Author: Camaro Kalithasan

Posted on June 18, 2022

Luddite Blog Entry #2

Problems With SubMenu Tabbing UI Development

Part 1:

Our game needed a way to leave the game and return to the main menu, which without implementation, the player would have been stuck in the game and would need to ALT+F4 just to exit the game, or even for us during development stage in the editor, would need to do the same to return to the editor. Testing was getting frustrating and since we were having a lot of lag in Unreal before the problem had been solved there, Unreal would continuously crash and force us to restart the editor, causing a lot of team members to have lots of time wasted. For testers, they would think that our game was basically "Sword Art Online", due to the fact that we didn't have a way to leave the game to the main menu, referencing SAO where the players had their quit button disabled and were forced to be trapped in the game. This issue was of high importance because it affected both testers, clients, and team members' experience.

Part 2:

After creating the submenu widget and implementing the widget to be able to add to the viewport, the character was still stuck running, with the mouse cursor never showing up on the submenu, as well as the player being able to move their camera around with the widget stuck overlaying on their screen, which can cause dizziness. I realized that when I was working with my blueprints, I had been attempting to stop the character's movement and camera, but that was only by ticks, so it caused more glitches when opening the submenu. After some research, I found "Set Input Mode Game and UI", which I was using "Set Input Mode Game Only", which was allowing the player to still have control over their character in the screen, and when I tried to use "Set Input Mode UI Only", I noticed on Unreal documentation that doing that meant it can no longer process Player Controller input anymore. I manually got down each movement from the player controller I needed to stop and worked in "Set Input Mode Game and UI", and proceeded to be able to have the player stop when opening the submenu. This brought up another issue where I couldn't get the player to tab in and out of the submenu, but luckily when I had George being an overwatch programmer for me, he noticed that I can use a flip flop instead of boolean toggles, and by having flip flop A add the widget to the viewport and flip flop B remove from parent, the submenu tabbing worked perfectly. With the work of the team's solutions to their issues this week, I see it as a big step in progress, and more to come. My next step further in these blueprints is to find a way to simplify it.