Woah - It's Day 3!
I'm taking a break to essentially update my current status. I may or may not update this with whatever I work on after I write this post. (Depends on how tired I am by then.) I might keep dev log posts short like they've been, too.
Recap
Opened up my project and tried to follow some of the built-in tutorials.... uh, the crashed two times in that period. I knew this day was coming, but not this soon. Friendly reminder to Save Often lol.
After following the Blueprint Components tuts, I decided to try setting up events for mouse interactions. I had a bit of success with them in the Level BPs yesterday, so I figured I'd keep things simple and just print to the screen if the mouse did something to an object in the level. That worked out fine. I also used the bit I learned about needed object references (and one way to find them) to get the sparks from yesterday to spawn where the blue sphere is. That worked too. Things were good so I took a minute to tend some other responsibilites...
And that's when I saw that the bathroom had flooded. My sisters' room is right next to it, but I don't think she noticed yet. She had just got out the shower and was tangled in her shirt when I walked in. So I was rushing to get her clothes and stuff off the floor before the water got to them. OTL We had to move everything around while ma tackled the problem itself.
Once the maintenance man came by, I sat back down at my computer to try a different approach to processing mouse interaction. One doc I read used Actor BPs (which I had just learned how to make) and another walkthrough also used Actor BPs. I was trying to add Blueprint components to actors I already placed in the scene... which you could say is sorta backwards.
Actor BPs have different features available to them that BP components do not. BP components are added to actors, but I'm not exactly sure the scene actors I was trying to add them to were the scriptable actors I needed. IDK. All I know is that what I was doing wasn't the way to do it. XD Now that I've got that cleared up, Mouse events work!! (And are easy to add.)
(lol sorry this gif is so ugly... I was making this in a rush.) When the mouse interacts with the blue sphere, it prints to the screen and spawns a particle when clicked; when it interacts with the box, it also prints and affects the Point Light component when clicked or hovered over.
Task List
| Done | To Do | Dropped/Revised | ????? |
| - Learned how to (properly) handle Mouse events with Actors! - Learned more about Blueprint Actors and Components. | - Variable Door tutorial; optional inventory tut. (today) - Spawning Actors, editing their attributes in-game; Camera and UI; (2 days) | Nothing? | Nothiing for now. |
Brain Dump
Moar songs:
- Crucial Star - Fire
- Zico - She's A Baby
- Topp Dogg - Open the Door
Thoughts:
- Using Blueprints brought back some ActionScript memories lol. I made a platformer in Flash once with AS3 (i think it was AS3. When did they stop allowing movieclips from being scripted?) I would make a character one movieclip with all the necessary art and code in it, then put him in the scene (which had its own bit of art and code.) UE4 seems to be about the same: you have Actors and Levels you can design/script seperately with their own BPs, then put 'em together.)
- I might go for an isometric game? Or maybe not. Will figure out presentation tomorrow.