XB1000 Unreal Prototype - Issues, Respawn Blueprint and Conclusion
In all honesty, I struggled with Unreal quite a bit, I have much more of an understanding at this point it just took me a while to learn the ropes. There were numerous times where I had cast something to the wrong object or tried to join nodes that just didn’t match and had no clue how to fix it - this resulted in multiple errors, warnings and occasions where my work actually refused to save. Luckily, I was comfortable asking for help where needed and did have individuals willing to provide advice and criticism. One of the best forms of feedback was from my formative hand in which I was advised to try different blueprints and sequences, as well as adjusting platform sizes, timing and even something as simple as a spawn room to set the player off in the right direction. I even played about with he character details panel where I adjusted to jump so it was a bit more difficult to completely overshoot a platform and so that the third person character’s gravity was a tad more realistic as it was fairly irritating and difficult to play when the jump left the character suspended in the air for a few seconds. I’ve learnt a lot more at this point and am more comfortable with different features and have a great understanding thanks to all of the resources provided in classes. I’m still not great with Unreal but there’s quite an improvement.
One of the features I did try initially was a respawn blueprint, I’d attempted this before fully getting an understanding of Unreal and it didn’t go so well.
As you can see in the screenshots it’s quite a long winded and detailed blueprint (at least for a beginner), there was a link broken in the Spawn player section that was preventing it from working; however, when it did work my character would respawn but then still be falling and would just float off the map. I got feedback on this explaining that a link was broken somewhere towards the end, by this point I’d decided to use a simple collision box (as shown in my blueprints section) and used that to teleport the character as it was much more succinct, simpler and still used blueprinting so I was learning how to use blueprints there. I did decide to keep this in the Prototype, though. Just to show the work and to keep it for future reference or in case I wanted to retry using it, I broke the links so that it wouldn’t mess with the collision boxes. This was the only major issue I seemed to have, everything else ended up working out and I developed a greater understanding of blueprinting, especially with timelines which I really struggled with at first.
Conclusion:
My overall experience with Unreal has been rocky but I am a lot more confident with it now and am pleased with the improvements I have made and my ability to use it with better understanding now. There are still a few areas I’ve shied away from such as changing colours and binding keys but small attempts (as seen with the lift and pressing ‘E’ to activate it) have been made.
