As I checked the list of videos I had on my YouTube watch later I thought about all the things I still need to learn. I went through them and tried to find the most relevant and vital to handling the player character. I started off with a recent video on using the control rig in Unreal 4.26. As far as I know the control rig is an animation tool to be used within the engine to make animating easier, this way you can create, update, and more, on animations you have without having to go to another software such as blender. It was a three hour long video and I didn’t watch the whole thing because it was very high level, basically beyond me. The lecture was very interesting but a lot of it was for those who already knew how to use the control rig, or those who had prior knowledge of it. So if I want to know the basics of the control rig I need to look elsewhere.
The next video I watched was 2 hours and a bit. It was done by one of my favorite Unreal teachers, Zak Parrish. I forget what other lectures he has done, but he is a very excellent teacher. The lesson was on Blueprint communication. Basically it went over different ways you have different objects talk to each other. This was very useful because I have been using these things such as interfaces, events, and event dispatchers but I wasn’t entirely sure what they were and how to manipulate them fully. A lot of the tutorials I watch simply tell me what to do without really explaining the basics. It’s important to know the basics because the player character will be interacting with most if not all things in the game. I need to know and decide which form of communication is best in certain situations.
Blueprint communication is basically having a sender and a receiver, depending on what you are trying to accomplish you can connect them in different ways. The thing I was using a lot but didn’t understand fully were blueprint interfaces. These are things you must add to the blueprint themselves and anything can easily call and use the interface, which is useful when you are sending information such as damage, type, etc. to another object. I had been using it for damage and moving physics objects in my game.
With this new knowledge I will again pour through the code of the player character to see if there is anything I can improve and clean up. I’ll probably add more comments, fix some wiring, and make sure everything works. I know a lot more than I did months ago so I might spot something that I see can be done better with what I’ve learned. I just have to be keen enough to identify where I can do better, and that will be difficult because there is already so much. The grind continues.
GoldenGratus Games 