WEBVTT 00:07.230 --> 00:08.430 Welcome back. 00:08.460 --> 00:15.120 So we have some random locations that we generate every time we cast our spell. 00:15.120 --> 00:17.190 And it's looking good. 00:17.190 --> 00:23.130 And what I'd like to do next is load these points asynchronously. 00:23.130 --> 00:24.060 Now I say load. 00:24.060 --> 00:31.140 I don't really mean that we're loading all the points at once, but I'd like to create a timer of sorts 00:31.140 --> 00:33.960 that will go through them one at a time. 00:33.960 --> 00:41.730 And that way we can go and do things that we want, like spawn our shard particles, because I don't 00:41.730 --> 00:44.310 want them all to just pop up all at the same time. 00:44.310 --> 00:50.310 I want them to go one after the other according to a sort of set amount of time. 00:50.310 --> 00:57.540 So I'm going to go into my aura abilities arcane arcane shards and open my gameplay ability here. 00:58.080 --> 01:05.130 Now, all of these points, these debug spheres pop up all at the same time, because a for each loop 01:05.130 --> 01:07.950 will just execute all at the same time. 01:07.950 --> 01:12.930 I mean, it's not really at the same time, it's one after the other, but very, very rapidly. 01:12.930 --> 01:16.320 And they'll pop up all on the same frame. 01:16.320 --> 01:22.440 Now I'd like them to pop up separated by an amount of time, and we've seen how we can use timers for 01:22.440 --> 01:22.800 this. 01:22.800 --> 01:26.010 You know, there are different ways to go about doing this. 01:26.010 --> 01:32.100 One is to do a delay and the loop the wire back around and execute the same thing again. 01:32.100 --> 01:33.420 I like to use timers. 01:33.420 --> 01:35.250 I tend to think those are cleaner. 01:35.250 --> 01:40.770 And I'm going to just take these parts here where we're just cleaning up. 01:40.770 --> 01:43.080 We're hiding the magic circle again. 01:43.080 --> 01:48.300 Showing the mouse cursor is inherent in that we're destroying the point collection and we're ending 01:48.300 --> 01:53.100 the ability after a point two second delay, I'm going to take all of these and just set them aside 01:53.100 --> 01:54.030 for now. 01:54.030 --> 01:58.530 We do want to do them, but I want to get rid of this for each loop. 01:58.530 --> 02:01.950 I'm going to keep my draw debug sphere. 02:01.950 --> 02:03.750 I'm going to put that up there. 02:03.750 --> 02:08.460 But right after the ground points is cached off, I'd like to set a timer. 02:08.460 --> 02:13.830 So I'm going to drag off and set timer and we'll set timer by event. 02:13.830 --> 02:16.560 You can also do by function name. 02:16.800 --> 02:23.250 There's several options here, but I like to set a timer by an event and create a custom event. 02:23.900 --> 02:29.300 And the custom event here is going to do something every iteration of this timer. 02:29.390 --> 02:33.710 It's going to basically spawn a shard. 02:33.740 --> 02:38.270 I'm going to refer to one Niagara system as a shard. 02:38.270 --> 02:43.850 So I'm going to call this spawn shard for lack of a better name. 02:43.850 --> 02:53.450 I think that's descriptive enough, and for the time we can have a sort of shard tick rate of sorts, 02:53.450 --> 02:57.200 a delta time for spawning shards. 02:57.200 --> 02:58.790 So we can call this. 02:59.120 --> 03:05.570 We'll promote it to a variable and we'll call it shard spawn Delta time. 03:07.190 --> 03:12.350 And I'm going to set this to something like 0.2, maybe 0.1. 03:12.350 --> 03:15.350 We'll start at 0.2 and we'll see how that feels. 03:15.350 --> 03:18.020 And I'll go ahead and reroute this red node. 03:18.770 --> 03:22.100 So that these things look nice and neat. 03:23.990 --> 03:26.840 So we have a shard spawn Delta time. 03:26.840 --> 03:30.770 I'm going to check looping here for my set timer by event. 03:30.770 --> 03:37.010 And for each iteration of this timer, we're going to do a few things. 