Wednesday, February 28, 2024

Some more knowoledge on Enhanced input. Specifically bindings, and some gotchas

 So I was following a tutorial this morning. Another Stephen Ulibarri one. 

I got to othe point in his tutorial where I was to bind the functions to the input actions. And I have a pretty good idea of what i'm meant t do, so I went ahead to start, but there were quite a few trip ups I had, that in hindsight make sense. But I wanted to jot some notes down..




1. YOu have to declare your Input Action. I was under the impression All I needed to do was connect the IA like I would in blueprints, but just like mapping context you need to declare it. 

2. With the function that you're going to bind, you need to make sure it is a a ActionInput value. Or more specifically 

void Function ( const FInputActionValue& Value); 

I kept makinng the mistake of just passing in a float value. You need to make this an FInputActionValue reference if you're going to bind it to your enhanced action input). 

3. When you're binding your function to your Input Action. The syntax for BindAction() goes. 

BindAction(InputAction, ETriggerEvent::(WhateverTheEventIs), this(the actor it's acting on), A_The specific  actor::TheFunctinYou'reBinding). 

I really had trouble with it this morning, but I hope htis clear is up for you future Paul. 


ALSO here's the setup for the ball, in the ball maze projec tyou did. 




// Called to bind functionality to input

void AC_PlayerBall::SetupPlayerInputComponent(UInputComponent* PlayerInputComponent)

{

Super::SetupPlayerInputComponent(PlayerInputComponent);


if (UEnhancedInputComponent* BallInputComponent = CastChecked<UEnhancedInputComponent>(PlayerInputComponent)) {


BallInputComponent->BindAction(BallMove, ETriggerEvent::Triggered, this, &AC_PlayerBall::BallMovementFunction);

}



}

Tuesday, February 27, 2024

Super quick post about commenting

 Not sure why this information isnt readily available, maybe i'm just searching in the WRONG places, but here we are. But for future Paul. 


TO COMMENT OUT CODE, THE SHORT CUT IS. 

CTRL + SHIFT + /

and to undo is the same.


https://stackoverflow.com/questions/32426267/visual-studio-comment-shortcut

Sunday, February 25, 2024

Coding Knowledge update- this part has given me the most trouble.

 SO I've started making a game every monthh, r every few weeks. Just to experiment, and obviously get better at game development. 


A few days ago I started a ball project. Where the goal is to get the ball across a goal, under a certain amount of time, without dying. 

You die by hitting the edges of the maze, and if the timer reaches zero. 


RIght now it plays like this. 


Right now the code is basically being all done in side of the player character pawn. 


The first week, I added the movement controls. This was, and is continously the trickiest part. 

I'll outline it in a few steps. 


Since I was Using Enhanced Action Input; I"ll be describing my process using that. 



Step 1 - 

In the headerfile; I had to declare a few things. I had to declare where the Input Mapping was going to go. 

And I had declare where the Input Action was going to go. 

When I made a blue print based of this class, this is where I'll put the Input Mapping Context, and the INput Action , when I make em. 


The Header file contrains these lines of code


UPROPERTY(EditAnywhere, Blueprintreadwrite, Category = Input)

UInputAction* MyActionInput;

///The above is where you're going to put the Input Action that you made/make in Unreal


UPROPERTY(EditAnywhere, Category = Input)

UInputMappingContext* MyMappingContext;

///The Above line here is where you're going to put the Mapping Context that you've made in Unreal

As you can see. with the pointer after the Class, I was forward declaring in the header. That looks like this. 

class UInputAction;

class UInput;

class UInputMappingContext;

You put that near the top. 

    So the next part, is always super confusing to me, I imagine I'll look back on this fondly for the times when I thought THIS was complicated. However as of now, this part is still very confusing for me haha. 

    The next step, Is we're getting the player controller ( we need this for later also) and we're getting it by initializing our own controller class and casting from that to get the GetPlayerController Function. 
That looks like
So over on the CPP it looks like this

APlayerController* MyController

then casting from this class, to get our player controller, and that looks...

