(For this Blog post I will be referring to the ShooterGame level created by Unreal for educational use. This can be found in the "Learn" Section of the Epic Games Launcher for Unreal Engine 4)
To start off strong you must know the basics. This is the user interface (UI) of the game engine that you are working with. Luckily with Unreal Engine 4, it is pretty easy to wrap your head around the interface, as it has helpful tips enabled for when you scroll over functions. Do this and learn your way around the engine as it does help when it comes to fast and efficient workflow. Once you think you know what everything does you now have knowledge of the engine and what it does. Yes some features in the engine you may not use. However they are good to know when it comes to communicating with your client you are working for, or just for knowledge in general.
We now come to the fun part for audioheads. That is importing the audio. First things first, when you import the audio the best idea is to have a bunch of sounds to work with. If you want your sound to be somewhat of a 3D sound you need to make the .WAV file of your audio into what is called a Sound Cue. You can find these in the "Add New" drop box in the content browser and find sounds - sound cue. Once you have done that you must give it a sensible name for what that sound is going to be. After the Sound Cue has been created, to bring up the blueprint window you must double click the sound cue you wish to edit. The window at first will appear with an output. This is where everything will result to in the end of your code no matter what you are working on with sound cues. The most basic of audio implementation is clicking and dragging in your sound from the content browser in the main window over to the new blueprint window. This will then give the sound its own node. You now need to create a link between the new sound node and the output. On each node there is an Input and Output circle (This depends on the node). You just need to click and drag one link to the other and you should see what you see below.
This is a simple audio entity for a game. This sound now has 3D features to it when it is imported into the game level from the content browser. I will go onto more detail about this in a new post but for now if you are following along, feel free to have a go with some of your own sounds in a level. You can easily find levels from the Epic Games Launcher that comes with Unreal Engine 4 in the "Learn" section. Next time I will be going into how to randomize sounds, which can make a sound cue unique to its spot.
-Sean
