Unity raycast equivalent in Unreal

Question

I've been moving from Unity to Unreal and I'm finding it difficult to grasp the Raycast (Trace) logic of Unreal.

The use case I'm trying to implement at the moment is to trace a ray and check if I hit a specific set of objects or if there are other objects blocking the line of sight.

In Unity, I would use Raycast, define a new specific Layer, set the object layer to it, create a LayerMask with that Layer and Raycast. I consider this method to be performant as the use of layer masks provide a form of optimization and most importantly I'm guaranteed that if the ray hits an object than it's because its layer is part of the layer mask and if I'm using multiple layers I could simply check which layer the hit object has.

In Unreal it's been harder to understand what are the solutions that offer better performance and are easier to use. The C++ documentation for Line Trace (channel or object type) is very poor when comparing to Unity's.

Can anyone shed some light on how to move from the Unity logic to Unreal using the above use case as an example?

Answer 1

To do this in C++ / Unreal, you need to do the following either in (or called by) EventTick or on a timer:

// Set up parameters for getting the player viewport
    FVector PlayerViewPointLocation;
    FRotator PlayerViewPointRotation;

// Get player viewport and set these parameters
    GetWorld()->GetFirstPlayerController()->GetPlayerViewPoint(
    OUT PlayerViewPointLocation, 
    OUT PlayerViewPointRotation
    );

// Parameter for how far out the the line trace reaches
    float Reach = 100.f;
    FVector LineTraceEnd = PlayerViewPointLocation + PlayerViewPointRotation.Vector() * Reach;

// Set parameters to use line tracing
    FHitResult Hit; 
    FCollisionQueryParams TraceParams(FName(TEXT("")), false, GetOwner());  // false to ignore complex collisions and GetOwner() to ignore self

// Raycast out to this distance
    GetWorld()->LineTraceSingleByObjectType(
        OUT Hit,
        PlayerViewPointLocation,
        LineTraceEnd,
        FCollisionObjectQueryParams(ECollisionChannel::ECC_PhysicsBody),
        TraceParams
    );

// See what if anything has been hit and return what
    AActor* ActorHit = Hit.GetActor();

    if (ActorHit) {
        UE_LOG(LogTemp, Error, TEXT("Line trace has hit: %s"), *(ActorHit->GetName()))
    }

This will return the first actor that has been hit. If you want to find a specific actor, you can say:

if (ActorHit == Cast<AYourCustomActorClass>(YourCustomClass))

Which will only return true if the first item hit is the specific class you're looking for.