Methods and Tools to Create Your Games - Learning Unreal Engine iOS Game Development - page 25

Blueprints inside Unreal ® Engine
Essentially, a blueprint makes everything in the game logic clear and easy to follow. When
creating a game with UE4, a blueprint does exactly this: makes writing code or game logic
much easier.
If you have had the chance to work with the free, limited version of Unreal Engine 3,
which was UDK, you will know that the scripting inside UDK was based on one of two
things: either using the scripting language called Unreal Script , or using Kismet.
The Blueprints system in UE4 is almost the only, and certainly the most common way to
build game logic efficiently and fast. It is the new version of the old system in UE3 called
Kismet, that was not efficient when it came to refactoring the logic for different levels in-
side the same game. The engine supports C++ game code as well, but in that case I would
not consider it as scripting, as C++ cannot be a scripting language and is pure program-
ming!
With a simple graph of four nodes like the following one, you will be able to save the time
taken to write code. The following graph says that:
• If the player presses Jump , then the character controller executes the respective
jump function
• If the player inputs Horizontal axis, then the controller will use the Add Move-
ment function with a specific amount of moment, and a direction (values passed
through the function).
To write similar code in any programming language, you would spend 10 minutes and
write at least 50 lines of code, but with a blueprint, all that you need is 4 nodes and 5
seconds of your time! For more efficient usage of the blueprints system, if you are a pro-
grammer, you can write your own blueprint node in C++ that executes a set of functionalit-
ies. This will save you the time taken to connect several nodes or write lots of code mul-
tiple times.