Jordon's Toolbox Devlog 1

A couple of weeks ago I was inspired by myself to take the blueprint weather system I made which was split into multiple files and components and recreate it in just one single C++ actor. I wanted to see how far I could get it without actually learning the basics of C++. Surprisingly it was fairly easy because I know other languages like C#, which are very similar.

What was hard?

I think the hardest part of this project was knowing where to put the code, for example It took me over a week to realise how to access material parameter collections in C++ because it kept crashing. The reason wasnt that the code was wrong, it was just in the wrong place because I didn't know that material parameter collections get created when the game is playing and I was trying to access it in the editor which just made it crash.

This piece of code enables and disables various particle systems depending on the type of of weather for example, when its raining we want to activate the rain particle system and turn of all the others, if it is a storm, you want lightning as well as rain so we turn them both on. This also changes the materials to make them more rainy if it is raining too.

This will be compiled as a plugin so that I can just drag and drop it in to all of my projects.