Week 23, Year 2 To know and to know how

So this week was really the same as last week. I just did some touch ups on some of my models and started to unwrap them. It’s really handy now because with unreal 4.7 you can just grab the export of your model and then just drop and drop it into the contents folder in the UE 4 project folder. What has really help speed things up. So when someone has finished a model and puts it into the file, if I have the project open I can import it in for them. No more need for them to have to open the unreal project as well.

I big thing that my team needed to do was make the level work from start to finish. This is still something we have not got done yet. We have got are starting area to work but we still needed to get all the puzzles working and add an end to the level. Luckily we already had 2 puzzles working. We need to get the anamorphic puzzle to work and get the stairs puzzle to work. The problem with the stairs was that we need to make just a new model and make the collision like a wage. So the player think he is going up some stair but really it’s just a slope.

The real problem was the anamorphic puzzle. The idea is that, when the play is in the right place they could look around and when they look at the right place it would trigger a door to open. James (another member in my team) had already try to make it, he had got the trigger to work. So that when the player is in the right spot, the area you have to look at become active. If the player in not in the spot and looks at the area then it will not trigger. Sounds like an easy idea right… well sadly not because to make this work it need to be in 2 different blueprints and not in the level blueprint.

So the problem was that I need to tell the look at Activator, when the player was in the trigger or not. The trigger blueprint had a variable in it that told it if the player was in it or not. I had to find a way to get that variable into the Activator blueprint so it knew what to do but you can’t just copy a paste it, and that what I know in my head what I have to do, but to know how to do it I had no idea. I did come across this document on the unreal engine website 

(https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Engine/Blueprints/UserGuide/BlueprintComms/index.html) 

It talks about how to get to blueprints to communicate between each other. I knew that I had found what I was looking for but I found it hard to understand how it works. After many tries by me and James we could not get it to work and really that’s all because we only knew how it should work but we did not have the knowhow to make it work. Lucky for us we knew someone that had the know and the know how to make it work for us.

To know how something should work is one thing but to then know how to make it work is something very different and this really goes for unreal blueprints. There are many tutorials that can show you how to do thing and from them you get the know-how but some of these tutorials will miss out, the how it works. So if you try and try and make something new you may not know what to do because you don’t have the know how it should work. This is the problem I had but the other way round, I knew how it should work but I did not have the know-how to make it work in the blueprints.

What I do know now is that I need to learn more about the different nodes in the blueprints and how they all work with each other. So I can get the know-how.