gamedev
Have you ever had problems with textures being blurry when you render to textures in Unreal using a Scene Capture Component 2D? Maybe you’ve searched for the problem, and come across forum threads that give really terrible advice, such as turning off texture streaming, or adding a global boost to all texture LODs? If so, you’re me earlier today. The difference is, I can save you some time and give you a better solution.
You can use Animation montages to play ad-hoc animations on a character. While your animation blueprint is stateful, montages are useful to just do a one-off animation like a reload, a hit reaction, or an emote. But, if you’re making a multiplayer game, calling “PlayAnimMontage” on the character is only going to play it locally. If you want other players to see it, you need to replicate it. Ideally, you want that replication to handle lag, so that animations are mostly synced up across players.
Just a quick post today about a very weird error I encountered while trying to package a project with Unreal 5.3; and because I got zero search hits for it on the web, I figured I’d document how I fixed it to save others in the future. Here’s the error I got while trying to package this UE project, either from the editor or the command line: LogObj: Error: LoadConfig (/Script/BlueprintGraph.
It’s always better to drive your game’s systems from data that’s easily editable. Games require a lot of iteration, and if you can just play with settings on the fly instead of having to change code, you can try things out much faster, and everyone on the team can experiment, not just programmers. A key asset type for this in Unreal is the DataTable. You make a row struct, then fill it with whatever data you like.
Intro You can do some quite nice text effects with Unreal Engine’s UMG Rich Text Block. Coloured text, outlines, shadows, even embed images in the text. But what if you wanted to do things like this to your text: When I was looking for information on how to do this kind of animated effect, I didn’t find very much. So now I’ve figured it out, here’s the information I wish I’d been able to find.
Intro I’ve been experimenting with UE4’s Control Rig recently, in my case in order to be able to do custom skeletal animation in level sequences - this is really handy when you want to animate something in the context of the actual level, instead of just in isolation. I’ve generally found it very useful, if a little under-documented, but that’s understandable since it’s still beta software (but as of 4.27, pretty robust).
Sequencer and Gameplay Camera Blending UE4’s most recent tool for making level animations, cutscenes and other cinematics is called Sequencer. I only just started using it this week, and I really like it. However, I had a lot of difficulty at first with a problem I thought would be extremely common: smoothly transitioning from your normal gameplay view into a cutscene, and back out again afterwards. The default is to just jump cut to whatever camera you have in your sequence, which can be a bit jarring.
How to add editor visualisation to unselected objects in UE4? I solved a particular problem of mine in Unreal Engine this week, which was this: How do I visualise any custom information I want at edit time (not runtime), even when objects are not selected? I’m talking about information that doesn’t come naturally from things like collision bounds, or other existing components. Custom things specific to my game that I want to see all the time as I pan over the level.
Skyboxes are textures that you use to display distant objects and environments in your scene, so that you don’t have to render the universe to an infinite distance. They’re often pre-rendered or captured, although you can start adding layered and dynamic elements to make them fancier. Ultimately they’re an optimisation to the problem of how do you give the impression that the player is in a huge world, even though really it ends a lot closer than it looks.
Our Story So Far Just over a year ago, I started the process of learning Unreal Engine 4. I should probably say re-started, because I’d experimented with it before - in fact when the Epic Store launched, I was surprised to have an unexplained store credit, which turned out to be because I paid for UE4 for a while when it was a monthly subscription, and they refunded some of that after they made it free.