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Hey yo, I have a bunch of 30-day UE4 codes to give out. It's only a 30 day subscription but you don't have to stay subscribed to keep access, so you're basically getting a free copy of UE4.6. I'm aiming to mostly give them out to people who can't really afford the $20 themselves, so if that's you hit me up 

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Currently messing around with UE4 and love it. I come from a formal CS background so being able to glance at all the code is a godsend. The only thing I hate is it's rough on my old MBP so my typical coffee shop dev is off-kilter.

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Ladder system nearly ready for the marketplace woo

 

:tup:  :tup:  :tup:

 

I saw this on the Unreal forums earlier. Looks real nice!!! 

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I've been playing around a lot with UE4 in the last week, just trying to expand skills beyond my Unity-centric development process.

 

It's really nice so far and I'm even getting the hang of Blueprints (WAY better than Kismet was). I'd say the most annoying thing is just the lack of documentation. There's a lot out there but half of the stuff I find is no longer relevant because of how frequently the engine updates.

 

For the C++ folks, is your code working between major version changes? Because if written code is more future-proof than Blueprints then I might take the plunge and switch over.

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There were a few major changes to C++ between 4.5 and 4.6 but it didn't actually break my code, it was just a hassle to update everything.

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Hey yo, I have a bunch of 30-day UE4 codes to give out. It's only a 30 day subscription but you don't have to stay subscribed to keep access, so you're basically getting a free copy of UE4.6. I'm aiming to mostly give them out to people who can't really afford the $20 themselves, so if that's you hit me up 

Are any of these still available, perchance?

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Are there any good tutorials for someone who lacks complete knowledge of UE4? Thanks to Lacabra, I've got a 30-day pass for 4.6.1, but much like the issue I had with Unity, certain features have changed names in this build so the official tutorials are basically useless to me.

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The video tutorials on the Unreal Engine youtube account have been pretty much invaluable to me over the past few months, and to my experience they've held up pretty well over time. What specifically have you been having trouble with? If it's some minor change in nomenclature, perhaps I could help out?

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My trouble begins with the "Place Actors" section of the UE Quick Start Guide.

 

The first issue is that it calls for you to select "Box" from the "Geometry" menu in the Modes tab. After some hunting around, it appears that "Geometry" has been relabeled "BSP." Confusing, but fine.

 

So I grab the box and place it into the main window. It's clearly too tall (at least, it doesn't reflect the size of the tutorial), so I scale down the Z axis to make it look more like a floor or platform. Then the tutorial asks me to place a directional light inside the editor, and states that it should be sitting on top of the floor. It isn't, and switching into the orthographic view, it's clear that the light is somewhere underneath the floor. So I use transform to change its Z-axis position, but it doesn't behave as I'm expecting (or, more to the point I guess, as the tutorial suggests it should).

 

I think my primary issue is that while basic, a lot of these tutorials seem to expect some level of competence regarding design and I essentially have none at all. What I need is something that not only explains what to do but also covers why I'm doing it. I desire something closer to Photoshop Essentials, but for game design.

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Hmmmm. Interesting. How were you expecting the directional light to behave versus how it did behave? As a matter of fact, it doesn't matter where the directional light is physically positioned - only its rotation matters - so you could have left it in the floor. But it sounds like that wasn't intuitive.

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You've sort of spotlighted one of my major issues--the tutorial should tell me that directional light isn't occluded by game geometry. I could see my platform lit, and I didn't understand why. The tutorial should express these concepts in plain language.

 

Perhaps it makes more sense for Epic to rename "Geometry" as "BSP" for veteran developers, but I personally have no idea what the hell binary space partitioning is (I'd never heard of it until John Romero brought it up during that Devs Play episode with JP LeBreton). And when they change things in their engine, they should update their documentation accordingly.

 

I'm certainly going to keep at it, but it's pretty disheartening to feel completely out of my depth during a tutorial.

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Directional lights are occluded by geometry. The thing that was happening is a directional light represents basically a sun for most purposes - lighting from infinitely far away in a particular direction (specified by rotation). That's why its location is irrelevant. But yeah, I mean, it sounds like a tutorial for unreal geared toward people who have already dealt with the same concept in other engines, which is not super helpful to beginners.

I also don't at all think it's intuitive to rename the Geometry tab to BSP. I do call it BSP but it isn't technically BSP so I don't know why you would switch back to that terminology tbh.

In case helpful:

-Directional light = the sun, light from far enough away that shadows are always parallel, location therefore irrelevant

-point light = omni directional light

-spotlight = light shining in one direction in a cone shape

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When static lighting changes it gets invalidated and the editor preview falls back to bad dynamic lighting for everything until you build static again

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I can't think of a reason to not save time and go completely dynamic if you're just doing a small tutorial where performance isn't an issue.

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Oh man, first time playing with UDK since a 3.0 version and man is it so much easier, I left it for a while to try out Unity but I think I'm going to come back to this for the blueprints and the BSP stuff.

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I started experimenting with construction scripts and did a wall module thing where you can choose the wall color and attach a piece of furniture with randomized materials. I plan to add more furniture and randomize things like the number and placement of boxes and books on the shelves, if there's stuff on the desks, if the computer screens are on or off, etc.

 

pa22PLf.jpg

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