Hey guys,
Today we resume our C++ Fundamentals lessons by looking at interfaces and how they can help simply our life by allowing for common contracts to be shared by different game actors.
As usual you can find the start project on our GitHub page.
What are these tags ? And why do I care ?
Tags are essentially a collection of strings that can be applied to an Actor or an Actors Component and then referenced by other Actors or parts of the game world by those tags.
Very similar to using tags on a blog to include metadata for search engines to query … like this blog !
Tags ?! We don’t need to no stinking tags !
Sure you do, and they are really easy to use which is why this post is going to be super short.
Take a look, in this case we are displaying all tags for a specific actor.
// iterate over all of our actors
for(TActorIterator<AActor> ActorIterator(GetWorld()); ActorIterator; ++ActorIterator)
{
AActor* Actor = *ActorIterator;
// ensure actor is not null
// ignore self if found
// ensure we find actors of a specific interface only
if(Actor && Actor != this && Actor->GetClass()->ImplementsInterface(UInteractiveActor::StaticClass()))
{
// display all available tags for an actor
for(FName Tag : Actor->Tags)
{
GEngine->AddOnScreenDebugMessage(-1, 5.f, FColor::Cyan, Tag.ToString());
}
}
}
We can also just check for a specific tag without iterating over all of them by using ActorHasTag method.
if(Actor->ActorHasTag(TagToCheck))
{
IInteractiveActor::Execute_Interact(Actor);
}
Wait you forgot about lerping ? What is lerping !?
Lerping is a way of translating between vector A and vector B over some period of time.
For example if you need to scale an object from one size to another you can use FMath::Lerp to accomplish this.
BaseMesh->SetWorldScale3D(FMath::Lerp(BaseMesh->GetComponentScale(), FVector(2.f, 2.f, 2.f), 0.05f));
In this example we go from vector A ( GetComponentScale() of our mesh ) to vector B ( 2x the size ) over a period of time represented by 0.05f time.
Take a look.
That’s it folks, not much more reading but here are a few links for you to check out: