First Degree Contacts

Saturday (02-03-2024) I’ve really started to put my hands in the Unreal Engine 5 and the first contact was very overwhelming, but after some time playing with the UI I started to be more ‘confortable’ with it.

After spending some time playing with the panels, buttons and so, I got to the docs and started from the start.. Reading it.

Did a fast read in various articles give me some overview about how the engine works and how it puts things together, it was very enlightening and I feeldt so amazed by the ammount of possibilities and functionalities to implement for my future projects, even if I plan on not even using 50% of capabilities.

Now I am following the UE5 Course from Stephen Ulibarri and already learned the basic of Objects, Actors, Pawns, Characters, Components, World ilumination, Blueprint and some C++. Now, I can make a character and move him and the camera with Enhanced Input. I’ve implemented this with blueprints but in the next days I will be practicing to do it in C++. This was my first milestone in my learning path and I always have to thank my wife for being lovely during all the study sessions.

First difficulties

From the learning perspective, the interface of the engine was the first challenge. A overwhelming quantity of information jumping from the screen, icons, buttons and items. I have spend some hours absorving everything to start understanding how to find my self in this complex interface.

After some time, I’ve started playing with the ‘map editor view’, discovering the shortcuts to move my self and see the world from different angles. Then, placing actors of all types in the map, reading the details panel from everyone and trying to undestand what ‘that or this’ can do. I’ve spend almos all day playing alone without much resources in the engine, simply to get an first contact before reading everything.

In the next day, after searching for a good learning resources, I find the uDemy course cited above and a vast quantity of sites/articles/documentation (I am thinking of writing an article with all these resources), and started the course.

I use an Galaxy Tab S6 (2022 version) for taking handwritten notes, and that help me a lot in the process. Taking screenshots from documentation and drawing in PDF’s is a wonderful thing.

Learning more about the interface in the beginning of the course helped me to really starting to understand how all the things get together in the engine. And starting by my self before everything helped to strengthen the learning.

Placing (and knowing what is) an actor came in next. Meshes and geometric basic objects, components, playing with directional light placing two suns and tweaking the colors, making then work together and taking a beautiful screenshot of the result was a very good first experience, UE can make amazing graphics and effects.

Scripting and Coding

My first blueprint was an simple ‘function’ to print an sustring to the screen, saying Hello, World!. Simple but give to me some basic understangind and with this, I’ve started to tweak and discover others functionalities of blueprints.

During the course (until now), I learned how to create blueprint classes for Pawns (a bird) and a character (player), and how to make them move and look.

The struggle started with C++, learning how to implement these functionalities with C++ code was challenging by the fact of not knowing how to adequately search how to naturally implement certain basic things in C++ using the official documentation. But I am making progress, learning the engine code helps and now such things like recognising how the functions/macros work are not a completely nightmare.

I will try to learn how to combine Blueprints and C++ code correctly. It’s hard.

My PC was scared

Running the Engine with Visual Studio showed me that my 16 GB of RAM are not enought, I will have to upgrade to 32 GB and a new motherboard in the future..

My VRAM also complained.. I have only an NVidia GTX 1650 with 4 GB of VRAM and I have to lower the graphics to let she run with more tranquility.

The RAM upgrade will help my compile time. I have a Ryzen 5 3600 and It’s a very good processor, but the RAM limits him becouse the compiler asks for at least 1.5 GB of free RAM per physical core. Put everything in the SSD helped in the overall speed of the engine too, but I will need more space soon (have only 240 GB for now).

Finishing here for now, see ya.