Tutorial #0. Setting up a basic project.

In this tutorial we'll show you how to setup basic UE4 project with Stratis Plugin onboard. If you are looking for more information about Unreal Engine itself, please follow an official UE's website.

Let's go!

Prerequisite

First of all, you need Unreal Engine to be installed on your computer. If you don't have it yet, you can get it on the official website. As well as Unreal Engine, you need a Stratis Full Node to be installed either on your local machine or on remote web server. Please check Stratis Academy if you need an Operation Guide for Full Node. Also, you need something like a text editor or an IDE if you are going to work with C++ in your project. UE4 supports Visual Studio, Visual Studio Code, XCode, CLion and so on. Finally, some experience with Git will be very useful. If you want to learn more about Git VSC, please follow git-scm.com.

Creating a sample project

Now we are going to create our new project. Run Unreal Engine, find a project browser, and pick Games category. Now we can see a list of available project templates we can use. Let's just pick a First Person template, but if you are familiar with UE, you can go with any of them. On the next page, set path and name for your project, and choose programming language you want to go with. You can choose from C++ and Blueprint, and if you are not familliar with C-style programming languages, it's better to go ahead with Blueprint. Remember, you can always add C++ classes to the Blueprint project (and vice versa) later.

But what is Blueprint? Blueprint is a graphical programming language used in Unreal Engine to simplify development for non-programmers and for people who are not familiar with C++. Stratis Unreal Plugin supports both C++ and Blueprint, so you can choose the tool you are more comfortable with.

Then, just press Create project button and voilà, we did it!

Installing Stratis Unreal Plugin

Next we need to install the plugin within our new project path. Go to the project path and create Plugin directory (if it not exists).

Stratis Unreal Plugin uses Git LFS to maintain a large precompiled third-party dependencies for each of the supported platforms. You need to ensure that LFS extension is installed on your computer, or you can get it from the official website.

Now go to the Stratis Unreal Plugin GitHub repository and clone it to the Plugin directory. Rename cloned directory to Stratis to eliminate potential missing path problems. Ensure that precompiled libraries within your plugin installation have a proper size (a hundreds of MB), and if it's not, make sure you have Git LFS plugin installed within your environment.

Compilation & running sample game

Now we have a successfuly set up project & plugin, so let's build the project and run sample game! For that, let's restart Unreal Engine Editor, reopen our project and Unreal Engine will ask us to recompile project. Press confirmation button and wait until compilation ended. Finally, press Play button on the toolbar and enjoy your game!

What's next?

Now you can use Stratis Unreal Plugin functionality & Statis Blockchain eco-system to build next-level gameplay & economics within your game! In next tutorials, we will show you how to use STRAX currency and NFT in your games.

If you found a problem, you can open an issue on project's Github page. If you still have a questions, feel free to ask them in our Discord channel.

Stay tuned!