If you have been developing in UE4 for some time you have probably stumbled into delegates.
What is a delegate? Delegates in two words are a UE4 implementation of the famous Observer template pattern. It allows code clients (or observers) to subscribe to some events. A dispatcher does not even know that something is listening to it. It just broadcasts events. This is a very powerful pattern – it makes your code less coupled.
What is a game prototype? Certainly, there is a short and elegant definition. But I like how Jesse Schell explains it in his famous book The Art of Game Design. He says that the sole purpose of a game prototype is to answer a question or questions that arise during game development. Questions could be general like: “Is this game mechanic fun?” or very specific: “Does my team have enough experience to produce animations of given quality?”
When I just started my experiments in game development I did not know about prototyping. I had just a blurry vision of how a game development process should look like.
The game I currently am working on is quite heavy on all kinds of jumps, so I dedicated some time to investigate how to configure UE4 character jumps properly. Some random values I put in Jumping / Falling section of Character Movement component did not work well for me:
I drew a trajectory of my jumps before I started tweaking the config values. You may notice that they are not symmetrical – the reason for that is the character (a lamp in my case) speeding up horizontally during a jump. This does not make sense for projectile motion.
Do you use Set Input Mode Game Only node in your game? Have you experienced any strange behavior of a user input controller? If yes, stick with me, I am going to shed some light on how this function works under the hood.
Unreal Engine 4 has three input modes:
In some games or game genres, a typical 3d perspective camera projection does not really work. For example, classic 2d platformers (2d by definition does not have a perspective) or top-down shooters. And since UE4 is a 3D engine in the first place, one gets a question: how to implement an orthographic camera in UE4?
Fortunately, Unreal Engine has an option for such camera mode. You can enable it in Camera Settings for a Camera Actor:
