01 - GAS Project Setup - Let's Make a Top Down Shooter

[@axxessdenied]

I've watched up to 30+ so far and I have to say this is pretty great foundation to get you going in the right direction with UE5. Great mix of coding/blueprint usage. I find other videos are too heavy on the blueprints. I guess it depends on what your workflow is like.

[@AlamarsDevDomain]

Thanks for watching, and for the kind words. As much as I'd prefer doing almost everything in C++, I think there's more tutorial value to mix the two. Foundational stuff (Parent Classes, Structs, Enums, etc) are all 'objectively' better in C++, but BP is fast for prototyping and easier to learn, and teach. Though I feel I get bogged down making the BP 'Code' readable (consistent and well spaced) too often : )

[@Cookie_has_youtube]

I have been following along now and I am up to video 7. These video tutorials are great and he explains things well.

[@AlamarsDevDomain]

Thanks again for the kind words : )

[@kameenavery9616]

I almost Spit out my drink when I saw the title of your Project Title lol. TDS is a HYUGE thing in America. That is all I will say lol

[@AlamarsDevDomain]

Thanks for watching ; )

[@Code-BEZLIMIT]

Oiii mate thanks a bunch, looking forward to the continuation!

[@AlamarsDevDomain]

Thanks for watching : )

[@shannenmr]

I realise you have probably already recorded a lot of this series already but have you thought about pivoting (or add additional bonus videos) to something more like an Action Roguelike or Vampire Survivors style game as they are more "hot right now" then just a Top Down Shooter ?

[@AlamarsDevDomain]

Thanks for watching : ) I had considered a Horde Survival (Genre name I like slightly better than Bullet Heaven), as I'm really enjoying a bunch of the games coming out in that genre, but I don't know that Unreal is a good choice for that. There are a lot of performance implications without the game being 3D, but that certainly adds a LOT more. So while it's possible to do a reasonable 3D Horde Survival like Soulstone Survivors, that's a big ask for a solo/small team. And as for 2D, it could work, but I'm not a big fan of Unreal's 2D Support/System. If I make a Horde Survival Playlist, I would probably just do it in Godot, and I'd like to at some point. Having said all that, I will try to keep in mind some variations that might fit that better, which is mostly about a massive amount of mobs, along with a progression system that includes many auto attack weapons and such. Thanks for the suggestion : )

[@shannenmr]

@@AlamarsDevDomain I did some basic prototyping and found the Animation system became the bottleneck first with lots of AI, I moved everything to be fastpath and threadsafe / multi-threaded which helped a lot, I moved some stuff to C++ which helped some, then I tried the Animation Sharing Plugin which considerably helped though does have some limitations... I wanted to test using Vertex Animations but at this point there are more potential savings elsewhere and the free tools I found to create them all had their issues. The next performance issue was that I was using the Character class and the CMC with RVO, I was able to get some decent performance gains from using NavMesh Walking mode instead (introduced by EPIC for the Trash NPC's in Paragon) and reducing the tick-rate of the CMC slightly (better if could time slice groups over multiple frames) then played with the idea of stripping the CMC code down but instead started looking into using the Floating Pawn Movement method which is a lot more performant but OOTB is definitely "lower fidelity" but passable in this style of game... I also looked into MASS which actually feels like it might be a better ultimate solution with its movement processors and more efficient RVO but the documentation and examples are lacking currently to know for sure.

[@MatheusGamedev]

Hi, first of all thanks for the series of tutorials. I have a question, what is the difference between having the ability component in the player state instead of implementing it in the character?

[@AlamarsDevDomain]

Thanks for watching : ) The short answer is, not much heh... I do touch on this right at the start of the video, kzbin.info/www/bejne/e6nNhmB3ib1qeLs But basically, if you want to be able to swap out characters but keep your set of abilities, using the PlayerState can be a better option. Personally, I'm not going to do that with any projects going forward (Like in the upcoming UE 5.4 GAS Project Setup video heh) because I think it's just not worth the extra hassle.

[@MatheusGamedev]

@@AlamarsDevDomain Sorry, I rewatched the video and saw that you had already explained it. But thank you for your patience and explaining it here again!

[@wildbard4112]

What's that command you do to automatically create the functions? How do you do that?

[@AlamarsDevDomain]

When you get the green squiggle under your function name, you can right click on it and click 'Quick Actions and Refactorings', which will give you a 'Create Definition of in '. You can also select the function, and hit the shortcut of Ctrl + . to get the Create Definition submenu popup. Thanks for watching : )

[@priceless5386]

Looking forward to this series. Just curious, will you be adding multiplayer, or is this a single player game with GAS?

[@AlamarsDevDomain]

Thanks for watching : ) Not intending to add multiplayer for this series, but might in the next (so not soon heh).

[@shannenmr]

@@AlamarsDevDomain GAS but no MP ? :(

[@ekagaurangadas]

Why did you choose third person instead of top down template?

[@AlamarsDevDomain]

Thanks for watching... Some of the video : ) I mention right at the beginning that I didn't want the pathfinding click-to-move hooked up to the Character, and that they're very similar, so feel free to start with top down.

[@AIDNPlaysStuff]

No idea why but I cant get this to work, Not doing anything other than your video and it doesn't let me build because of 4 - 6 errors when all I've touched is the files as you with the exact same edits

[@AlamarsDevDomain]

Throw the errors up here or somewhere else, along with the lines they're referring to, and thanks for watching ; )

[@AIDNPlaysStuff]

@@AlamarsDevDomain You respond fast but I managed to work it out xD simple misspelling, thanks for the offer to look over my errors though.