All right.
Welcome back.
Now we have our project.
We're set up and we're ready to start making some C plus plus classes.
And we're going to start with our character.
We need a character.
We need something to run around in the world.
And we know that we have our character assets.
If we go to characters Ora here is our skeletal mesh.
We need an actual character class that we can assign this skeletal mesh to.
So that's what we're going to do in this video.
Now we're going to have some functionality in our character class that will be shared between our player
controlled character that's going to be Ora and the enemy characters that will be controlled with AI.
And because we're going to share some functionality, we're going to make a base class for our character.
So that's what I'd like to do.
Now I'm going to go up to Tools and select New C plus plus class and choose the character class.
And for our C plus plus classes, I'd like to use the public and private Git folder structure.
So I'm going to click on public and that's going to put our header file in public and the CPP file in
private.
And I'm going to call this class Ora.
Character base and this will be our base class and we'll have all of our characters in this project
derive from this class.
So let's go ahead and create the class.
Now I have live coding off and my project is set up so that it doesn't automatically compile when I
create a class.
So it's going to generate the C plus plus code.
So I'll give it a moment and once that's finished, I'm going to go ahead and close out of the Unreal
Engine editor.
Now A has been generated for me, but I'm going to open this project in Rider.
Now, if you don't have Rider, you can use Visual Studio or even VS code if you'd like to do that.
But as I mentioned, I'll be using Rider for this course and I can right click on the project and select
Open with Rider.
Now I'm going to tell Rider that I trust this solution.
So I'm going to click Trust and Open and we'll see our brand new Aura character base header and CPP
files.
Of course they'll be red because I'm version controlling this rider is smart enough to see that and
it's letting me know that these files are not staged yet.
So that's going to help me to remember.
Now we also see Rider link is required, so I'm going to go ahead and click install plugin and game
just to take care of that and we'll give this some time.
We see now that rider is ready to use and we'll give Rider a moment to process Unreal Engine source
files.
Okay, so after waiting patiently, now that rider is finished, we can now take a look at our new character
base class and I'm going to tell Rider not to ask me again to add new files to get.
I think I can handle doing that on my own.
And here's our project.
The Aura module contains a source folder with some new things.
Here we have Aura and CPP.
We got our Buildpacks, all that good standard stuff.
Here's our public and private folders with Aura, character based and CPP.
And of course once I stage and commit these and git, they'll no longer be read.
If you're not version controlling, then Rider will not make these read for you and you don't have to
worry about it.
So before we go ahead and get started rearranging and coding things, I'm just going to go ahead and
open up the Visual Studio solution as well, just so we can see what things look like and that it's
telling me I need to install some extra things.
Let's take a look and install those things we might need that we don't have.
And once that's complete, we can now take a look at our project here in Visual Studio and we can see
Aura character base here, both H and CPP.
So it doesn't really matter what ID you're using.
What matters is the code itself.
Now throughout the course we're going to be running in debug mode and to run in debug mode, we need
the editor symbols for debugging, which is a set of symbols that allows us to see the call stack when
we're debugging and when we hit breakpoints and things like that.
We'll be getting lots of practice doing debugging throughout the course as that will greatly enhance
our experience as developers and we'll go ahead and run in debug mode just to make sure that we're up
and running and everything's working in this video.
So the first thing we need to do in order to run in debug mode is we can open our epic games launcher.
Go to library and find our version of Unreal Engine.
Click the drop down next to launch and go to Options.
And here we see editor symbols for debugging.
Now, if you've taken some of my other courses, I haven't forced you to do this, namely because,
well, it's nearly 60GB in this case, which is a lot.
But for this course, I highly recommend that you do install editor symbols for debugging as debugging
is an important skill that you should have as a game developer.
And as you'll see throughout the course, it's going to allow us to get a lot of information that we
would otherwise not have access to.
So make sure that checkbox is checked and go ahead and hit apply.
And I'm going to give this a few minutes to finish downloading those symbols.
And in the meantime, I'm going to close out of the Ides, both Visual Studio and writer, and I'll
go ahead and edit out that wait time.
Okay.
So now that that's finished, I'm done with the Epic Games launcher.
I'm going to close it and reopen my project in my IDE.
Now I'm going to go ahead and open up the new project in Writer First.
And now that I have editor symbols for debugging, I can run this in debug mode.
So I'd like to come up here to my solution configurations and change the configuration from development
to debug game.
So I've switched to debug game and now if I like I can hit run that'll compile and launch the Unreal
engine editor without running in debug mode.
Or I can hit the debug button which will run this project in debug mode.
That's what we're going to do most of the time as we're developing and playtesting this project.
So I'll go ahead and allow writer to launch the engine.
We see up here that it says Ora debugging now and we now have the editor open and we're running in debug
mode.
Now, we do need to make sure that if we make changes here in the editor that need to be saved, that
we do click save all before we end our debug session.
If I go back to writer, you'll see that up here there's a red stop button.
If I hit that, it's going to actually close out of the Unreal Engine editor.
As you can see, it's no longer open, so that's something to be aware of.
Now we can run in debug mode in Visual Studio as well.
I'm going to close writer and open my Aura Visual Studio solution.
I'll go ahead and close this What's new tab there and we can change this from development editor to
debug game editor and what this will do is it'll run the project with debug symbols for our game project
module and not the engine modules and we can simply hit the play button if we want to launch this in
debug mode here.
And once again we have aura open and just like we saw before when we were debugging from writer, we
see debug game up here at the top.
I'll go ahead and close out of the editor and I'm done with Visual Studio.
I'm going to go ahead and close out of that.
As I mentioned, I'll be using writer, so I really don't need my Visual Studio solution.
It's there, but I can remove it.
I can also remove the settings.
That's just some options for writer slash Resharper.
I'm going to go ahead and just delete both of those and I'll right click on the new project.
And once again I'm going to open with writer.
And I'm ready to actually start coding.
Now we'll start coding in the next video.
For now, we've got things set up.
We're able to run and debug mode.
Everything's looking great.
I do have a lot of red here and I can fix that by making another commit.
And the convention that I'll use for this course is each commit will be named after the lecture title,
as is pretty common with my courses, so I'm going to go ahead and commit.
I like to run git add
git status and then I'll make a commit and I'll call this the base character class.
So there's my commit.
I can go ahead and push to my remote repo.
And we're good.
And back in Rider.
The red is gone.
Okay, we're all set up and ready.
We'll start actually coding in the next video.
I'll see you soon.