Inheritance is an important feature in many object oriented programming languages. It allows programmers to create variations of an object and communicate with them as if they are all the same original type.

Blueprints also have the ability to have child classes and have parent classes that they inherit from.

If you want to learn more about the theory behind inheritance, click here for a tutorial from w3 schools showing inheritance in C++.

Parent Class

Creating the Parent Class

To start, create a new blueprint actor and name it ParentActor.

This actor can now be filled with events, input actions, variables, functions and more. All of these attributes will be shared to our child actors.

If you don’t know how to use input actions and input axes click here for a detailed run down on how to include these powerful events into your project.

Setting up the Parent Class

To demonstrate, I have created two keybinds, an event, a function and a float variable.

Pressing 1 will set this float value to 1 and pressing 2 will set the float value to 2.

Child Class

Creating a child class

Creating a child class from your chosen parent class is very easy.

To create a new class based on a previous simply right click your chosen class in the content browser and click create child blueprint.

Accessing the parent

Variables

Inside the child actor there are no visible variables of the left side.

Right clicking and searching for your parent variables will reveal them in the default section.

Events and Functions

Right clicking inside your child blueprint class and typing the name of your functions and events will give you access to them.

Key events will override any code that is on the same parent event. This child class will now print 10 on key press 1 and 20 on key press 2.

To make sure the parent code runs as well as the child code on these key inputs, click on the input and look to the right of the details panel.

Un-checking the “Override Parent Binding” box will run both sections of code. If you want your child to have different behaviors on the same key presses you can leave this checked.

Running Parent Code

When accessing parent functions and events you are stopping the parent code from running. This is called overriding.

To make sure the parent code runs during the event, right click the specific event and click Add Call to Parent Function.

Now when custom parent event is fired the child code will run and the parent code will run. The expected output is “Hello From Parent Class” on screen.

Conclusion

That is the basics of parent and child classes in unreal engine 4!

Designing your code to utilize this powerful technique will improve the readability and efficiency of your game development processes.

The post Parent and Child Blueprints in Unreal Engine 4 appeared first on Couch Learn.

Is VOIPTalker Voice Chat Difficult?

No, not at all!

Implementing Positional Voice Chat into your UE4 multiplayer game only using blueprints is simple and requires very little knowledge of how the backend C++ code works.

Adding this system to my own project initially was very difficult due to the lack of resources available from both the community and Epic themselves on their wiki.

As I don’t want anyone to follow the painful nights of troubleshooting like it did, I have created this guide for the UE4 community to enhance their own projects.

Examples of proximity and positional voice chat 

• Rust https://rust.facepunch.com/ developed by Facepunch Studios
• PUBG https://www.pubg.com/ developed by PUBG Corporation
• Fortnite https://www.epicgames.com/fortnite/en-US/home developed by Epic Games

Requirements

• Unreal Engine’s basic voice chat system fully working.

• Unreal Engine version 4.19 and above.

• The new audio mixer and associated plugins be enabled. (If not using Unreal Engine 4.24)

Complete these requirements to move onto adding the VOIPTalker component.

The VOIPTalker Component

Adding the Component

The VOIPTalker component intercepts voice data and runs it through any effects or attenuation thus preventing player voices playing directly to the players.

Firstly, on your character blueprint, type create the blueprint node named Add VOIPTalker and attach it to your Begin Play event.

From the return value pin, promote the new VOIPTalker to a new variable. Call this variable something relevant as we will use this again soon. I named this VOIP.

Validating the Player State

Next, connected to your Add VOIPTalker node, we need check if the PlayerState is valid and as a result, preventing failure during VOIPTalker’s initialisation.

There are far more pretty ways of doing this check but reliability and simplicity is key for understanding how this system works.

At this step, the code should look like this.

Registering Voice Chat data to the Player State

VOIPTalker in its current setup, can’t receive any voice data.

We now need to assign the correct PlayerState.

Using the Register with Player State node, we can assign the target pin to the promoted variable we created earlier. In the earlier steps we named this VOIP.

In the owning state pin, the PlayerState variable needs to be connected.

Microphone Sensitivity

When using this system I found that the microphone sensitivity was far to low to sustain voice chat without stuttering or cutting out entirely.

To fix this simply create a Set Mic Threshold node and set it to -1.

VOIPTalker Voice Settings

We are almost there!

VOIPTalker by default has no effects, location for the sound to originate from or attenuation preset.

From the VOIP variable, drag and type set settings to create this node shown below.

This node gives us the ability to define the settings we want for our voice chat.

Set Component to Attach to a reference to the player’s camera. This will appear to make the audio originate from the player’s mouth.

I created a specific attenuation class for VOIP which will more accurately reduce volume over distance in the context of speech. You can create and set your own Attenuation class in here and tweak till it sounds right.

If you don’t know how to setup Audio Attenuation in Unreal Engine 4 click here for a simple guide.

In the content browser create a new source effect chain class and leave it empty. Assign the source effect chain setting option to this new class.

Completed Blueprint

The entire system is fairly simple. The lack of documentation is the difficult part.

Here is the complete blueprint nodes all inside my player character blueprint.

Example Video

Download the Project Files

Conclusion

Positional Voice Chat should be well documented and developed considering how many games use this feature.

If you found this tutorial useful please share to other developers, family and friends because I believe that this takes very little time to set up and adds a whole dimension of gameplay.

Developers should not have to rely on custom C++ solutions for basic multiplayer features.

The post How to use VOIPTalker Proximity Voice Chat using only Blueprints in your Multiplayer Unreal Engine 4 game appeared first on Couch Learn.