Unreal engine on Mac
How to become productive in Unreal engine within an hour?
Are you using the Unreal Engine for the first time like me on a Mac? Let me save you from the frustrating first few minutes of using the Unreal engine productively.
If you have a habit of using your Mac on your lap, then I would suggest that better place your Mac on a table or on a cooling pad for the entire duration of your Unreal engine session. Because, for some reason, CPU and GPU thinks it is a good idea to go crazy while Unreal engine is running, generating a lot of heat. Within 5 minutes you will start to feel that your lap is on a hot grill even though the Unreal Engine is just idling. Please save yourself and your lap.
Navigating Viewport using Trackpad
Please use the following table, to make yourself comfortable navigating the viewport using the trackpad
Rotate scene camera
2 Finger movement on trackpad
Move scene camera
Single finger press and drag on the trackpad
Move Forward / Backward / Left / Right
Rest 2 fingers in the trackpad and simultaneously press the WASD keys to move as we do in FPS games.
Move Up / Down
Rest 2 fingers in the trackpad and simultaneously press the Q to move down and E to move up
Camera Trolley Mode
Hold down the Option key, Simultaneously press and drag single finger in the touchpad
Practice these shortcuts for the next 10 minutes, this will make you comfortable for the rest of the session in unreal engine.
Getting started with Unreal development without C++
The major barrier for most of the newcomers into Game development is the programming construct used in Unreal Engine which is C++. Little did we know that it is still possible to get most of the development done in the Unreal engine even without a single line of C++ code. The paradigm is known as “Blue Print” in the Unreal engine.
Let’s not get misguided by the term “Blue Print” most commonly known as BP. It is nothing but a kind of Visual Scripting done using a node-based editor. While seasoned Unreal developers may claim that BP may be slow compared to C++. But in practice, BP does perform really well for moderate use cases. The performance degradation will only come when we instantiate and use hundreds of thousands of objects at runtime.
Let us explore the BluePrint development in the Unreal engine in a series of articles in the coming days.
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