Original subtitles

In this section, I'll show you how to navigate the Unreal Engine editor.

This is the main screen you'll use most of the time with all the buttons and tabs it has.

It can look very overwhelming at first, but I'll give you an explanation of all the essential things

you'll need to know to get started.

The big window here in the middle is the viewport.

This is basically our window into the world of the game.

The stage and objects you can see here come with a third person template.

We can simply left click any item in the scene, and this will show us a gizmo with three arrows.

We can simply click one of the arrows to then drag the item around into any direction.

If you press this ball here, you can drag it into all directions at the same time.

A very important shortcut we use all the time is control Z to undo our last action.

This works just the same way it does on windows for almost any program.

We can also use Control Plus Y to redo the last step.

You can also check these commands here under the edit tab.

And also execute them from here.

We can also change between translate, rotate and scale mode.

You can simply click here to go into rotate mode and again left click any item.

Now the gizmo looks different and it allows us to rotate the item around like this.

And also in the other directions.

Again we can go back with control and Z.

And lastly, we can scale using this button.

This will show you three handles you can pull on to scale the item in certain directions.

If you select this one in the middle, you can scale in all directions at the same time.

And again, we can undo this with Ctrl and Z.

We can also actually switch between these three modes by using keyboard shortcuts.

The translate mode, for example, is w, the rotate mode is E, and the scale mode is R, and we'll

use this all the time to build our levels out.

One thing that works together with this are the snap values you can see here.

By default.

For translate, we move by ten units per snap, and you can see that in action here.

However, we can change this to 500 for example to move in bigger units.

This is going to be extremely important, especially when you work with modular assets.

And we can just set this back to ten.

The same goes for the rotation.

We can also set this to 45.

For example, go into rotate mode and rotate around in big steps.

Let's set this back to the default.

And then again for scale, we can set this to a big value like one for example.

Go into scale mode and scale in really big steps.

This will allow us to get exactly the value we want, and again set this back to the default.

The next thing we need to learn is moving the camera around the map to change the rotation.

We can simply right click and hold and then drag the mouse around to get a different view.

When we use the middle mouse button and hold it, we can pan around.

But what you'll use most of the time is right clicking and holding it, and then using the wasD keys

to move around.

This is basically like controlling a first person shooter game.

You can also use the arrow keys on the keyboard instead of wasD.

Sometimes you need to pinpoint an item, and with the camera speed it can be quite hard.

So you can scroll down to make the movement slower.

And you can also scroll up to make the movement faster.

To find the exact value that you need.

When you're not holding the right click.

You can also use the mouse wheel to zoom in and out.

Here you see the button that says lit.

You can change the view mode of your scene.

For example, hamlet will show you the scene without lighting information.

Wireframe will show you the wireframe.

Detail lighting will show you the detail lighting, and there's many settings you can use to get a better

view of what's happening behind the scenes.

This can be very helpful when debugging.

But generally speaking, you just have the lit mode, which is basically what your game will look like

in the end.

The show button here is also very important because you can hide and show different things in your scene.

For example, static meshes.

If we turn this off like the entire stage is hidden.

But what you use most of the time is use navigation to confirm that your navigation mesh is working

and collision.

Collision will show you the actual collision of the items.

And here you can see that the collision is simplified when compared to the actual mesh, which is a

very common practice.

This will be especially important when debugging 2D games, because the collision will still happen

in 3D space, and this will give you a better overview of what's actually happening.

But for now, let's just turn it off again.

Here on the right side we have the world outliner.

This also allows us to select items in the scene.

You can actually press the F key to zoom in on the item, or zoom out to get a better view on it.

This is also very important if you want to find certain items in your scene, and it's always good practice

to have a proper name here.

When we select an item here, you can actually see the details of the item down here.

And we can, for example, do things like change the material on it.

And you can then see this reflected in the world.

But you also get the same details panel if you just click it in the viewport.

There is no difference between selecting something in the viewport or in the world.

Outliner.

And here, for example, we can also change the scale, location and rotation like we did with the gizmo

before, but we can simply click here and drag to the left or right to do this.

This again will allow you to make very precise changes and might be better suited for whatever you're

doing.

From this window we can also start our game to test it.

Just click the play button or alt and P.

Before you can control your character, you need to click into the viewport once to activate it, and

now you can just use the mouse to change the camera or use wasD to move the character around, and you

can also press space to jump.

This character, the controls and the map are all things we get with the third person template.

If you have a blank project, none of this will be available.

And in the next lecture, we'll have a deeper look at why and how this even works.

You can press escape on your keyboard to exit the play mode.

Being able to playtest our game like this on the fly is what makes Unreal Engine extremely awesome.

This will allow us to easily make changes, move things around, and then just instantly test how the

changes affect the gameplay.

When you're in play mode and moving around.

You can also press shift and F1 to get your mouse controls back.

We can actually do things here, like selecting something in the world outliner and moving it around.

While the game is playing.

However, once you exit the game, everything you do here will be reset.

While you're in play mode, you can also again press shift and F1 to get the mouse back and click on

eject.

This will allow you to get back the floating camera and not control the character anymore.

In this mode, we can actually again just grab items and move them around for quick play testing or

just like seeing how things work out.

And we can then again press the controller button to jump back into our character and test the changes.

And again, once we go out of this mode, we might get an error message because we moved something that

wasn't supposed to be moved, but everything goes back to the way it was before.

The eject feature can be very helpful when debugging, especially for 2D games where where sometimes

you'll just see your character from the flat side and think it actually isn't there, so you have to

eject to check it.