Unreal Engine API C++ Courses For Kinesthetic Learners

Okay, so looking through the questions here, I see a lot of people asking about courses, and the responses are always linking to the schools you can go to or Unreal’s YouTube channel, or other misc. “tutorials”.

Everything is great and all and you can watch a video tutorial about anything (blueprints / c++) and in the end of the entire series, you can have an entire functional game, etc, etc. These are great and everything, however, I’ve yet to see a tutorial about anything that goes into depth about the actual API of the engine, thus making tutorials for us kinesthetic learners pretty useless. I can take all the info from these tutorials and make another game out of it, but I’m just typing what someone told me to type without explaining the framework.

Are there any resources or for getting started with Unreal Engine’s framework API and what it means (without reading through documentation).

Here’s one for Unity: https://www.udemy.com/unitycourse/?dtcode=MfvfX2f35Lob

These guys made a killing.

I think you probably have to clarify this question a bit.

  • UE’s internal API? I’m not sure I follow. There’s no real concept of an internal vs external API, unless you are referring to private functions of classes, or classes that aren’t exported from their modules.
  • Furthermore I’m not sure what you mean about the tutorials being no good for kinesthetic learners. I’m one myself, and tutorials like the ones that are available are what gave me the knowledge to teach Unreal for a living. Are you saying you’d like more explanation of the game framework itself, how the classes work together? If so I’d look for information with the phrase “Gameplay Framework” as that is the term Epic uses for the architecture that comes together to create gameplay, for example here: Gameplay Framework Quick Reference | Unreal Engine Documentation
  • Another thing to bear in mind is that Unreal is designed to provide a high level of abstraction. This means that you don’t need to know the real low-level underlying calls to be able to start playing around with C++ and beginning to learn how to use the engine, unless you need to extend engine functionality. The tutorial you linked doesn’t show the engine internals, it appears to be showing how to consume or use the Unity API, which is what I see most official UE tutorials doing. If I’m misunderstanding perhaps you can give a more concrete example of what that course is doing right so I can better suggest alternative approaches?
  • As far as the documentation goes, I would say that to some extent reading documentation is an essential part of getting greater understanding of the engine, but when you are starting it isn’t strictly necessary. What platform are you on? On PC I had no trouble creating a code-based project from one of the templates, then simply reading over the code that was in the template and using VS’s autocomplete to look for functions based on keywords that seemed to do what I wanted, then experimenting and seeing what the outcomes were.
  • Personally if I were to be wanting to ‘do and experiment’ to learn the UE API I would use blueprint. Iteration times are faster and you can more easily and quickly experiment with functions with less risk of crashes or having to spend time debugging. The logic is the same as C++ and when you want to learn the code that corresponds to your experiments you can search the engine source for the functions in question and see how they accomplish what they are doing. This is primarily how my students approach the engine in class.

Hey, thanks for the response. Yeah after re-reading what I wrote, I didn’t mean the internals and very well meant the framework. I agree that tutorials are definitely helpful. Especially since you can find one for almost anything.

I personally can follow through with an entire course which starts with basics of the framework, followed by code by example.

Essentially a video course of:

Then the course can transition to more of the, “Hey, lets make this game”.

This question is more aimed at the idea and opportunity of one of you well versed UE fellas to make a paid course to learn the framework. Just like the Unity link I pasted (over 30k purchases and good review… $$$$!).

Also, to be clear, I’m not “ragging” on tutorials and all the resources available in this community. I think they are beyond great.