Unreal Possibilities

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 Tutorial: Create Circular Ring Material without Textures

Hi, welcome back for another tutorial. It's been quite a while since I put up a tutorial as I've been busy working on toolkits for the Marketplace. One of my earlier tutorials [link: Unit Selection Decals for RTS Games ] had focused on how to create ring materials using textures, as well as using them to display unit selection decals for RTS games. However, a drawback associated with using textures was that it prevented the user from changing the inner & outer radius of the ring. And during prototyping stages of a product, it's far better to implement structures that can be changed easily from within the engine so that you don't have to create a new asset from an external package every time you need to test out a new idea. I've found this approach quite useful while working on my own products. Hence, this tutorial focuses on creating a ring material that can be adjusted both from within the material editor as well as dynamically at runtime. Alright before...

Unreal Engine Tips: How to create slanted Health Bars

The UMG UI Designer in Unreal Engine comes equipped with a variety of tools that can be used to create UI elements for your projects. Among these tools is the Progress Bar widget, which is often used to create Health bars. Simply drag & drop the progress bar into the UI designer and you essentially have a basic Health bar already. But what if we wanted to create a health bar that has a slanted design? Say, for example, something similar to the ones used in Borderlands 3. Fortunately, the same can be achieved in Unreal without writing a single line of code. Under the Render Transform section in the details panel for the Progress Bar widget, is a parameter named Transform . Expand it to reveal the Shear and Angle settings for the widget. The Shear controls how slanted the widget is, while the Angle determines its degree of rotation. Here is an example of custom Shear/Angle settings used for Health/Shield bars in one of my projects: As you can see, by combining the Shear & Angle ...

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