll see our character dies. Rag dolls on the floor. We can hit respond to spawn a new character. You can see that our interaction is still working. If I press E, that's working correctly. If we run into the zone again, we can kill this character as well. Now we have a fully functioning response system. Now you may want to add new spawn points for your character. So to do that, we can exit out and we'll go to the drop-down here, then two basic and we can add a new player start just by dragging this in. We can add in a second one, so it will go to Basic again, then Player Start and we'll add one over here. Now when we hit play to play in that step, we may spawn or even one of these new points. So we'll hit Play. You can see we've actually spawned at the original one, but if we run into the damage zone to kill ourselves, we can respond. And you can see it's respond me at the original again. But if we do it again, we've responded at different spawn point. So that's it for this lesson. Hopefully you found the information useful and you now know how to set up a response system for your future projects. 57. Gameplay Systems (Crouching): Hey everyone. In this lesson I'm gonna be showing you how to set up a crouching system for your characters. Now, you can use any crouching animations you like. I'm gonna be using the lesson animations that we used earlier on in the course. And to download those, just go to the link in the course description. You can download that file, then extract them, and you should end up with a folder that looks like this. Now we're going to add these to our project. So all we do is right-click and do copy. Then go back to the engine. Then we'll right-click the content folder here. And we want to go show in Explorer. And that'll bring up our project files here. And we're just going to paste these in that. Now you can see it's shown up in the engine here. Now, yours may or may not have firewalls inside. So if we open it, you can see mine is working, but if yours doesn't have any animations inside, just close the engine and then reopen it and it should show up. Now the first thing you need to do is create a new blend space because the lesson animations doesn't actually include a pre-made blend space for our crouching, but it does include all of the animations we need to create one. So it will create a new blend space. Now, I'm just going to click Add, then go to animation. And we want to find the blend space option here. And we need to select our character skeleton. So that's this one here. You can see it says path game, characters, mannequins, and then meshes. So we'll select that one. And we're going to name this blend space, crouch like that. And we'll open that up. I'm just going to drag mine to the top bar like that. So to get started, we need to set up our axis so we'll start with the horizontal. This is going to be all direction. So search for direction. We're going to set the minimum value to minus 180 and then positive value to positive 180. And if you remember from our blend space is less than, That's because we need to be able to set an animation for all of the different directions that our character can be going. Next, we need the vertical axis, so we'll open that and we'll set this to be the speed. And we'll leave the minimum axis value at 0. And then our maximum axis value will be wherever your walk speed is when you're crouching. So if we are planning to 300, then we're going to set this to 300. Now this is important because if I set this to say 600 and we set animations for our crouch walking at this 600 value. If our character was walking around when crouched at 300, then the animations that will be played will be in the center part here. So if we had animations at the bottom and at the top, we'd get half of the animations from the top and half from the bottom. And then our animations wouldn't look very good. So we want our maximum access value at the top here to be whatever our max crouch walk speed is going to be. For me, I'm going to set up to 300, so I'll set this to 300 as well. I'm also going to take on Snap to Grid for both the vertical and horizontal axis. Now if you remember from our animation lessons, we can't actually use our crouch animation chat because we need to set up our skeletons to be compatible. So to do that, we're going to go to characters, then to mannequins, meshes. We're going to open up SK mannequin. And then here we want to go to the Windows and then we want to find asset details and tick that off. For compatible skeletons, we want to add a new option. And we want this to be the skeleton that came with the lesson animations. So that's gonna be this one here you can see it says path less than animations. So we'll click that one. And then we'll save our skeleton. And we can close this asset details and head back to our blend space. Now, for our animations to show up in the asset browser, we might need to restart our blend space, so we'll just save it and close, and then I will reopen it. So that's in my lesson animations. And we're going to open up the blend space crouch. And now we should be able to find all of our animations here in the asset browser. So it will start just by searching for crouch. And that should show up all of our crouch animations here. So we'll start with the idle animation. So I'm going to put these at