Believe it or not, there are some people that believe Ground Branch will never see the light of day. Oh well… might as well reap the benefit of it.
Welcome to Unreal Engine 4.
Are we crazy?!
Possibly.
The first time I used the engine after setting it up, it took me 10-15 minutes to get a player mesh, animations and basic true first person viewpoint working. That was a decent first experience.
The other night I was talking to John about our inventory class. As example of its improvements over its UE3 counterpart, I showed him the function used to attach one item to another. The original was about 70 lines in length. The new one was 15.
I went on to show him how we now handle different firearms.
In UE3, firearms all shared a base firearm class, with each type having its own sub class.
eg. gbxFirearmExtFed – a firearm fed from an external magazine.
Archetypes were then used to define ammo types, rates of fire etc.
In UE4, I exposed our inventory class to the blueprint visual scripting system, then created a base firearm blueprint.
What does this mean?
I can be really lazy, as adding firearms, even unique or complex ones, is a lot easier. The M249, for instance, is generally belt fed, but can use a magazine.
In UE3, I’d have create a new subclass.
That’d mean typing, thinking up variable names, waiting for the compiler etc.
Bugger that.
In UE4, I could do everything required in the editor. The only thing I’d have to type is “ThatAnnoyingBeltFedLMGThatCanTakeMags” when it came time to save it.
I hope to create most items using blueprints, when possible.
So yeah… Unreal Engine 4.
I’ve had to port a lot of code, learn new systems and API’s, but its interesting, generally fun and I can’t wait to share more.
That’s it.
-Kris
