I’ve made a simple moving platform in Unreal Engine today. This is used in platform games all the time, be it as a triggered mechanism or an automatically moving always-looping/moving thing. Remember all those gaps you need to cross over a deep ravine, while stone platforms are moving left and right, and you’ll have to jump over them and make sure you don’t die? Yeah, those are the ones. I’ll show you how to make one of these in Blueprint.

With a new Actor Blueprint, I’ll add any type of object that will serve as my moving platform. A squashed cube will do, or anything more fancy if you wish. I found the platform above in the Synty Sci-Fi City Assets. It needs to be movable rather than static, otherwise Unreal Engine will throw an error message as it’s trying to animate it.

In the Event Editor, I’ll hook into Event BeginPlay for an always-moving platform. It’ll be different for a platform that is triggered as a result of a player’s action. Any trigger will do to kick off the yellow Timeline Node. I’ve called mine Elevator, and here’s how it’s hooked up:

The Height parameter drives the Z Location of our platform (referenced as Target). The real magic is happening inside the Timeline Node though, so let’s have a look at that:

Here we have a vector track I’ve named Height. It’ll be accessible as a pin on the node, as seen in the previous screenshot. There are five keyframes on this track (creatable by right-clicking), interpolating the output value between 0 and 800, and leaving a plateau at the top and bottom so the platform waits for the player to step on/off.

The sequence will auto-play and loop indefinitely. Adjust as necessary. Here’s what it looks like in the game:

Any questions? Please let me know below!

When something happens in our game, we may need to play a sound file. Think of anything from firing a bullet, playing footsteps during a walk, or a sound that is fired as a result of us sliding something open. To play those sorts of files we can use a method called Play Sound At Location. Let me show you how it works.

We need several things to make it happen:

• a sound file, imported into our project (in WAV format)
• the world location of where we’d like to play our sound
• a trigger (any event will do)

Here’s what this looks like in Blueprint:

In this example I’m playing a sound file called Door_Movement. It is triggered by a Do Once node, but any trigger will do. Do Once is nice because it avoids your file being played 60 times a second which is… annoying.

The Play Sound at Location node needs to know where to play the sound, and in my case I’m playing it where my Trigger Volume is located (which is likely where my player is located to hear the sound, having just stepped into said Trigger Volume). To get this location, I need a reference to the object, and a GetWorldLocation node. That’s it!

There are some exciting items on the Play Sound node, like the pitch and volume controls. I’ve used an interesting effect in a Game Maker project once, where the “dying” sound an enemy makes is randomly pitched a tad higher or lower than the basic sound, adding a little variation into a single sound file.

I’ve been following Katie’s videos to get my feet wet with Unreal Engine, and thought I’d take a note on how to build her sliding door so I don’t forget. Here’s how I’ve built mine in principle:

• create a new Blueprint Actor
• bring in a cube and build an “InnerDoor” piece (that’s the one that will slide up and down)
• build a frame for the door (will remain static)
• add a Box Collision and extend it (it will trigger our animation)
• use a Timeline node to raise the door
• reverse the process so the door closes

I’m doing it slightly different to how Katie suggests it, but there’s really no right or wrong way. Let’s get started!

I’ve just found out how to change values for Morph Targets on objects in Unreal Engine via code. This will come in handy when any attribute needs to be updated either as a result of user input, or via automation. Here’s the basic workflow:

• know the exact name of the Morph Target
• add a Set Morph Target node in Blueprints
• populate it with the name of the morph
• give it a value (between 0 and 1, equivalent to 0% to 100%)

Here’s a small example that continuously changes my Genesis 8 character from Basic Female into Olympia. While not particularly useful in itself, it illustrates how a parameter change can trigger a morph.

When you start a new Blueprint Class in Unreal Engine, there’s this weird white ball that shows up in the centre of the viewport. I believe it represents the Default Root object. Trouble is, there’s no obvious way to get rid of it, even when you add a mesh object to your Blueprint. For a troubled and easily confused beginner like myself, I don’t even know what question to type into Google to get an approximate answer.

In this article I’ll show you the simple solution to the problem. Here’s the ball I’m referring to:

Even with a Static Mesh in my scene, that ball persist. I can’t even select it.