03:37.010 --> 03:44.510 Right now, what I want to do is get an element from ground points each time, but I want to get a different 03:44.510 --> 03:44.900 element. 03:44.900 --> 03:49.550 I want to loop over them as if this were a for loop, but it's really not. 03:49.580 --> 03:56.000 Now, if I want to do that, I need some kind of a count and I need to know how many points are in this 03:56.000 --> 03:56.690 array. 03:56.690 --> 03:59.120 Well, we're passing in num points here. 03:59.120 --> 04:04.010 So what we can do is make that a member variable of this ability. 04:04.010 --> 04:08.060 So I can promote this to a variable and call this num points. 04:10.700 --> 04:15.290 And if I compile, I'll see that that's set to 11 because it was already 11 there. 04:15.770 --> 04:19.190 And now that we have num points, we can have a count. 04:19.190 --> 04:23.810 We can keep count, keep track of how many that we've spawned already. 04:23.810 --> 04:25.880 So I'm going to make another variable. 04:25.880 --> 04:27.860 And this can be called count. 04:29.640 --> 04:33.450 And it's going to be an integer, and it's going to start off at zero. 04:33.450 --> 04:38.850 And every time we spawn a shard, or in this case we're just drawing debug spheres. 04:38.850 --> 04:44.430 But every time we do that, we can take our count and we can increment it by one. 04:44.430 --> 04:48.480 And just like C plus plus has a plus plus, so does blueprint. 04:48.480 --> 04:52.950 And it's going to do what plus plus and C plus plus does. 04:52.950 --> 04:55.800 It's going to take count increment it by one. 04:55.800 --> 04:58.050 And now count will be changed. 04:58.050 --> 05:01.860 So it's like setting count equal to itself plus one okay. 05:01.860 --> 05:03.510 So that's great. 05:03.510 --> 05:06.060 But we're going to need to check that condition. 05:06.060 --> 05:09.000 Just like a while loop or a for loop does. 05:09.000 --> 05:12.120 So we need to take our count right here. 05:12.120 --> 05:14.970 And we need to make sure that it's still less than. 05:15.980 --> 05:16.940 NUM points. 05:16.940 --> 05:19.370 So we're going to say count is less than num points. 05:19.400 --> 05:23.900 It's just like creating a for loop and using this as that loop condition. 05:23.900 --> 05:25.490 We're going to have a branch here. 05:25.490 --> 05:28.520 So we're going to say if count is less than num points. 05:28.520 --> 05:33.560 If that's true then we can go on with our lives and spawn debug spheres. 05:33.560 --> 05:38.540 We can spawn one debug sphere increment count and then we'll resume. 05:38.540 --> 05:40.310 Now where are we going to spawn it. 05:40.310 --> 05:42.470 Well we need to get it from ground points. 05:42.470 --> 05:43.880 So we're going to get ground points. 05:43.880 --> 05:47.660 We're going to get a copy of one of its scene components. 05:47.660 --> 05:49.820 And we're going to use count as the index. 05:49.820 --> 05:53.000 Because count is kind of like the eye of a for loop. 05:53.000 --> 05:57.140 I always use eye, but you could call this index if you wanted to as well. 05:57.140 --> 06:03.980 But either way we're getting from ground points one of those scene components and we can use that components 06:03.980 --> 06:04.850 world location. 06:04.850 --> 06:10.220 We can get world location from it and hook that into the center for draw debug sphere. 06:10.890 --> 06:11.820 And. 06:12.740 --> 06:15.080 We're checking that loop condition. 06:15.080 --> 06:20.420 And what we can do is we can exit in the false case. 06:20.420 --> 06:26.900 If this condition no longer evaluates to true, then we have all this stuff that we were doing at the 06:26.900 --> 06:27.740 end there. 06:27.740 --> 06:29.540 We can go ahead and do that. 06:29.540 --> 06:35.390 But the hide magic circle business, I don't want to wait until we're done spawning all of these or 06:35.390 --> 06:36.680 showing all these spheres. 06:36.680 --> 06:43.040 I'd actually like to hide the magic circle right away, right after we've set the timer. 