Monthly Archives

November 2018

Unreal C++ Tutorial – Player Character Series – Punch – Part 3 – Collision events

By | Development, Tutorial, Unreal | No Comments

Hey guys,

Today we are going to jump into exploring collision events and continue from our last tutorial.

Now to get our collision events working we are going to go over the following topics:

  • Delegates – 04:00 – delegates allow us to defer logic from specific events to our internal methods based on aligning our method signature with what the delegate expects.
  • OnComponentHit – 05:00 – OnComponentHit provides is with information when a block event occurs between two entities in the world.
  • FHitResult – 15:00 – the FHitResult struct contains a lot of important information not only about the entity we are colliding with but also all the details about the collision, point of impact, various transform vectors, time, distance, etc etc
  • OnComponentBeginOverlap / OnComponentEndOverlap – 18:00 – these are notifications that will fire during the course of our animation playback and trigger specific events on our player character. In our case we are simply going to enable the collisions on our collision boxes.

As usual we have our starter project on GitHub as well as the final version for you to try out. Additionally here are a few links to do some further reading on the items we discussed.

Thanks for taking a look and tune back for more.

Unreal Project Copy / Rename Tool

By | Development, Tool, Unreal | No Comments

Hey everyone,

Recently I’ve been needing to make a lot of copies of my projects to support the various tutorials I am producing and I very quickly realized that merging from multiple branches across multiple projects was extremely time consuming. The primary motivation for this tool was to be able to quickly work on one project to create a baseline, copy the baseline to a new project, and keep iterating without having to create a ton of git branches in a single project.

“UE-4Kopiarka”, as I am coining it, is a small utility that allows you to take one Unreal 4 Blueprint / C++ project and copy/rename/update file references from one directory to another.

It can also be used to move/rename any other directories or files but it may not behave 100% due to how it renames contents of ascii files.

Changelog

Release 1.0.1 – Download

  • fixed one minor issue where folders that had prefix or suffixes around the old project name would not get copied over correctly

Release 1.0.0 – Download

  • initial project release
  • only tested on Windows

 

Unreal C++ Tutorial – Player Character Series – Punch – Part 2 – Collisions

By | Development, Tutorial, Unreal | No Comments

Hey guys,

Today we are going to pick up where we left off last time with our Player Character and we are going to introduce collisions.

Now to get our collisions working we are going to jump into a few topics like:

  • Mesh Sockets – 1:45 – these sockets will allow us to attach our Box Components to parts of our fists during the firing of our animations
  • Box Components – 6:25 – these small collision boxes will allow us to apply specific collision profiles at run-time in order to trigger the interaction with our target
  • Animation Notify States – 31:15 – these are notifications that will fire during the course of our animation playback and trigger specific events on our player character. In our case we are simply going to enable the collisions on our collision boxes.

As usual we have our starter project on GitHub as well as the final version for you to try out. Additionally here are a few links to do some further reading on the items we discussed.

Thanks for taking a lookt and tune back for more.

Unreal C++ Tutorial – Player Character Series – Punch – Part 1

By | Development, Tutorial, Unreal | One Comment

Hey guys,

Today we have a new video in a series of videos looking at the Player Character.

Specifically we are going to examine various mechanics of the player character and how we can replicate them in C++. Some of the topics we are going to look at are animations, sound effects, particles, collisions and various other technical topics all in the form of fun skills and features we can introduce to our player.

Our first video is all about crafting a Punch mechanic using Animation Montages.

For this I have created a GitHub Project for you guys to start from, as well as the final version of the project listed under the “part1-end” GitHub branch.

If you would like more information about animation montages check out the following links:

 

Thanks for taking a look and tune back for more.

How to disable Oculus VR / Google VR / Steam VR plugins in Unreal Engine

By | Development, Tutorial | 2 Comments

Hey guys,

This is for all the Unreal devs out there who have a VR headsets and cannot stand the fact that the VR plugins are enabled by default, never fear ! Here is a quick little walk through of how to disable them.

With the Unreal Engine open do the following:

  • Go to Edit -> Plugins
  • Search for “VR” plugins
  • Note all the plugins you want to disable and who makes them

           

Now open up your file explorer and navigate to:

C:\Program Files\Epic Games\[ENGINE VERSION]\Engine\Plugins\Runtime

NOTE: you will have to repeat this exercise for all the versions of the Unreal Engine you use as they don’t carry over. In my case I had to update 4.21 and 4.20 independently.

 

Here you will notice all the various plugins that are available to the engine. We are going to look for the folders of the plugins we want to disable, in my case the Oculus one. This can be found under ..\Runtime\Oculus\OculusVR\OculusVR.uplugin

We are going to pop open the *.uplugin file in a text editor and look for the following line: “EnabledByDefault”: true

Change the “true” to a “false“.

Save your file. Restart Unreal Engine and now when you start a new project, BAM no more VR plugins by default.