Tanks VS Zombies

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A few years ago when I started studying UnrealEngine, I tried to follow on UnrealEngine’s Youtube channel a series of videos/tutorials called C++ Tanks VS Zombies (in 6 parts). Unfortunately at the time this was a big frustration because I failed to follow this project…

In part my lack of experience with the engine and C++ were to blame for the problem, but in another part the presentation format of this series is especially frustrating, the two initials videos are very close between the code and the presentation, but in the third video there is a jump of content and code, instead of going step-by-step the series changes to present the code and ready visuals and only commenting small snippets of code. A person watching without knowing that they need to visit the forum and download the project (one project for each part of the series) is unable to reproduce the content completely.

That’s the good part of studying both Unreal Engine and C++ and having evolved in studies, this time I started watching the series again and managed to go to the end successfully!

After several small incomplete projects and studies of engine bits, one of my requirements in 2022 is to create and finish complete projects, from start to finish, with music, sound effects, menus, interfaces, controls. So when completing the tutorial series, I proceeded to include all the details that were missing for the game to be a “complete package”.

As it is a simple Paper2D game I chose Unreal Engine 4.23.1 to be able to export the game in HTML5 format and be easily playable without any installations. Overall it was a very pleasant experience, the game was fun, I made it in a few days, the code is interesting, I learned a lot, and also this is my first complete UE4 C++ project.

The only sad part was that I got distracted and tried to update emscripten to version 3.0 that supports Gamepad and TouchInput, it would be great to be able to see this and other UE4 HTML5 games working with Gamepad or playable on mobiles with touch controls. I wasted about 2 days tinkering updating emscripten, I even had some successes and managed to compile almost all the ThirdParty code needed (ICU, Freetype, zlib, vorbis, ogg, etc), but when compiling PhysX3 I received more than 1500 errors so it was impossible because in the UnrealEngine code apparently either emscripten is updated for everything (Engine and ThirdParty) or it doesn’t work. Maybe one day I’ll try again, because I still believe that UE4 HTML5 updated with gamepad and touch input support would be awesome!