Unreal Engine 5 Blueprints Best Practices: Inheritance, Composition using Components, and Interfaces

Description:

Survey: This tutorial was made as part of a college project, and I’d greatly appreciate your feedback. After finishing the tutorial, click the link above for a short, anonymous survey that only takes a few minutes to complete. Thank you for your time and feedback. The goal of this tutorial is to introduce you to Object-Oriented Programming practices. We will talk about: inheritance, composition and interfaces. The objective of this tutorial is to teach you implementation. More specifically, sharing common functionalities between classes. You will learn not only How to implement a functionality, but also Why and When it should be implemented. The focus of this tutorial is theory. Community Tutorial: Timestamps: 0:00:00 Intro 0:02:03 What does this tutorial teach? 0:05:39 What are the best practices with Blueprints? 0:07:49 Object-Oriented Programming 0:10:41 Creating simple pickups – Problems with duplicated classes 0:15:03 Inheritance 0:16:13 Inheritance – Pickups 0:29:30 Class Responsibility – Where to implement (put) my code? 0:37:42 Upgrading pickups + how to create new pickups 0:44:12 Abstract Class 0:47:17 Casting Theory 0:56:50 Casting Examples – Characters 1:08:25 Casting Example – Pickups with Characters 1:12:49 Casting Examples – Casting to an Abstract Class 1:22:30 Casting – When to use it 1:24:44 IS-A Relationship + related and unrelated classes 1:35:50 Creating a Class hierarchy using inheritance following the IS-A Relationship 1:40:17 Polymorphism – Creating an interaction system using inheritance that follows the IS-A Relationship 1:55:52 Monomorphism – Creating Hazards using inheritance that follows the IS-A Relationship 2:18:37 Benefits of inheritance + What does the code affect? 2:24:44 Drawbacks of inheritance – Adding NPC to our Interact and Hazard class hierarchies 2:30:12 Drawback of inheritance – Adding BP_Fire as a Hazard and Interactable 2:33:44 Composition over inheritance – Theory 2:37:27 Recreating Hazards with Composition using components 2:46:23 Blueprint Interface – Theory 2:49:32 Recreating Interactable classes using Blueprint Interface 3:01:51 BP_Fire as an unrelated class that is a Hazard and Interactable 3:03:17 RECAP – Sharing common functionalities between classes 3:06:15 Adding a vehicle – a new, unrelated player controlled pawn class 3:10:02 Casting VS Interfaces 3:15:01 Don't use interfaces if the implementation is the same for all the unrelated classes 3:21:29 HealthManager component – Gives health to any unrelated class 3:26:28 DamageManager component – Damages any unrelated class that implements the HealthManager component 3:32:53 PlayerStatsManager component – Handles player's: Health, Gold, and Score variables 3:42:06 Sharing monomorphic functionalities with components between characters and vehicles 3:44:54 Adding HealthManager component to any unrelated class to share a health functionality 3:49:45 Interface_DeathHandler – Destroying actors that implement HealthManager component 3:57:21 Interface_AffectPlayerPawn – FreezeForDuration(), OnImpact, BurnEffectForDuration(), ChangeMaterialForDuration() 4:22:46 Conclusion 4:23:52 RECAP – How to share common functionalities between different game mechanics 4:29:51 EXPANDING – It's easy to add new things to our game mechanics – Expanding: Pickups, Interactables, and Hazards 4:36:07 RECAP – Inheritance Drawbacks 4:40:38 RECAP: Sharing common functionalities between two unrelated Player controlled pawn class hierarchies: Characters and Vehicles 4:48:00 EXPANDING – Adding a Paragon character to the PlayableCharacter class hierarchy 4:51:02 RECAP – Theory Cheat Sheet 5:04:54 EXPANDING – What to learn next?