Did you hide the model when it was selected

in general, I fixed this problem, I had to delete DefaultRoot and then yes, now it is updated both in the editor and in the view port in Blueprint

you could save and load it to a save object, that's a bit on the slow side if there is a lot of data since you're reading and writing to disk isntead of all in memory though. having data assets hold some info could be a decent way to keep data persistent through a play session ( do be aware that data assets reset back to default values when you close and re-open the game so you'll still need to save and load data, but only on started and before you close the game) personally i find that the best way is to not open new levels, instead to have 1 persistent level that the game takes place in and all your levels would just be streaming levels in that. that way, you always have a persistent level that data that should persist can exist inside (so your player would be in that for instance). If you take a quick look at any of my livestream VODs you'll see that is how I have myproject set up and the basic setup for it is shown in my video : how to actually load levels in unreal in the end, each method has it's downsides of course but those are some other ways to look into!

if you're having no trouble following along then you should feel free to keep going! having a general understanding of unreal engine or programming in general will help but if you feel like youre not running into problems while following this, keep on going :)

pretty much yeah! It also comes with a lot of ready made features and systems to work off which saves a lot of time.

The main thing to remember is that data assets are just that, assets. they exist as files on disk, not objects inside a level. a data asset has more in common with a 3D mesh or a material than it does an actor. So yeah, for a swrod, espcially if you dont have a whole item system in yoru game, making it an actor makes more sense. But take or instance making an inventory system (something which I recently did a whole series on) The items in your inventory doesn't exist in the world, so you can't use actors to keep all that information, instead every item is a data asset with it's corropsonding values (what mesh it displays when it IS spawned into the world as an actor, what image it displays in the inventory, what value it has in a shop and so on)

@@thegamedevcave Hmmm but how is a data asset any different from a struct for inventory purposes? Currently I am building my own inventory system for my prototype game, and I just use a struct for items, and then include that struct in the inventory array and also as a variable in the Item actor. So when I spawn an item in the world, and pick it up, my functionality will take the details from the actor, store it in the inventory array in the item struct, then destroy the actor. If I want to drop the item I can just spawn the actor I want from the details in the inventory struct. I have searched a lot on different forums, but no-one can conclusively explain why Data Asset is preferred over Struct. Besides the obvious "in DA you can perform functions", is there any other benefit??

structs are still variables that you write onto another object that exists in memory, data assets (for all intents and purposes) are objects by themselves that exist on disk. if you have minecraft as exmaple : wooden sword has a certain durability, a certain attack damage , attack speed and all that. you would store those things in a data asset so that you can just easily reference that instead of having to indevidually worry about setting all those values anytime something happens to be a wooden sword. then stone sword has different values, iron/diamond and so on all have their own values. Now, do you really want to have to write all those seperate values to a struct every time you make or move an item? probably not, it's prone to making mistakes, and you're needlessly throwing oppertaions to read and write values on the cpu (i will admit, that's probably not going to be an actual problem but still, when it's not needed, you probably should avoid it). with a data asset, the data for that one item exists as a file on disk, so instead of copying over all those values every time, you just refernce that one asset that holds that data, all your wooden swords will look at the wooden sword data asset when they need to know something about their info. stone swords look at the stone sword asset, iron swords and that asset. This also means that if you want to change something about a value on one type of item, you simply change it in your data asset instead of having to dive into your code and find where you set all that stuff in the first place. if nothign else, it will help keep things organized once a game grows past only a handful of items, because going through and finding that in code will be an increasingly massive headache comapred to just a data asset (or even a data table, depending on the needs of the game)

@@thegamedevcave I see... thank you for the explanation. The downside of data assets is that you cant use it for data that changes. For example, a sword that loses durability, cant be changed in the data asset, else everyone with that sword will also have the changed durability. So if I understand it right, a data asset is best used for the common values of an object. So in this case, a sword, with its MAX durability, Base Damage, Weight etc, but all other values like current durability, quantity, upgrades etc are better stored in an array using struts?