06:43.040 --> 06:46.070 So like, right up here, I'm just going to put it here. 06:47.410 --> 06:53.020 So we can hide that magic circle right away, and then we can start seeing our spheres. 06:53.020 --> 06:58.930 And then at the end, we'll have a point two second delay, destroy that point collection and end the 06:58.930 --> 06:59.500 ability. 06:59.500 --> 07:04.600 So with that, let's see how this looks in action. 07:06.690 --> 07:10.110 So I can go ahead and press one and press one. 07:11.380 --> 07:13.090 And there we have our points. 07:17.530 --> 07:20.590 Now I'm noticing a slight delay before the first one. 07:21.640 --> 07:28.360 And we can really see that if we take our shard spawn delta time and increase it to say 0.5 or even 07:28.360 --> 07:29.500 a whole second. 07:30.090 --> 07:34.200 Let's see what this looks like when we spawn our spheres. 07:34.470 --> 07:37.230 I'm going to press it right now. 07:38.090 --> 07:42.710 Actually, I need to press it again, so I'm going to press it again right now. 07:43.260 --> 07:43.800 Okay. 07:43.800 --> 07:51.660 See, a whole second went by before we had our spawn shard called, and that's even with an initial 07:51.660 --> 07:53.220 start delay of zero. 07:53.400 --> 07:59.940 So what we are going to do here is we're going to just call spawn shard right away, right after we 07:59.940 --> 08:02.880 set the event, and that's going to increment the count. 08:02.880 --> 08:04.470 It's going to do all this stuff. 08:04.470 --> 08:08.070 So I'm going to take my event spawn shard. 08:09.860 --> 08:11.390 And just call it right away. 08:11.920 --> 08:13.000 That's one thing. 08:13.000 --> 08:19.210 And another thing I want to do is I want to promote this timer to a variable so that we can clear and 08:19.210 --> 08:20.950 invalidate it once we're done. 08:20.950 --> 08:27.400 So I'm going to go ahead and take this return variable, promote it and call this shard spawn timer 08:27.700 --> 08:30.580 and hook that up. 08:30.580 --> 08:36.640 And then in the false case here, if we fail the loop condition we're going to take shard spawn timer 08:36.640 --> 08:40.390 and call clear and invalidate timer by handle. 08:42.280 --> 08:46.120 And we'll hook that up right there, like so. 08:46.540 --> 08:49.720 And that takes care of cleaning up the timer. 08:51.310 --> 08:53.200 Okay, let's try this now. 08:53.200 --> 08:54.460 Let's go ahead and press play. 08:54.460 --> 08:57.310 I should have a whole second delay between these spheres. 08:57.310 --> 09:01.450 So I'm going to press the one key and I'm going to press it again right now. 09:01.450 --> 09:02.980 And there's the sphere. 09:02.980 --> 09:06.760 So as we can see we get it executed right away. 09:06.760 --> 09:11.590 And then we get all the others and we can adjust shard spawn delta time. 09:11.590 --> 09:14.860 We can set it really quick like 0.1. 09:14.860 --> 09:18.910 And we'll just get these popping up all over the place like this. 09:19.920 --> 09:21.300 That looks pretty cool. 09:24.000 --> 09:26.670 And if we wanted a little slower, well, we can just adjust it. 09:26.670 --> 09:33.630 I think point two is a pretty good time, but we aren't really going to know until we're actually spawning 09:33.630 --> 09:36.030 those shards and we see what they look like. 09:36.030 --> 09:39.030 And that's going to be one of our next tasks. 09:39.300 --> 09:46.230 So before wrapping up, I think I'd like to just make sure that things are not too messy on the blueprint 09:46.230 --> 09:46.620 front. 09:46.620 --> 09:53.730 We don't want this to be confusing and out of hand, so I just want to make sure things are looking 09:53.730 --> 09:54.600 good here. 09:57.150 --> 09:59.580 So we can clean this up just a bit. 09:59.580 --> 10:02.430 I actually don't think I need that reroute node there. 10:07.810 --> 10:08.440 Okay. 10:08.440 --> 10:09.880 That's looking good. 10:13.500 --> 10:14.100 All right. 10:14.100 --> 10:17.250 And with that, we can go ahead and wrap up. 10:17.250 --> 10:18.150 Excellent job. 10:18.150 --> 10:20.790 I'll see you in the next video.