Code & Content

In Unreal we have generally two types of codes and one type of content.

Content

"Content" in terms of 3D models, sounds, textures, materials and so on are called Assets. You use these assets to make stuff in your game f.e. visible to the user. There are multiple types of assets:

  • StaticMesh

    A simple 3D Object like a .obj or .fbx

  • Sound

    Sounds like the background music or footsteps.

  • Skeleton

    Characters like the player or enemies have a skeleton to tell the engine f.e. where bones and joints are.

  • TextureSample

    Textures like the grass texture, ficsit logo or the items in the inventory are simple images called "Texture Samples".

  • Materials

    Every surface has a material applied on it, so the renderer does know how he should let the surface look like. Here textures and surface properties like reflection and roughness come together.

  • Blueprints

    Discussed in its own Concept-Page.

Native Code

Native code describes code that is written in C and can't directly be changed in the Unreal Editor because the Editor itself uses this code. This kind of code can interact with the computer on a very low level and is often used when performance is really important. Much things of Satisfactory is written in C so you will often find out that there is the functionality you cant access from within Blueprints. Native code is compiled directly into machine code and that means for every platform you want to compile for, you would need to compile this code separately.

This can be a problem for you when the game updates. Because that would mean you need to download the C++ code again and compile it, and this can be difficult if you don’t know what you do.

Besides this downside, native code allows you to low-level manipulation of the engine environment and also allows you to implement third-party libraries like discord, curl and Lua.

Blueprint Code

This is a kind of asset which is compiled into the pak files as a kind of bytecode which then gets loaded and linked at runtime through the Unreal BP VM.

To learn more about Blueprints visit the Concept-Page about that topic.