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Unreal Engine C++ Fundamentals – Using Inheritance by moving the player & particles along a spline

By Tutorial, Unreal No Comments

Hey guys,

Today we are going to continue exploring our last tutorial by looking at inheritance and what it takes to refactor our class.

The project files for this video & article can be found on our GitHub page.

The majority of the inheritance work is by creating a base class that our children can derive from which contains the primary logic that all children are always expected to perform.

To do this we are going to take our previous MovingSplineActor class make some of it’s methods virtual and migrate all of it’s Mesh specific logic to a new MeshMovingSplineActor class.

My making our MovingSplineActor functions virtual we provide the child class to override said functions and implement it’s own logic.

Since we need to have our MeshMovingSplineActor do it’s own work on a static mesh that the parent MovingSplineActor those methods need to be accessible otherwise it’s going to cause conflicts in our logic.

UCLASS()
class UE4FUNDAMENTALS14LIVE_API AMovingSplineActor : public AActor
{
  GENERATED_BODY()
  
public:	
  // Sets default values for this actor's properties
  AMovingSplineActor();

protected:
  // Called when the game starts or when spawned
  virtual void BeginPlay() override;

public:	
  // Called every frame
  virtual void Tick(float DeltaTime) override;

  UFUNCTION()
  virtual void ProcessMovementTimeline(float Value);

  UFUNCTION()
  virtual void OnEndMovementTimeline();

  UFUNCTION()
  virtual void TriggerBeginOverlap(UPrimitiveComponent* OverlappedComponent, AActor* OtherActor, UPrimitiveComponent* OtherComp, int32 OtherBodyIndex, bool bFromSweep, const FHitResult& SweepResult);
  UFUNCTION()
  virtual void TriggerEndOverlap(UPrimitiveComponent* OverlappedComponent, AActor* OtherActor, UPrimitiveComponent* OtherComp, int32 OtherBodyIndex);
}

Additionally we need to ensure that the logic we had in our MovingSplineActor is available to our child class. In this case we need to move the SplineLocation and SplineRotation variables out of the initial processing logic and into their own protected variables.

protected:
  FVector StartingSplineLocation;
  FVector CurrentSplineLocation;
  FRotator CurrentSplineRotation;

We can then modify our CPP file to ensure those variables are populated.

void AMovingSplineActor::ProcessMovementTimeline(float Value)
{
  const float SplineLength = SplineComponent->GetSplineLength();

  CurrentSplineLocation = SplineComponent->GetLocationAtDistanceAlongSpline(Value * SplineLength, ESplineCoordinateSpace::World);
  CurrentSplineRotation = SplineComponent->GetRotationAtDistanceAlongSpline(Value * SplineLength, ESplineCoordinateSpace::World);
}

By migrating all of our logic to the MeshMovingSplineActor we need to ensure it inherits from our new parent class. To do this we need to modify the header definitions to change it from AActor.

UCLASS()
class UE4FUNDAMENTALS14LIVE_API AMeshMovingSplineActor : public AMovingSplineActor
{
  GENERATED_BODY()
  
public:	
  // Sets default values for this actor's properties
  AMeshMovingSplineActor();

protected:
  // Called when the game starts or when spawned
  virtual void BeginPlay() override;

public:	
  // Called every frame
  virtual void Tick(float DeltaTime) override;

  virtual void ProcessMovementTimeline(float Value) override;

  UPROPERTY(VisibleAnywhere, BlueprintReadOnly, Category = "Spline", meta=(AllowPrivateAccess = "true"))
  UStaticMeshComponent* MeshComponent;
};

With our headers defined we can now migrate the logic of actually moving the spline component into our new child actor.

AMeshMovingSplineActor::AMeshMovingSplineActor()
{
 	// Set this actor to call Tick() every frame.  You can turn this off to improve performance if you don't need it.
  PrimaryActorTick.bCanEverTick = true;

  MeshComponent = CreateDefaultSubobject<UStaticMeshComponent>(TEXT("Mesh Component"));
  MeshComponent->SetupAttachment(SplineComponent);

  TriggerComponent->SetupAttachment(MeshComponent);
}

// Called when the game starts or when spawned
void AMeshMovingSplineActor::BeginPlay()
{
  Super::BeginPlay();

  MeshComponent->SetWorldLocation(StartingSplineLocation);
}

// Called every frame
void AMeshMovingSplineActor::Tick(float DeltaTime)
{
  Super::Tick(DeltaTime);

}

void AMeshMovingSplineActor::ProcessMovementTimeline(float Value)
{
  Super::ProcessMovementTimeline(Value);

  FRotator SplineRotation = CurrentSplineRotation;
  SplineRotation.Pitch = 0.f;
  MeshComponent->SetWorldLocationAndRotation(CurrentSplineLocation, SplineRotation);
}

If you notice, each override method ends up calling “Super::MethodSignature()” in order to execute the logic in the parent. Since our parent is simply moving the timeline around we don’t have to worry about anything other than the mesh in our timeline.

