Learning Unreal

By: Jesse Kives (Programmer)

           Before I began this class, I had a little bit of knowledge on how the unreal engine works. I knew more about the modeling and design aspect even though I am a programmer. This class helped me focus mainly on the programming portion of unreal. At first, I was a little confused with how the programming works since it isn’t traditional writing code on a software. So, this class got me more used to the different style and helped me learn more about all the different abilities you can do with the programming.

           This semester I created a control movement widget for the game designers. I made this so that it would be much easier for the designers to decide on how exactly they wanted the movement of their character to work. At first it seemed very difficult since I wasn’t an expert on the unreal engine, but the programming lead helped me understand the logic and set up for unreal and then it made much more sense and was able to finish it. Even though it took me a while to make and was frustrating at times, the pay off from finishing it was worth it because I think its really cool to see people use the widget that I created. I would highly recommend this class even if you’re new to unreal because you will learn a lot about unreal in just a trimester.

By: Max Shiraishi (Programmer)

            You’ll learn quite a bit about Unreal Engine 4 while working with the fine folks over at the DePaul Original Game Studio. My main task for this quarter was to work on a editor utility widget to control some values for Rose. It was necessary to dig through quite a few blueprints to find the values that were necessary for our designers to edit on the fly with the widget. In doing so, I gained greater familiarity with the project and how all the pieces of the puzzle talked to each other.

            Making an Unreal Engine editor utility widget (euw) is like making a piece of the game that only the internal team will ever get to play, specifically a menu. The UI needs to be designed before blueprint scripting can be set up to allow that UI to have a meaningful effect. It’s important to know beforehand what you’d like the euw to actually even do. In our case, It would edit some variables relating to the movement of our protagonist, Rose. Her walking speed, running speed and other such values were put on individual sliders. Once these sliders were all in place, some clever blueprint scripting in the euw would change the values for these variables within their respective scripts. At a certain point in the development process, it was decided that there should also be a text field in the widget that could edit each variable’s data. With this change in place, a designer would be able to precisely edit Rose’s movement variables with a text input rather than having to rely on the imprecision a slider brings to the table. Tests that denote different walking speeds could be conducted that could take note of precise values for each of Rose’s variables. Overall, this euw was a good entry point into the project, and the implementation of similar widgets might prove beneficial to the designers and programmers that need to test on the fly.

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