Devlog - Jazz Hands

 Posted on January 13, 2023  |  1 minutes  |  180 words  |  Ben Renninson

Grab n' Throw has reached an important milestone - we now have hands! With the core gameplay features in place it was time to add some GameJuice™. Over the last few months I’ve added visible hands, hand animations, camera animations and more. To make everything more immersive I’ve opted to re-use the same external player model that other players see - you can look down and see your feet, and your hands grab the actual character you’re holding. [Read More]
UE4  Grab n' Throw 

How to Rename a UE4 or UE5 C++ Class Used by Blueprints

 Posted on April 19, 2022  |  1 minutes  |  192 words  |  Ben Renninson

Commit all existing changes so you can cleanly roll back if required Stop the editor Add something like the following to <your game folder>\Config\DefaultEngine.ini, where: <ProjectName> is the official project name UE4 uses in C++ for your project. E.g. the GT in GT_API that shows at the top of class declarations <OldClassName> is the name of the class you’re renaming from, with no A, U etc prefix. E.g. GTPlayerState instead of AGTPlayerState <NewClassName> is the name of the class you’re renaming to, again with no A, U etc prefix. [Read More]
UE4   

Devlog - Big Huge Throws

Bigger and Huge-er and Throwier

 Posted on January 19, 2022  |  1 minutes  |  183 words  |  Ben Renninson

Over the holiday break I prototyped a whole new gamemode and map, which are Hole in One and The Distant Links respectively. They’re based on the thought “what if I just multiplied all the throw force, sizes, etc by 11?" and it quickly became apparent this is the most fun game mode so far. Even just the basic actions feel good. Check this out: The map is “what if a golf course was 256km^2? [Read More]
UE4  Grab n' Throw 

UE4 Pie Graph/Chart Material

 Posted on December 17, 2016  |  1 minutes  |  169 words  |  Ben Renninson

(Download link at the bottom) In Tropical Manipulation, I need to display the share of customers that each player will receive, and communicate the price interaction mechanics (a lower price gets more customers, etc). For this I’ve created a pie graph/chart material, so that I can add an image widget and use it in UMG. I actually posted an early version of this on the UE4 forums, but it was a basic version that only gave results like this: [Read More]
UE4  Tropical Manipulation 

Create A UWidget At Runtime

 Posted on October 6, 2016  |  1 minutes  |  157 words  |  Ben Renninson

UE4’s built-in blueprint function ‘CreateWidget’ only allows you to specify UUserWidgets, so to add something basic like a button, border or text at runtime, you have to create a custom UUserWidget to wrap it - very inefficient. Luckily, there’s a ConstructWidget() function in C++ that can easily be exposed to blueprints. Make sure you’ve got a BP/C++ project, then create a blueprint function library C++ class. Code Add this to the . [Read More]
UE4 

Height Based UE4 Island Landscape Material

 Posted on September 9, 2016  |  6 minutes  |  1161 words  |  Ben Renninson

For the island used in Tropical Manipulation, I wanted a simple material applied that I could quickly tweak to get a great looking island. I investigated using landscape layers, but found that for what I was using it for (an unchanging backdrop to the game) they wouldn’t be necessary. Here’s what I wanted from the material: Different areas based on height Beach - sand Flats - sand and grass Lower mountains - grass Upper mountains - snow Automatic rock textures on the side of cliffs A way to transition between areas A way to aesthetically combine sand and grass on the flats Colour manipulation Quick control and feedback over most variables without having to regenerate the material. [Read More]
UE4  Tropical Manipulation 

Set spline point rotation in UE4 blueprints

 Posted on September 5, 2016  |  3 minutes  |  538 words  |  Ben Renninson

Skip to the bottom if you just want the c++ code to use. Originally written for 4.9. Updated 2016-09-05 for 4.13 (also maybe .10, .11 and .12) code changes. After following the great tutorials on using splines and spline meshes by DokipenTechTutorials I had a very useable spline_path object, but wanted to extend it a little further. I re-implemented some existing blueprints I was using elsewhere and created options that let me auto-height and auto-pitch start, middle and end points to follow the shape of the ground or object underneath the spline. [Read More]
UE4