Original subtitles

Let's take a look at how our third person character works.

To do that, we need to open up the content drawer.

You can simply click here on the bottom left to open it up.

Or press control and space.

If you want, you can also dock it in the layout so it's always open.

In that case, you can actually open up a second one as well.

But let's just detach it again for now.

Here we have the content folder, which is the heart of our project.

Because we use the third person template.

We also have a characters level prototyping and third person folder.

In the case of a blank project, this will be empty.

Let's find the character blueprint.

Click on third person blueprints and here we can see BP underscore third person.

When creating a blueprint a common naming convention is to prefix BP underscore.

We can then double click this to open it up.

What we're looking at here in the middle is the event graph.

The event graph allows us to use Blueprint Visual scripting to implement game logic on this blueprint

actor.

To look around.

In the event graph, you can right click and hold and move the mouse around to see all of the other

nodes as well.

You can simply select the node by left clicking and dragging it around.

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

And this is something you'll do all the time, so you should take some time to get used to these controls.

Even if you're new to Unreal Engine, you've probably heard of Blueprint Visual Scripting.

This basically allows us to use a node based interface to implement game logic, instead of having to

write code in C plus plus.

We can quickly implement gameplay logic just through these nodes and start test playing for fast iteration

right away without having to wait for compiling.

When using C plus plus instead, of course your game will be more performant, but there's a lot of

things you have to deal with that will slow down your game creation process.

I actually created a full fledged VR shooting game just using blueprints, which runs just fine.

It is available on steam, so you can even make pretty big games, only using blueprints if you know

how to do it properly.

And that's the reason why we're going to use blueprints in this course.

However, a blueprint actor is more than just the event graph.

You can click here to see the viewport.

On the left you can see all the components that are in this blueprint actor.

We can have a look at the capsule, the skeletal mesh, the camera and many other things here.

Just to show you how this affects gameplay, we can select the camera boom and move it up a little bit.

When we start the game now, you can see that the camera is higher than was before.

All of the changes we do here are instantly affecting our gameplay, and we can just go back with control

and Z.

Another thing I can show you is the character movement component.

This is something that comes with Unreal Engine on the character class, and this basically allows for

all the movement your character needs.

We can look for max walk speed here.

And change it to 2000, for example.

And you can instantly see how this affects the gameplay.

Let's change it back with Ctrl and Z.

So I hope you understand that these blueprints are the core of our game.

They allow us to set the components we need and also the gameplay logic we need in the event graph.

In the next chapter, we'll make a blueprint actor from scratch.