3D Work + Game Dev!

Just finished our second game jam!

Give our submission a try here!

I've been spending some more time familiarizing myself with parts of unreal and while I was working on an interface in C++ I came across some stuff in the docs that sent me down a rabit hole

TL;DR:

Here's the docs to avoid my explanation of how I discovered it works

For interfaces specifically it is possible to make an interface that can be overwritten in either C++ or blueprints. In order to make that work they have changed the way you would create said interface.

So normally if you were creating a C++ only interface, you'd probably define a function something along the lines of:

virtual bool MyInterfaceFunction() = 0;

and then where ever you then inherit from said interface, you'd then do

bool MyInterfaceFunction() override;

and then you'd do your implementation in a .cpp file

However this is NOT how unreal want you to do overrides if you want to be able to have the option to override in C++ OR Blueprints.

Instead in your interface itself you have the following:

your interface class would have the following decorator:

UINTERFACE(BlueprintType)

you would then define the function you want to override like so:

UFUNCTION(BlueprintCallable, BlueprintNativeEvent, Category="Blueprint/C++ Implementable") bool MyInterfaceFunction();

then wherever you inherit this interface you would then put

Category="Blueprint/C++ Implementable") bool MyInterfaceFunction();

and then to override in C++ you'd do this:

bool MyInterfaceFunction_Implementation() override;

which is a signature that Unreal will generate for your interface class when you compile it.

and then according to the docs if you then ever access an instance of this interface to call this method, you will need to call this function instead

myInterfaceInstance->Execute_MyInterfaceFunction();

Which again is generated by unreal for your blueprint class and will be "Execute_" followed by the name of your function with a matching signature.

I just thought this was really interesting as I assume this is how they allow the C++ call to not care whether this interface function calls a C++ implementation or a blueprint one.

I know that there are benefits for iteration using Blueprints over C++ but as I'm learning C++ I reallize how much more concise code can be.

When I look at blueprints there is often so much more visual clutter that I don't want.

I can look at the code and pretty much immediately know what this is doing. Even if I cleaned up this short blueprint snippet it'd still take longer for my brain to parse than the code.

This is a stick up! Giv me all your fish and chip

So I wanted to add some more interesting hats and potentially other clothing for birds to look goofy with...

Now I can make things that will deform with the rest of the mesh, it wasn't too hard to setup but I had been putting it off

Bird become feathers...

Did the very first larger scale playtest of my multiplayer based pigeon game yesterday! 9 People including myself, a great turn out and the first time that I've had so many people play at once!

Turned out really fun, everyone enjoyed themselves, got a bunch of feedback but everything is looking really positive, I recorded some footage so that will be soon to come but for now here is a scoreboard with all the dumb names people called their birds. (Blurred one because it was someones actual steam username) and some fun shots of various shenanigans

Its been a long 48 hours but me and a mate have just finshed our first game jam! was a bit tense in the last hour but well worth it! Definitely want to do one again!

Mainly just menus here, there is a peck that works now too might upload some footage of that later