Creating a spawned Turret in Unreal Editor 3

If you were to make a game where you needed a turret to be spawned and attack an enemy in real time, the best way to achieve it would be using Kismet.

Before opening up Kismet at all, first decide on the area in your map where the turret is going to be placed. Right-click on the spot and add a PlayerStart actor. Add another actor close-by but not too close. (This second player start will be for the turret's bot so that there will be someone to shoot from it.) If the two points are too close together, that the bot will die on spawning due to the turret being too close to spawn point. (Ever seen a two players spawn in the same location? Needless to say, one of them usually explodes.)

Now, with your spawn points in the world, open up Kismet.
Depending on what you're using it for, you'll need a different trigger to set off our event. So for the sake of testing, I'm going to set it up on a console event. (Add Event > Misc Event > Console Event). Be sure to add a name into the ConsoleEventName space so that you can call it from game. Mine is going to be "testturret". When you activate this in-game, you'll press tab to open console and type "ce testturret".

Next, add two Actor Factories (New Action > Actor > Actor Factory). Connect the out from the event into the Spawn Actor of the actor factory. Next, connect the Finished of the first to the Spawn Actor of the second.

Now we're going to make our Object variables. With the player spawn of the turret selected, right click on the first actor factory's Spawn Point and click create object using PlayerStart_x. Do the same for the other spawn on the other actor factory. After that, right click on the Spawned part and create a blank object variable for each factory.

With the first one selected, click the blue arrow to the right of Factory. From the drop-down, select the UTActorFactoryVehicle. Then, from the VehicleClass drop-down, select UTVehicle_Turret. This is pretty much all you need to spawn the turret in the world. Go ahead and change the TeamNum value to 0 for Red or 1 for Blue if you're using it in a team game.

Now Select the second factory and do something similar. This time, select UTFactoryAI. After that, go down into the PawnClass and change him to a UTPawn. Again, change TeamIndex to either team if need be, 255 defaults to a Deathmatch bot.  Go ahead and give him a PawnName if you'd like.

Our next step is to force that pawn to get into the turret we created. Create a New Action > Pawn > Enter Vehicle. Connect the finished from the second Actor Factory to the In of the Enter Vehicle. Now connect the Target to the (???) object of the second Actor Factory and the Vehicle to the (???) from the first Actor Factory. This will effectively force that bot that we created into being the targeting system for our turret. We could stop here, as this will create the turret and man it, but there's nothing keeping that bot from leaving the turret if he gets bored or finds something important to do. In order to keep him in there, we'll add a delay loop right on top of the enter vehicle. Create the new Delay from New Action > Misc > Delay. Connect the Out of the Enter Vehicle to the Start of the Delay. Now connect the Finished of the Delay to the In of the Enter Vehicle. With this in place, the pawn will be forced to get back into the turret every second, effectively making him a permanent targeting system. (or at least until someone kills him or the turret.)

This concludes the turret tutorial! Get in the game and type "ce testturret" in the console to see them spawn!
If you have any questions or comments, feel free to leave them below. If you have a specific topic you'd like me to go over, feel free to ask!


-Ken