V0.1.1 Devlog-KH

Widgets and Save-System

Author: Kevin Hall

Posted on: 07/12/24

THE PROBLEM:

This week I was in charge of creating the save system.  This took up a bulk of my weeks time and it was very challenging.  While making the save system I wasted at least a whole hour on getting a null reference.  I was not able to cast to the bp_monkDude while I was in the main menu map and could not figure it out!  I also had some trouble while making the main menu widget for I'm not super familiar with the UI tools and was having a ton of trouble trying to incorporate a widget switcher with a scroll box.

THE SOLUTION:

I embarrassingly did not even think about the fact that since I was doing work on the main menu map where the monkdude was not on, I would never be able to get a reference to the monk dude because that object has not even been created(yet)!  I had to change the way that I was going to access the health component.  This was actually really good practice though, because to be able to save things on "Components", you need to sort of send the information forward to the player.  See image.

This calls all the components with the save-able interface and grabs any objects that have been passed to the interface implementable save event"SaveGame"

I have had some success with the UI elements but I am still working on it.  One thing I have been doing is using borders instead of horizontal boxes, for organizing the layout because the Border gives you a little more freedom with placement of things on the screen.