the bottom for the 0 speed. So it will grab the rifle, crouch, idle, and plug that here, here and here like that. Next we need the walk forward animation, and that's gonna be in the center because that's for direction 0. So we're going to grab the ford option here and drag that to the top middle, like that. Then we want the backwards, so we'll grab that one and that's gonna be at both the minus one AT direction and the positive 180 direction. Then we want the left. So we'll grab the left animation and plug that in here. And then right over here. Now, when we hold control, we can preview our animation and make sure that all of them are playing correctly, which it looks like they are. Now we can save and close this. We're also close our skeleton as well. And we're going to head over to the ThirdPersonCharacter Blueprint. So that's gonna be in the third person folder, blueprints, and then we'll find the third-person character. Now, our character blueprint actually has a built-in crouched system that we can use. So all we need to do is add an input. So I'm going to search for input and then we spell it and put the input event that we go control. I'm going to use the left control. Then we're going to right-click and search for crouch. And we want the crouch function. And I'm going to plug this into pressed and then right-click and search for on crouch. And we want the crouched connected up to the release like that. Now currently this one actually worked because our character doesn't have can crouch enabled. So it will go to the Character Movement here and search for can crouch. And we want to take on can crouch under movement capabilities like that. So now we can test this out. We'll compile it and hit Play. And now if I press Control, you can see my camera moves down. And when I move, I'm walking slower because we're using our crouch walk speed, but our animations on actually changing because we haven't hooked up them yet. So we're going to head to the Animation Blueprint. So it will actually out plan editor, go to characters than mannequins, than animations and open up the money Animation Blueprint. And I'm just going to drag mine up to the top pair. Now, like we did in the animation section of this course, we have our states lesson. We're going to add a new state for our Crunch animations. So we'll head to the Anim graph then to locomotion. Now there's quite a few different ways that you could set this up. If you look here, we've got a state for all you do animation and then I'll walk slash run. Now, our blend space actually has the idle animations built in. So we can just use one state for crouching. And it will update whether or not we're moving or idle for us. But if you're using a blend space that didn't have those idle animations. And then you would need a crouch idle state and a crouch movement state, like we do for our normal idle. And then I'll walk slash run. For us. We're just going to right-click and use the state. And we're going to call this crouch like that. We'll open it up and hook up our blend space so it will drag out and such will blend space. And we want linspace Claire here. And then in the Details panel, we want to set the blend space to our blend space crouched. You can see it's updated for direction and speed. We will just compile and we'll get our speed. So we'll drag out and do get speed. And we will use the get ground speed. Now, we need to set up a direction variable. So we'll do that now go ahead to the Event Graph and we'll create a new variable. We'll call this direction. We need to set this to a float like that. Now we're also going to add another variable for if the character is crouching. So we'll create a new one and we'll call this is crouching. And we'll set this as well. We need this to be a Boolean like that. So now to get our direction, we need our velocity. So we'll right-click and do get velocity. And that should be at the bottom here. Then from that we'll drag out and search for calculate direction. This will take our velocity and our characters rotation and returned and direction for us. So we're going to need the character variable. So we will do get character. And then from that we wanna do get rotation. We want the get's act of rotation and plug that into base rotation. And then from our Calculate direction, we can set our direction. So we'll do set direction. We can hook this up to our sequences. So I'll add a new pin, plug this in here, and I'll add to reroute know just to keep things tidy like that. Now we need to set R is crouching variables, so we'll drag that in and create a set node. Then we'll do get movement. And we want the gap movement component. From that we're going to do crouch. Spell correctly crouch. And we want the is crouching node here. And we'll just plug that into our crouching and then we'll add a new pen to sequence and connect that up here. Again, I'm just going to add a reroute now just to keep things looking a bit too idea. So now we can head back to our crouch state. And in here we need to plug in r direction like that. And then we can compile. And now we need to set up the rules that actually interests into the crowd stapes. So we'll go to the locomotion. Then we'll drag from idle to crouch, and we'll also drag from Walk, slash run to crouch as well. And we'll open up the idle to crouch rule. Then here