Unreal Possibilities

Following the previous experiments, this time we're creating fake scanlines using the Screen Position node. Scanlines can be built by dividing the screen vertically into alternating dark and light bands. We start by getting the vertical screen coordinate. The Screen Position node's ViewportUV output is masked to extract only the Y component, which represents our position from top to bottom of the screen. The Y value is multiplied by a ScanlineCount parameter. This scales the 0-1 range up to match the scanline count, creating distinct bands across the screen height. For example, multiplying by 360 creates 360 separate bands. The value should ideally match a factor of your screen's vertical resolution to avoid visual banding artifacts. 360 divides evenly into 1440 ( 4 pixels per band ), ensuring clean alignment on 1440p displays. We then apply Frac to this result. Frac resets to 0 at every whole number, which means our 0-360 range becomes a 0-1 pattern that repeats 360 tim...

Unreal Engine Tips: How to use Keyboard Inputs when Input Mode is set to UI Only

I had recently migrated some of the HUD workflow from Prototype Menu System to Tower Defense Starter Kit. While going through the HUD blueprints, I noticed that the Input Mode was being set to Game and UI when activating the Pause Menu. Since I didn't want the player to have the option to interact with the game outside of the menu in this state, I went ahead and changed it to UI Only, only to find out that the Escape button could no longer be used to quit the Pause Menu (in spite of it being set to Execute when Paused). It turns out that setting the Input Mode to UI Only also prevents us from interacting with the UI using keyboard. At first, it seemed like I'd have to revert it back to Set Input Mode Game & UI. But further inspection led to a workaround to tackle the issue: Handling the keyboard input directly through the widget itself instead of the player controller. The first step is to ensure that the widget can be focused. We can do this by setting its IsFocusable ...

Unreal Engine Experiments: Creating a Scan Pulse Effect with a Sphere Mask

While working on the scan pulse effect, I tried experimenting with other approaches to achieve the same result. This version uses a SphereMask node, which takes a world position and an origin point and returns a gradient based on the distance between them. The parameters are mostly the same as the previous version. We're using two vector parameters, Pulse Origin and Pulse Color, and two scalar parameters, Pulse Time and Pulse Speed. I'm going to set a default value of 2400 for Pulse Speed. As with the previous version, we start with an Absolute World Position node and use it alongside the Pulse Origin parameter as inputs to a SphereMask node. The Pulse Time parameter is multiplied by Pulse Speed and fed into the Radius input to drive the expansion, and I'm setting a value of 10 for the Hardness. The SphereMask returns a value of 1 at the center that gradually falls to 0 at the edge, with the Hardness parameter controlling how sharp that transition is. Running this ...

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