When building an Unreal Engine project for distribution, a common issue is the “multiple build targets found” error. This will stop the build with no real explanation as to why this happened. Turns out there’s an easy fix for it: the multiple targets it refers to are typically created when we rename a project. This …
Journal Entries are tracked as part of the SF Inventory Manager class. They’re a way to display items the player has found but not necessarily collected. As such, items in the Journal can be examined with the 3D viewer, just like inventory items can, although they’re not in the players possession. This is a nice …
Memoirs are pre-defined entries in a data table that can be unlocked by consequential tags. They’re easy to setup and trigger through custom logic, let’s take a look how to create one from scratch. First, take a look at the MemoirEntryList_DT under Pick a row and see how the examples are setup. Create a new …
Multi-pass rendering is a bit of an adventure in Unreal Engine. Here are some notes on how to get this working in Unreal Engine 5.5, using the layers system. Results are not quite what I had expected, but we can work around that. Let’s take a look at everything that’s involved. Project Settings In your …
Narrative Tales and Pro excel at dialogues, and they can be kicked off manually upon interactions with NPCs and objects like smart appliances, telephones, anything really. All we need is a brand new dialogue object and flesh it out. Open it up and select the Class Defaults, then populate the participants of this dialogue. It’s …
Endless engine changes means documentation from a few months ago can get outdated overnight, which is one of the downsides of “cutting edge” software. How rude indeed. Brushify is a good example, where the process of adding a brand new landscape object and trying to get the included material layer system going isn’t as straightforward …
Materials sometimes come as packed maps, like the ones we get from Quixel for Unreal Engine. If we wanted to make a change to those textures in Substance Painter, we can use the Grayscale Conversion generator to setup the material. Here’s how to do that. Let’s assume we have an ORM map. This means that …
We can use iClone’s Morph Creator to import morph targets and subsequently animate them. While it’s easy to create single morphs, it can be convenient to have a single slider to animate related morphs on related meshes. Think of an expression morph that also adjusts the hair, or part of their clothing. Those are technically …
Fetch quests are missions in which the player needs to go off and collect something, often in multiple quantities. For this example we’ll collect three bones for an NPC. I’ll create a new interactable blueprint for this, making it a child of Story Framework’s Interactable Base BP. I’ll add three copies of this class into …
We often see an effect whereby the third person player camera seamlessly transitions to a custom view to show something important in the level, then transitions back. There’s many variations of this theme, but the easiest way to achieve it in UE is by using Set View Target with Blend. Here’s an example of how …
Some events in the demo level create a custom pop-up at the bottom right if the screen. Those can be nice to inform the player of things to pay attention to, but that distinguish themselves from a subtitle or a task. If you successfully finish the Quick Time Even in the demo level, you’ll get …
Story Framework 4.1 introduced a new feature called Story Choices. With them we can give the player a choice to make with potentially devastating consequences. They’re easy to setup as part of the SF Sequence Manager component and can be reacted to with a Switch on String. Each choice can have a consequential tag that …
Story Framework has a feature called Subtitles, with which we can bring up text whenever we feel the need. This works great for informing players about things around them, as well as interior dialogues the player may have with themselves. They’re really easy to create thanks to the Play Sound with Subtitles node. Here’s an …
I’m using a live-retargeted CC character with regular locomotion in my project, using a standard combined skeletal mesh from Character Creator. I wanted to add a subtle facial animation to the character at runtime, something that could change depending on game play, without having to split off the head from the body. Thankfully there’s a …
Narrative Pro 2 uses EPIC’s Game Animation Sample Project for motion matching by default, with a character in jogging mode. The right mouse button will make the character walk temporarily, while CTRL will make him sprint. Let’s say we want to change this to a walking state by default, with SHIFT held down doing the …
By default Narrative Pro shows the compass navigation and mini map, but maybe your game doesn’t need it, or you want to enable these things later as players find an “item” in the story. Before I forget how to do this, here are a few reminders. Removing the Mini Map Both widgets can be referenced …
To get an idea which part of a large system is processing what is vital to understanding where issues come from. Without knowing where to start, it’s impossible to fix things that aren’t working. Input controls in Unreal Engine for example can be spread across a number of files. To understand where our input is …
The above video shows how to integrate SF and Digi Cam. I’ve had to do this multiple times to wrap my head around it and thought some notes are in other, so here’s how to do it: Player Controller Input Overrides In the DigiCamInfo Data Asset, pick Story Framework’s main gameplay input mapping context (SFGameplay_IMC). …
For debugging we sometimes need to know what class is being used, for example what Game Mode might be used. There’s no easy way I know of that can tell us the exact file name, but we can do the next best thing and test which class is used. Here’s an example: This code hooked …
We can fracture just about anything in Unreal Engine using real-time physics and the Facture tool. However, it’s always been a bit puzzling to me how to make these cached sequences available in sequencer. After a bit of R&D and plenty of testing, here’s how this works: Let’s see how to do this step by …
In the Viewport Outliner, we can designate any folder in our hierarchy as the “current folder”. This means when we add objects from the content browser into our scene, they don’t clutter up the main hierarchy but instead end up in said folder. Simply right-click the folder you want to use, then choose “make current”. …
Tasks are missions (or quests) for the player to do and to progress in the game. In Story Framework they’re part of the task queue, which in turn is part of the inventory manager. We can add tasks to the queue, which when active can be later completed or failed. We must implement the “reaction …
If ever we need to trigger any custom logic initiated from dialogues we have with our NPCs, we can use the Bind Even on Dialogue Reply function. It’s not super elegant and relies on the specific text of the reply, but it gets the job done and keeps the setup very simple. For this to …
Dialogues are a little tricky, complex and unintuitive to setup in Story Framework, so here’s an overview that will aid my (and perhaps your) memory. The hierarchy goes like this, no wonder I’m confused about it: Basic Conversations Each index in the Dialogue represents an independent conversation. We need at least one section, while others …
To interact with a Non-Player Character in Narrative Pro, we need to first In addition we’ll see how to bring up a dialogue option only if the player has an item in their inventory, and how we can give it to the NPC. Let’s take a look how all this works. Creating and spawning an …
Narrative has a component we can add to a blueprint that will turn it into an interactable object. It’s aptly called NarrativeInteractible. Once added to the class, we can select it and override the OnInteracted event. This will let us implement custom code that executes on interaction. The Interaction section on the component lets us …
In the player controller (SFDemoPlayerController_BP in the default project), select the camera manager component. Under Camera Settings on the left, switch between ThirdPerson and FirstPerson. This will determine what mode the game starts in. To switch camera modes while the game is playing we can press C to toggle (or hold Y on the gamepad). …
If you want to properly convert Genesis 8 and some Genesis 3 clothing over to Genesis 9 without using auto-fit, there’s a handy Developer Tools menu we can use. To convert into a native G9 item, the clothing needs to be stripped of its existing rigging, then re-rigged with Transfer Utility. Here’s how the Developer …
I’ve recently invested in Narrative Pro, a very comprehensive game framework for Unreal Engine 5. It features maps, quests, dialogues, inventory, combat, Metahuman support and a whole bunch of other stuff – in short, the glue code that would take me a good year to write from scratch. As I get into it, I’ll need …
I was working on a scene for which several actors needed to wear long draping robes as they walk slowly across a scene. This proved challenging to Unreal Engine’s native Chaos Cloth solver, which isn’t designed to drape high-res self-colliding cloth. While it can work, the results looked less than stellar as you can see …