we just want to get the is crouching and plug it into the variable hip. And then we'll do the same thing in our walk slash rum. And we'll plug that in here. Then we need rules to go back from our crouch to our idle or walk slash run. So we'll drag from Crouch to idle and then we'll open up that rule. And then here we just want to get is crouching, not true. So we'll drag out and do not beryllium and plug that in here. And then we wanna do the same thing. We've dragged from Crouch to walk slash run. Open up that rule. And in here we want to do the same thing is crouching, not true, so we'll try it out and do not Boolean. But we also want to check, are we moving? So we'll drag out from here and do and plug that in here. And then we want to get should move, so should move, plug that in here. So it should look like this. Now will compile and we can actually test this out. So we'll select the is crouching variable, take this on. You can see it is going up and down like it should. So we'll compile and actually test this in game. So it will head to our map, hit Play. And now when I press Control, you can see we actually crouch, are crouch, idle animation is playing. If I walk forward and side to side, movement animations are also playing. Now currently our character just faces the direction that we're moving. And the reason it does that is if you remember, I walked slash run blend space is a 1D, so it just has forward and backwards. It doesn't have side side animations like our crouch does. So if we wanted to have our side side animations play while we're in crouch, we would need to change our character's movements settings. So to do that will exhale planets to, and if we head back to our ThirdPersonCharacter, we can select the character movement. And in here we're going to search for orientate rotation to movement. You can see that currently it's turned on, which means whenever our character moves in a direction, the actor will face that direction. Turn this off and compile hit Play. You'll see that if I move side to side, our character no longer faces the direction we're moving in. And the reason I animation is doing this is because we only have forward and backwards animations. But if we crouch and we move side to side, you can see that our character actually place the correct animations. And that's because our crouches a 2D blend space with animations for each direction. Right now, if I look the camera in a different direction, it doesn't matter where I look. Our character is always going to face the same way. So what we could do to change this is to go to the ThirdPersonCharacter here, then select the top component here to get our cost defaults. And then here we can search for York and we can take on use controller rotation. You're now when we hit Compile and hit Play, you can see that I can move side to side and walk slash run doesn't play very well, but our crouch does. And if I look in a different direction, you can see our character actually looks in that direction. So we can change the direction we're looking at now. Now of course, all of these settings you can change during runtime when certain things happen. So for example, maybe you only wanted to enable or disable orientate rotation to movement when you crouch, You could do that by just getting the character movement here, dragging out and searching orientate, scroll down to the bottom. And you can do set orientate rotation to movement. We can set this to true when we crouch and untrue when we crouched. Or we could change that. You're setting that we turned on inside our class defaults here. We could change this. So we could do set, use control of rotation. You're, and we can turn this on or off whenever we want. All these settings are personal preference. It totally depends on how you want your character to move and how you want the player to be able to control them. Now, if you wanted to change your characters crouched movement speed, we can do that in the character movement here, which get rid of this search. We can just search for crouch and you'll find the max walk speed crouched here. You can also change your crouched half height. So this is how large the capsule component inside the character will be while you're crouching. And you can also turn whether or not the character can walk off a ledge, wild crouching. Again, these things can be changed in code. You can just grab the Character Movement Component, drag out, do set the max crouch, and you can change that max walk speed crouched in code if you wanted to. Now lastly, maybe you want to set up crouch to be toggle instead of hold. We can do that. So we'll delete this code here and we'll disconnect these for now and move them back. We'll use pressed and do a branch node. And here we want to check is the character currently crouched. So to do that, we'll get character movement, get the crouched or is crouching will plug that into here. And if we are currently crouching than we want to crouch, and if we're not currently crouching, we want to crouch. So it will reorder these like that. Now when I hit Play, you'll see if I press crouch. I stay crouched. And if I unpriced crouch, we go out of Crouch and we don't have to hold it down anymore. So that's the end of this lesson. Hopefully you now understand how to set up a simple crouch system for your future characters.