/agdg/ - Amateur Game Development General

Learn how blueprints work. I started with the starter blueprint project.

Make some basic stuff in the editor and get a feel for how that works. It's not much different than Unity. It takes a week or two to get a feel for the engine but once you've done everything a few times it's pretty simple. Learn how to set up key/controller inputs and how to build a level in the editor.

Follow some video tutorials for blueprints. You need to understand how they work as they're basically visual C++ scripting. Everything in blueprint can be implemented in C++ so down the road when you want to do something in C++ and there's no C++ tutorial you can follow along with a blueprint and then convert it to C++ later.

Once you're comfortable with blueprints, if you want to begin with C++, then go through the documentation page by page here https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Programming/index.html (you should probably read every page here anyway regardless of whether you want to use C++ but the programming guide is the definitive starting point) Set up Visual Studio (I really would not suggest linux for someone new, yeah it may be possible but it's a whole nother layer of work and best to avoid until later

I'd suggest learning to implement the blueprint C++ character in C++ yourself from scratch as a starting point. It's no small task but will give you the basis to move forward. That's what I'm doing at least. If you have any specific questions I'll try and answer but I'm still pretty new myself and by no means an expert.

>>22687

No problem, the lack of resources is frustrating indeed, but there are some good ones out there on youtube and elsewhere. Once you get a feel for how everything works though you start to see how things fall into place. As cheesy as it sounds anything is possible with enough time and work and the API is mostly usable. Then you just need a bunch of 3d models and animations and you're set (ha).

youtube tutorials (or get a cgpeers act) for what you want to do.

Edit and expand

>>22689

You only need 2 or 3 good sets of learning lessons/lectures. People get in trap of gathering learning stuff, but never get into them or just jump from one to another.

>>22686

What are the benefits to using C++ instead of Blueprint? One thing I like about BP is being able to set up simple commands on the fly, but since it's already based on C++, shouldn't it be more logical to use Blueprint instead of punching in code?

>>22749

I don't like blueprints because it's literally spaghetti code. They get way too messy way too fast and are impossible to share. As a programmer C++ code is a whole lot easier to keep track of. And obviously there's a significant speed bonus with C++ (every bit helps, I think I read BP is 10x slower than C++ somewhere)

You can even make games with nothing but blueprint but the subset of C++ that you use with UE4 honestly isn't that much more complex than other languages if you can program already. Once you start learning your way around the API and what you're allowed to do you'll literally see that blueprint nodes are nothing more than C++ functions.

I recommend Blueprints for prototyping and for when you're just too lazy to write C++ though. Implement something in BP then convert to C++ if you want/if necessary/if you can. Especially critical things like character combat animations, the closer to realtime you need the better off you are using C++. Things like GUI and game flow can be done in blueprint without any worry of performance impact.

just like make game