So that’s it, you just did some inhertiance work by shuffling around a few class definitions.

If you would like to see more examples check out the video as well as the GitHub project for examples of child classes that move the player and particles around.

Unreal Engine C++ Fundamentals – Moving Static Meshes along a Spline Component

By Props, Tutorial, Unreal No Comments

Hey guys,

Today we are going to take a look how to use Spline Components and modify their various properties to allow us to specify custom materials as well as determine how meshes are attached to the spline.

The project files for this video & article can be found on our GitHub page.

Looking at our previous tutorial we know that splines are not terribly hard to work with but there is a bit of magic to having something move along a spline.

The key ingredient in this is the FTimeline. This allows us to keep track of an execution of values across a specific timeframe.

The FTimeline combined with a UCurveFloat gives us all that flexibility. So let’s look at the code to see how this all breaks down.

FTimeline MovementTimeline;

FOnTimelineFloat ProgressFunction; ProgressFunction.BindUFunction(this, TEXT("ProcessMovementTimeline")); MovementTimeline.AddInterpFloat(MovementCurve, ProgressFunction); FOnTimelineEvent OnTimelineFinishedFunction; OnTimelineFinishedFunction.BindUFunction(this, TEXT("OnEndMovementTimeline")); MovementTimeline.SetTimelineFinishedFunc(OnTimelineFinishedFunction); MovementTimeline.SetTimelineLengthMode(TL_LastKeyFrame); if(bAutoActivate) { MovementTimeline.PlayFromStart(); }

Looking over the code we can see that as part of the FTimeline definition we are specifying a function that will be executed during the runtime of the timeline.

UFUNCTION()
void ProcessMovementTimeline(float Value);

As well as a function at will be executed at the end of our timeline.

UFUNCTION()
void OnEndMovementTimeline();

Additionally we need to ensure that our timeline ticks as part of our object. For this we can examine the Tick method.

// Called every frame
void AMovingSplineActor::Tick(float DeltaTime)
{
  Super::Tick(DeltaTime);

  if(MovementTimeline.IsPlaying())
  {
    MovementTimeline.TickTimeline(DeltaTime);	
  }
}

Now let’s take a look at the magic around moving the mesh across the spline. This all happens within our ProcessMovementTimeline method.

void AMovingSplineActor::ProcessMovementTimeline(float Value)
{
  const float SplineLength = SplineComponent->GetSplineLength();

  const FVector CurrentSplineLocation = SplineComponent->GetLocationAtDistanceAlongSpline(Value * SplineLength, ESplineCoordinateSpace::World);
  FRotator CurrentSplineRotation = SplineComponent->GetRotationAtDistanceAlongSpline(Value * SplineLength, ESplineCoordinateSpace::World);

  CurrentSplineRotation.Pitch = 0.f;
  MeshComponent->SetWorldLocationAndRotation(CurrentSplineLocation, CurrentSplineRotation);
}

As you can see the logic is not that scary. We are simply taking the delta time by the lenght of the spline and retrieving that points location and rotation.

This is then applied to our mesh and we prevent the pitch from being corrected so our elevator / platform does not tip as it’s traversing along the spline.

Lastly let’s take a look at the function OnEndMovementTimeline() which is called at the .. you guessed it … end of our timeline.

UPROPERTY(EditAnywhere, BlueprintReadOnly, Category = "Spline", meta=(EditCondition = "!bRestartOnEndTimeline"))
bool bReverseOnEndTimeline;

UPROPERTY(EditAnywhere, BlueprintReadOnly, Category = "Spline", meta=(EditCondition = "!bReverseOnEndTimeline"))
bool bRestartOnEndTimeline;
void AMovingSplineActor::OnEndMovementTimeline()
{
  if(bReverseOnEndTimeline)
  {
    MovementTimeline.Reverse();
  }
  else if(bRestartOnEndTimeline)
  {
    MovementTimeline.PlayFromStart();
  }
}

This function is a great spot to put in logic for things like restarting the movement or reversing the movement by injecting some simple properties into our new object.

For further reading about these topics take a look at the following links: