Unreal Possibilities

For the longest time, I believed that it was not possible to change Game Modes at runtime through blueprints. That it had to be specified in the editor either through Project Settings or the World settings for individual maps. Fortunately, I was wrong and there actually does seem to be a method for overriding the default Game Mode through blueprints. I was recently involved in a project that required setting up completely different types of gameplay based on whether the player chose to play as the attacker or the defender. While it was definitely achievable by creating separate maps for each game mode, it just seemed redundant given that the maps are identical in all other respects. It made a lot more sense to have two separate game modes with their own player controllers and HUD classes. And after some research along that line of thought, I realized that the Open Level node had more tricks up its sleeves than just opening a new level. The Open Level node as the name suggests, is...

Unreal Engine Tips: Change Widget Component's Widget Class at Runtime

The Widget Component in Unreal Engine provides the option of rendering widgets that are attached to an actor in the level. Unlike widgets that are directly drawn on the Player HUD, the widget component can render widgets both on screen space as well as the world space, and can thus be used to create spatial/diegetic UI systems ( like in Dead Space ). Adding a widget component to your actor follows the same process as adding any other component. But once added, it also requires us to set a widget class so that it knows what widget to render. And this is specified through its Widget Class parameter. Now while the above solution is ideal for specifying a widget in the editor, it doesn't provide us with any means to change the widget at runtime. Fortunately, the widget component has a BP function specifically for this purpose: the Set Widget node. However, using this Set Widget node is not as straightforward as setting the Widget Class method mentioned earlier. When we specify the w...

Unreal Engine Tips: Fixing "Unknown structure" Packaging Error

Lately, I've been doing some freelance work on the side for some of my UE4 marketplace customers who required custom modifications for the blueprint templates. And one of these projects has a heavy focus on data-driven design through the use of Structures, Data Tables, Data Assets, etc. Without going into specifics, the advantage of doing so is essentially to enable the customer to make changes to the project mostly through data without tinkering with blueprint logic. While working on this project, I recently had to make some changes to a Structure which was being used across a lot of blueprints. After doing some testing, everything seemed to be working fine, with no compiler errors or gameplay crashes. So I decided to wrap it up and package the project, but then the packaging process failed and threw a whole bunch of "Unknown structure" errors. And it had to do with the edited structure. Granted the errors show the blueprints that contain this structure, but disconnectin...

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