Player Look only works on certain actors

Hey y’all,
I’m having a time figuring out how to make my player (First Person) look at objects properly. I’m simply trying to have the player start oriented toward a specific actor in my level, but it mysteriously only works for a very specific set of actors. They are actor blueprints called “GoalA” and “GoalB”.

If I use one of these goals as the look at target, it works perfectly, but if I use one of my characters as the target (my intended look at target for what I’m trying to do), then it doesn’t work; instead it looks down toward the world origin. This happens no matter what I create and add to my level. It can’t look at anything, not a TargetPoint, not other blueprints, not an Empty Actor, nothing. Only works on these Goal blueprints for some reason:

the only thing I see different between these blueprints and other blueprints is that they have Instance Editable set to true. Could that be something?

Any other tips on look at targets? What can and can’t be used and why?

In case it helps, here’s the details of the ‘PlayerLook’ Macro seen in my bp:

Thanks for any tips in this matter. I’m totally stumped!

HI.

from variable panel select your goal var. then from details change “variable type” to “Actor” then it can be any actor

I don’t understand how changing the Goal variable has anything to do with whether I can look at other actors in the level. i.e. I can’t even create a new box actor in my level and have the player look at that. This tells me the issue is more general/global than the Goal variables.

Unless I’m misunderstanding your answer, I don’t think it’s gonna make any difference anyways.

I gotta be missing something obvious.

(The reason I have Goal set to a variable that only references itself (and not other actors) is that I need a reference to this specific actor for scripting. I can’t change it to be anything or things will break.)

You have to change variable type to be of an actor.
Then you can cast that actor to your goal actor to access its properties for scripting.

Just drag a wire from that actor var and type “cast to goal”,

Thanks for the help, saeedc!

I get what you’re saying. Hadn’t thought of that as an option.

I think I found the answer. I was scripting things inside of a character blueprint, which was only giving me access to certain actors to use as look at targets.

Once I moved my script out to the level blueprint, everything worked as expected.

I don’t fully understand why it fixed things, though. Since the Goal actor blueprints were targetable for some unknown reason while the rest wasn’t. I can’t think of anything that is special about them.