Daily Unreal Column #24 - Native Gameplay Tags

Are you tired fetching gameplay tags references using FGameplayTag::RequestGameplayTag function? Today you will learn how to define gameplay tags directly in the code.

For a while now Unreal Engine code has two helper macros for declaring and defining gameplay tags natively.

To declare a gameplay tag, use the UE_DECLARE_GAMEPLAY_TAG_EXTERN macro in a header file. For example:

UE_DECLARE_GAMEPLAY_TAG_EXTERN(State_Walking);
UE_DECLARE_GAMEPLAY_TAG_EXTERN(State_Flying);

To define the above tags, use the UE_DEFINE_GAMEPLAY_TAG macro in a source file. For example:

UE_DEFINE_GAMEPLAY_TAG(State_Walking, "State.Walking");
UE_DEFINE_GAMEPLAY_TAG(State_Flying, "State.Flying");

You can then access the gameplay tag anywhere in your code by simply calling State_Walking or State_Flying.

I recommend wrapping your gameplay tags declarations and definitions in a namespace to avoid any name conflicts.