APlayerController* MyController = Cast<MyController>(GetPlayerController());


Now if this cast is succesful, now we have to get the EnhancedLocalInput Subsystem. 
(Truth be told. I dont know much about Subsystems in Unreal, but I do know the steps that initalize our Local Subsystem)

So again, 
We can check if the cast is succesfull with a simple IF statement. 

if(MyController){}

This will check if the cast will work. Once there, we can add the cast of the subsystem into body of the IF statement. That'll look like this. 

If(MyController){
    If(UEnhancedInputLocalPlayerSubsystem* MySubystem = 

}

Now for the Subsystem, now we need to call the "GetSubsystem" function, which is a function of the ULocalPlayer  class.  That looks like this. 



If(MyController)
{
If(UEnhancedInputLocalPlayerSubsystem* MySubsystem = ULocalPlayer::GetSubystem<UEnhancedInputLocalPlayerSubsystem>(MyController->GetLocalPlayer()); 
}

/// The GetSubsystem Function Template is in the ULocalPlayer Namespace

Now this a bit complicated (to 2024 Paul).
This is all to get and check if we have a subsystem. Once that part is done, THEN we can initalize the subsystem with thhe Mapping Context that we made before. 

So take that code above, and add this 

APlayerController* MyController = Cast<MyController>(GetPlayerController());

IF(MyController)
{
If(UEnhancedInputLocalPlayerSubsystem* MySubsystem = ULocalPlayer::GetSubsystem<UEnhancedInputLocalPlayerSubsystem>(MyController->GetLocalPlayer())
{
MySubsystem->AddMappingContext(MyMappingContext, 0); 
}

To quickly go over what we're seeing. 
- We're casting to the MyController type, to GetPlayer Controller
- We check with an if statement if that cast was succesful
- Inside that if statement we  Get the subsystem thru the LocalPlayersubsystem Type by callin ght eGetlocal player function
- and from there, we acces the AddmappingContxt function in the MySubsystem class

This is all done in the EventBeginPlay to use our MappingContext. 


So now that we've got that part done, we need to bind our Mapping Context, and have it access a function.

This part is much shorter, but also complicated. I still dont completely understand it, but I"ll do my best to expalin it to future me. 
You'll need to bind ur inputs in the function called AYourActor::SetupPlayerINputComponent(UInputComponent( PlayerInputComponent)

What we're going to do here is cast from an input component, and check. IF the cast is succesfull then we're going to access the BindAction() function from the UenhancedInputComponent Class. That code looks like this. 

If(UEnhancedInputComponent* MyInputComponent = CastChecked<UEnhancedInputComponent>(PlayerInputComponent)){
MyInputComponent->BindAction(InputAction, EtriggerEvent::Triggered(or whatever event you've designated in your INput Action), this ( the object it effects), AC_YourActor::WhateverMovementFunction);
}

From there its pretty simple, we just define the function that we're binding and go from there. 

I hope this helps future paul quite a bit!. 
Back to some tutorials ;) 


Wednesday, August 30, 2023

It'd be pretty sick if I could put code in my blog posts.

 new blog post, obviously. I've been learning programming isnce I last posted, and its going pretty well. Just an update today. I've been learning functions and they are so much fun. I'm glad I'm finally realizing what they are inside my code.  I'd been seeing them around in tutorials, and while most of them do a pretty good explanation, they didnt spend enough time. Codecademy has really helped me so far. I'm going to jump back into Udemy tutorials as soon as I'm done here. However I will admit I'd much rather be in my books, so I may do that instead. Reading text to learn code is by far the easiest way for me to get things don



e. 

Monday, July 31, 2023

Programming

 I'm starting to learn programming now. Its been 6 years since I posted my journey into vfx and it's gone well, but now its time for another journey to add anothe rnotch to my belt. Programming. I'm going to start that journey by reading books, and using codecademy. I've already been doing it for a week by onw, and its frustrating but just like vfx I've got quite a while to go. Unfortunately I dont have much to talk about now other than I've started on Codecademy,

and as i'm typing this i'm buying 2 books off amazon. As things progress I'll keep posting here, but I'm excited!

my goal is to make games on my own, and just be a better game developer over all. 

Sunday, January 28, 2018

VFX

I'm learning some VFX, not much to say here, other than I barely understand it. ITs cool though, because whil i'm getting those sweet VFX gains I'm also getting some awesome material editor knowledge so that's always nice.
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