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Tinker Tuesday for September 9, 2024

This thread is for anyone working on personal projects to share their progress, and hold themselves somewhat accountable to a group of peers.

Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.

If you want to be pinged with a reminder asking about your project, let me know, and I'll harass you each week until you cancel the service.

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@Southkraut, how's your Unreal project coming along?

Thanks for asking. As always distractions abound, and time spent on this project was little. I made some progress in debugging things, but fell into a bit of a technical rabbit hole RE: Input systems. I originally used the legacy input system because that's what the example project I used as a base shipped with, then I switched to the so-called Enhanced Input System which I'm still learning about, and at the same time I wonder whether I really need all this. Can't I just query inputs directly as I used to in Unity and Godot, without needing to go through the Editor's Project Settings? Arguably that's just me wanting to reinvent the wheel and do in code what Unreal already does in the editor, and I'd be better off learning to leverage the tools that are already before me, but I also just want to do this myself because it's easy, simple and tailored to my needs and would live entirely in the codebase instead of partially in code and partially in project settings.

The editor in general has proven more cumbersome than helpful. Whatever I need is hidden away in menus that forget which tabs I had open and other non-persistent UI elements like pop-ups or self-closing windows. Project settings, compiler results, runtime console output; it always takes multiple clicks to get at those. Maybe there are shortcuts or UI settings that remedy this.

As to my original problem of not getting the camera to show what I'm doing - I made no progress there. Please query again next week!

Fun fact, querying inputs directly in unity is no longer best practice either. You can, but they're really pushing the new input system. It's... Not terrible tbh. My main gripe with it is I don't like dealing with it's api, which you might have to if you wanna do something like 'check which button this control is in a given control scene, and display the correct image for it's key on the UI' (IE show 'E' on PC and 'X' on a controller). I wanna learn Unreal, it seems really powerful, but I gave up and decided to stick with Unity for the time being because Unreal just feels to painfully cumbersome for so many tasks. It's really studio oriented and not solo dev friendly.

Hey @ZorbaTHut, what's your stance on Input Systems in Unreal?