Unreal Engine 4

I recently decided to go back to Unreal Engine and update myself, I've used Unreal on and off but my focus has mostly been on Unity. Soon after Unreal 4 came out I familiarised myself with the core features and blueprints using both Unreal's Youtube channel and Digital Tutors (now Pluralsight Creative).

Going back to Pluralsight now I found a bunch of much more advanced Unreal tutorials and chose to work my way through a selection of them (I still have a few more in my playlist to get to but I thought I'd make an update of my progress).

The first one I did was an advanced blueprinting tutorial, this made some pretty basic gameplay but it was really handy as it had a focus on interfaces, which I rarely work with in Unity and hadn't used much in Unreal before and a pretty simple hud interaction to remind me of how Unreal handles UI.

The second was on AI and navigation systems.

I'd never worked with AI in Unreal so this was all new to me but it went over all the key AI assets and how they all interact as well as how navigation meshes are generated and manipulated. This one also had some useful tips and tricks for handling maps/levels.

The third was a space flight simulator, this one was really good because it made entirely new game mode and player pawns from scratch.

The last and arguably most helpful was on 'Data Driven Gameplay'. This was so helpful because it went through how to set up Unreal for coding in C++ in Visual Studio and creating custom blueprint nodes and data structures. We also then went over importing CSV files and parsing them into our data structure so we could use that to influence our blueprints.

I'm not as much of a C++ native as I am a C# native so that part was a little daunting but overall not very difficult even with all the Unreal specific macros that are involved.

Overall this was quite a productive week and a half or so that I spent on these and I suspect I'll end up making a lot more Unreal projects in the near future.

Tutorials used available here:

http://www.digitaltutors.com/tutorial/1861-Creating-Gameplay-Systems-using-Blueprint-Features-in-Unreal-Engine

http://www.digitaltutors.com/tutorial/2205-Introduction-to-AI-and-Navigation-Systems-in-Unreal-Engine

http://www.digitaltutors.com/tutorial/2117-Creating-a-Space-Flight-Simulator-in-Unreal-Engine

http://www.digitaltutors.com/tutorial/2035-Using-DataTables-to-Create-Data-Driven-Gameplay-in-Unreal-Engine-4