Unreal Possibilities

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 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 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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