Light Switch System (Unreal Engine 5)

 Since our Game Jam project is a horror based shooter set in a dark cathedral, I thought having lights that can be switched on and off would be a good idea. This could be used to highlight hidden areas or items. 

First made a simple button to act as a switch and a sphere collision so we can turn the light on and off.

Next, is et up for the logic for switching the light on or off. I created a variable, for checking whether the light was on or off and set up an each loop. The branch checks whether the light is on or off and for testing purposes, displays a message whether the light is on or off. I added a spotlight into the scene and created a variable for the switch and one that accessed the spotlight component as a value. I set the intensity of the light to the desired value in the scene and set that to when the light switch is on. When the light switch is off, the light intensity is set to zero. In the image below, you can the default value of that spotlight is also set to zero, as it should be off, until triggered.



Then I created an interact event and in the character blueprint set up the logic in a for each loop which checks if the character is overlapping with the switch and then allows the character to interact with it. The benefit to setting this system to an interact event, is that the interact event can be used elsewhere and the switch system can be reused for switches for doors, or anything else that may require a switch.

The video below showcases this. At first you see a dark room which slightly obscures the statues and switching on the lights makes them more visible.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Creating a simple dialogue system in Unreal Engine 5

Image
 Through my early days as a gamedev, I've learned a plethora of neat techniques but there was one that I always wanted to know how to do. A dialogue system. Here is my first attempt at a rudimentary system. This will be redone very soon with more depth. The very first step was to create a interface for Dialogue. Then a duplicated the Third Person Character blueprint and changed the meshes for both.  I made variables for this NPC, the first being an array variant of the string variable. This was give as many options for dialogue as I wanted. Then I created an index variable as an integer to determine in what order the dialogue was spoken. Then a reference to a widget was made. For the string array, I added three elements and added three simple sentences. The Index integer was initialized at -1. This was because the first element of the array began at 0 and the way the code works, we are incrementing the index. Starting it at -1 means we start blank, then move index 0 (the first...
Read more

Remaking Mario in Unreal Engine 5 (Part 2)

Image
(This post follows on from this page:  https://triplehitcombo.blogspot.com/2024/07/remaking-mario-in-unreal-engine-5-part-1.html ) Last time we left off, we ended on the UI and ensuring that all variables to be displayed on screen worked as intended. Checkpoints First, I made a checkpoint system to give the player a place in the level to return to, to avoid frustration if they repeatedly die. The concept was to make the visual representation for the checkpoint, then a trigger volume. In the event graph, I started to work on the blueprints.  The beginning of the code was a cast to the player and game mode BP. Then a setter for the spawn transform for the rotation of the checkpoint. This was set to a Do Once loop that connected to a timeline to display the animation of the flag changing when Mario enters the collision. Since the checkpoint can only be triggered once, a Do Once loop was the most useful choice.  After the timeline was set a lerp was added to adjust the rotati...
Read more

Remaking Mario in Unreal Engine 5 (Part 1)

Image
 For this project, I aim to remake Mario (or at least as best as I can) in UE5. The project makes sense as, while it is simple, there are a lot of core concepts that are valuable for any newbie game dev. Here is the first part of what I've done so far, which is a lot of set up. Stay tuned for Part 2 soon! The first port of call was to get the camera in position to act as a side scroller.  Here I set parameters, to allow for customization of where the camera goes in real time. This allowed me to find a sweet spot that looked good for the perspective I wanted.  (This ended up looking similar to this) The next step was to set snap layers. This allowed me to set layers for placing assets for the foreground, main play layer and background. This is important because all of the interactable objects would only be in  the middle of the play area and without the snap layers, if they were incorrectly placed, the player may not be able to interact with them. (The snap layer sett...
Read more