How to get started

Once you've installed the Stack-based FSM plugin into the engine, and you've enabled it, we can begin using this in your project.

Let's start by creating a new character blueprint or you can use your existing one.

Right-click on an empty space in the content browser, select Blueprint Class, and select 'Character'. I'm going to name it BP_Player

Next, open the character blueprint and add an FSM Component. Like this:

If this is your first time setting up a character blueprint, here is some movement input code:

And make sure that the Player 0 will possess this character when we press play.

Finally, drag your new blueprint character into the world. When you press play you should be able to move and look around!

Now we can go on to create our first state blueprint asset!

Right-click on an empty space in the content browser, select Blueprint Class, expand the 'All Classes' list and search for StateBase.

Click on StateBase, click select and give your blueprint a name. I'm going to name it BP_PlayerState_Idle

Open BP_PlayerState_Idle and let's begin implementing this state!

But first, you should give this state a meaningful name. For me, it's just Idle

Next, let's override the Init event, which of the 5 events that are available to us.

Let's retrieve our player character in Init (It's the same as an actor's 'BeginPlay' event) and store it for later use.

Next, we'll add some input handling. Let's make our character jump when the space bar is pressed. The great thing about this is that the character will only jump when it's in the Idle state!

Click compile and save. And open your character blueprint, because we need to add the new state that we created.

Click on the FSM Component, and in the details panel, under FSM. Add a new state to the States list and set the Initial State Name to whatever you've named your state. In my case, it's Idle. If you don't give it the correct state name (capitalization matters), the FSM will throw an error.

After that, we'll need to call Start to start our state machine

While you're there, enable debugging so we can see what's going on. Like this:

You can also choose where you want the log messages to output to. For now, I'm going to leave it as it is.

Click compile and save. Go back to the main editor and press play. You should see that your new state was added and that the FSM has successfully started. And you should also try to jump since that's implemented now.

But there is a slight problem here, "What if I want to walk and jump or run and jump, or slide and jump?". Now we have to create a slew of states, which adds a lot of unnecessary fluff. That is a valid concern. That's where Hierarchical states come into play. Shall we begin?

We will create 2 new state blueprint objects. One called Locomotion and another called Walk. Locomotion will be the base state for all states that are 'locomotion-based'. And the Idle and Walk states will inherit from the Locomotion base state. Note: Don't forget to give these 2 new states a meaningful name, like what we did when we created our first state. This will be important later down the road.

Open the new locomotion state blueprint, select 'Class Settings' and drop down the advanced section under 'Class Options' and enable Generate Abstract Class. That way we don't accidentally add it to the state's list. And it won't be useful as well since we'll be extending this base class through our two states Idle and Walk.

Now, we need to reparent the Idle and Walk states to inherit from our Locomotion blueprint class.

To reparent a blueprint, go to File>Reparent Blueprint. And search for 'locomotion'.

And do the same for the Walk state

Now that they've been reparented, we can move the blueprint code that was in the Idle state to the new locomotion state blueprint. Like this:

Idle should be empty now.

Let's implement the Idle state, this blueprint code will detect if the player has started moving and if so, push the Walk state (then this will now be the active state)

Note: You must always call the parent update function if you're inheriting from another state blueprint and if it has some logic in the base event, or else anything in the Locomotion's Update event will not get called! To get the parent event node, right-click on the 'Event Update' node and select Add call to parent function. This will give you the orange node.

We'll do the same for the Walk state but now use the '<=' node to determine if the player has stopped moving. If so, pop the active state, which is the Walk state obviously.

That is how you set the active states in the FSM, it's called the pushdown-automaton. Basically a push and pop system. And it's really that simple.

Compile and save all your changes.

Finally, add your 2 states to the state's list. Like this:

Compile and save. Go back to the main editor and press play. You should now be able to jump while idling and jump while walking. No need to copy n' paste the jump code for each state you make. Do it once and forget about it! This is the result:

It's all up to you now from here on out. Finite state machines offers us a great way to create gameplay systems and simple AI. They help clean up code, organize it and make it way more maintainable for large projects.

 A quick shortcut to create states that inherit from our Locomotion state blueprint would be to right-click on the BP_PlayerState_Locomotion asset and click Create Child Blueprint Class, then name your new locomotion-based state and add it to the list of states in the FSM component.

You can stop here since we have finished the blueprint tutorial. However, if you'd like to translate this over to C++ and extend it through blueprints then continue on!