@@bighit20100 yup that’s pretty much correct!

which is what the high poly mesh is for, to use to bake detail into textures

Found it. BP_Weapon has a variable "Damage" 10 that is editable and expose on spawn. This is the default value for all weapons. I have BP_Axe with Damage set to 20. To get the damage when a monster is hit I use: - Get Player Character -> Cast to BP_Player -> Get Weapon -> Get Child Actor -> Cast to BP_Weapon -> Get Damage

for sure! collapsing some node sections down into material functions (especially if they are reused of course) is also a massive help to keep things at a reasonable scale :)

Yup! Good point, it is technically cheaper. I would personally not worry about it a lot, its unlikely to cause a noticable difference but best to get into the good habbit of using saturate then possible!

This is exactly what I wanted to comment, thanks.

So the issue here is that spawning actors spawns them into the persostant level, not into the same sub level that the spawner exists in (which is really annoying) in c++ you can give it a level to spawn in, as far as i know, blueprint doesnt let you do that so a workaround is to keep an array of actor references on the spawner and when the spawner is destroyed, it loops through that array and destroys all those other actors too. Not an ideal sollution but it'll work

easiest way to store metadata like that is to add a map that uses string keys (or name keys, which is technically slightly more performant i believe) and add a struct with a few variable types on it. that way you can look for the string "ammo" and read.write to the int variable of that stuct. or you coudl store it all as just strings, i've heard some people do that too.. i'm not too sure if that's a good idea though. the best way though, which is a little more difficult to do, is to add in an extra Object slot to each itemslot, and if there is metadata you put a UObject that hold specific data in there. but that can get complicated pretty quickly and I am not even sure if you could get that all set up in just blueprint to be honest. So, easiest and most straightforward way would be to make that String-struct map where the struct simple has options for a few different types of data. whatever the case, metadata on items is a massive pain to deal with so if you can work around having to implement it (for instance by not having the ammo in the gun, but have the gun just use ammo from the inventory) that's probably a way less headache inducing way to do it

@@thegamedevcave thank you for the answer. Now I think about to create BaseItemActor and BaseDynamicData for saving mutable data and override function that adds this object to replicated. So, every class just can use this data object and not required to implement any converting to structure functions or casting from string. I think that this is overhead. But I don't know how to implement it easier. Also I really scared about 8th reimplementation of my item system after I learn the GAS. I heard something about AttributeSets but I'm not sure that I can use it for the inventory system. But I will use it for a gameplay item actor logic. Im frustrated.

i did, but my initial idea for this rework, which wouldve worked fine, came across an annoying issue, that being that unreal for some reason likes to wipe soft pointers clean on startup so i then had to pivot, trying to use hard pointers, which obviously runs into the issue i discuss here, so only then did i have to start thinking again about what other solutions i could think of.

@@thegamedevcave 😂 it happens

@@GameDevAraz I probably couldve made the whole thing less shit in the first place so it didn't need a rework to begin with though XD

hey, i just double checked the link, they do work. but theyre only available for patreons and youtube members on the "cave dweller" tier or higher

@@thegamedevcave oh sorry , thanks for replay

Glad it was helpful!

it all depends on what you need :) if you just need a hanful of potions and maybe weapons, this system might be a little overkill. if youre going full survival game, you'll want to build some more on top of this system but you could very much extend this to use in a crafting system too.

@@thegamedevcave Gotcha. I think I'm looking for basics. I've only watched this video but when I have some time I'll do a follow along. I'm just starting out, the only game I'm working on so far is from a course on Udemy, just something to get me going.

it also messes with me a fair bit XD but i hope i at least can help make it slightly more intuitive :/

for me, nothing noticeable, both in the 3-5 seconds range. and when using blueprint in unreal instead of c++, there is no compile time at all (not sure how that compares to unity's visual scripting, since i never used that)

hard to say without seeing your node setup but that sounds like your character may not have the interface implemented? usually an error like that implies an actor variable not being assigned a value though.

i'm thinking maybe the arms are using IK instead of FK for some reason, check if the IK variable on them it set to true (in the animation)

If you are just spawning partiles, there is a function for that too instead of spawning an actor. The particles will destroy itself once done but an actor will stay around, so thats worth looking into

yeah it's really annoying, blueprints dont allow you to make a level type variable, you need to do it in a weird workaround. if you get a "load level by instance" node and then promote that level instance pin to a variable you can have a level variable. They really dont work very well though (as i show in thsi video with values getting wiped) so i'm guessing unreal doesn't want you to use those as actual variables.

@@thegamedevcave damn i wanted to use a blueprint data struct to have a handy drop down, but i guess i gotta use a different way ; ( thx for the quick response, really appreciate it!