Pause Menu

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For another project I have been working on a Main Menu and pause menu, both of which could be implemented into my Subject Specialism. Much like the HUD system I currently have these menus make use of the widget system. Setting these features up was a little easier than I expected with the ability to click on menu elements to activate sub menus and basic functions of quitting and pausing the game being simple blueprint actions.



I also added a post process component to be added to the screen upon the game being paused. This chromatic aberration effect will disappear once the game has resumed play. This is all done via and "Add Post Process Component" node that is called in the custom function I added called "Pause Game" when "Set Game Paused" is set to true. This post process component allows me to add a bevy of different effects, from lens effects, blur, colour grading and much more all at once with a great deal of control on how they work. This current chromatic aberration effect is set to be incredibly strong and I will likely be toning down the effect or changing it for another one entirely as this was just for testing purposes.

The Post Process Component and some of its options





Once the pause menu has been added to the players view port the input mode will be set to UI only in order to stop the player from accidentally accessing gameplay functions like moving and shooting as they attempt to operate the menu 


One issue the menus currently have is that they do not support controllers as of now. I have done some brief research in how to get a controller working with this menu which will require considerable more work than the initial set up with mouse. 

One issue I did have that I managed to solve was that the player character, along with the player HUD would spawn in the main menu despite there being no game start or pawn to be possessed position within the map. To fix this I needed to create a custom main menu game mode that did not spawn anything on start up, and attach that game mode to the main menu "level map" 


To create these menus I used these great tutorials by CodeViper. I plan on continuing their main menu tutorials and add a graphics menu to the options menu that can help adjust settings like resolution scale and overall graphical quality in order to help my projects run on as many different machines as possible.

Tutorial Links: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ulUO4EN8BG8
                         https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSt-7jY0t80

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