Highly recommend skipping this one for new players

If you aren’t confident that you can pickup on the Lecturer doing things wrong, and general bad practice in regards to CPP and Unreal Engine, you should maybe skip this one. The other videos in this course have been great, so the value is still there, but this one is riddled with bad practice and it’s honestly more likely to cause you problems than to help you with anything.

It may seem like this project is the more advanced culmination of all the things we’ve learned up to this point, but it isn’t, and the code presented is just bad. I mean using pointers without checking if they’re null bad.

It does go in to the animation system, and I’m not experienced enough to say if that part is wrong, so there’s that, but nearly everything else is done in a bad way, and he bounces around so much it’s very uncomfortable to watch, much less if you want to follow along. For example, anyone with experience with UE will tell you that the right way to compile is to close the UEEditor and compile from your IDE/cli. You can get by with Livecoding/Live++ if you aren’t modifying header files, but you should always close UEEditor and compile from the IDE or CLI if you modify a header file. This guy will create a single variable in a header file, go back in to the UEEditor, and then back to create another variable in the same header file, related to the same task, and then back to UEEditor and back and forth several times as he remembers or figures out what he needs. It’s obvious there is very little up-front planning here, and that leads to half-baked methods and bad practices, and revisiting code far more often than needed.

Jut trust me, and skip this one if you don’t trust yourself to pick out all the bad.

Just want to also mention that this same guy has done a lot of good stuff. This must just be some of his earliest content.

1 Like

I know the closing down to compile seems like a big deal, but for learning, the Live Coding’s memory patching works well enough. Closing down is a seriously minor habit change.

With the rest and to keep this short, I don’t share your viewpoint. I have a different viewpoint that involves other things and not those things. That is the world of programming though. Always someone disagrees about every single thing.

Your main point of skipping for new players though I do agree in the sense that I feel people new to programming would be better to go with other things first. Edit - but for other reasons.

Then dont use Live Coding for this course. Disable it and compile in the Unreal engine using the compile button at the bottom of the engine window and disable Visual Studio from trying to compile simultaneously. Not quick but miles quicker than stopping and restarting the editor. Not had any problem with that.
The course has been broken up to teach each concept and feature of the game engine separately as they introduce them and build up the game. This is a beginner course for the basics of Unreal concepts with C++ .

I really recommend that in ALL video courses (not just this one) , you do not just watch and follow along every click, keyboard press, recreating everything that they do as it happens. Watch each video in turn in full. Then do solely on your own, recheck the video if you forget or get stuck. If you think there is a better way then do it. Or if you already have an idea of what to do after watching the initial description of each video, then do it , Then watch the video if you get stuck or want to compare.

1 Like

Privacy & Terms