Unreal Possibilities

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...

Unreal Engine Tutorial: Setting custom Game Modes at runtime using Blueprints

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: 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 ...

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