‫Hello and welcome.
‫In this lecture, we're going to be learning how we can ask good questions and help other people to
‫answer them by providing the right sort of information.
‫Let's dive in and see how.
‫So we're about to dive in to doing some more complicated things.
‫And when following along with complicated lectures, things may go wrong.
‫So it's important that we know how to ask for help in a useful and constructive way.
‫So one of the first principles for asking for help is paste the exact error that you're getting.
‫If you are getting an error message from Unreal or something's not happening as you expect, try and
‫paste that into Google first and see what the results show you.
‫If there's something that you can fix yourself, Google's by far the quickest way rather than asking
‫in the Q&A.
‫Then if that doesn't succeed, do go ahead and ask in the Q&A, but be sure to include the error message
‫and your code.
‫Most crucially, because it might seem like you've done everything the same as us, but that's often
‫not the case, and it's perfectly fine and normal to make slight mistakes.
‫And when describing your problem, be as short as possible, but as long as necessary.
‫You don't want to give too little information and for us not to be able to help them.
‫But also, you don't want to put too much time into writing a question.
‫You don't want to make it too hard for someone to read and get to the nub of the problem.
‫And also, if you find that you have later on solve the problem yourself.
‫Please, please let us know so that we know basically that you don't need our help anymore, but also
‫share your solutions so that others can benefit from what you found out.
‫That's always really helpful.
‫And also while you're waiting, if you've asked a question and have kind of twiddling your thumbs and
‫waiting for a response, then do have a look at other people's questions.
‫It's all there for each of us to help each other, so please answer other people's questions.
‫You often find that you learn a lot and embed a lot of knowledge this way.
‫So what does it take to add?
‫Ask a really good question that will get really good answers.
‫Well, first of all, you need to answer the question, what have you tried?
‫It might seem tempting to say, well, I've done exactly what they did in the lectures, but it's easy
‫to miss a step.
‫It's easy to have misheard or not heard something.
‫So please tell us and reiterate what you've tried.
‫It's a good way of you to revise and make sure that you have actually done everything you thought you
‫did.
‫And also, if you've done any steps to try and understand what's going wrong, try to try and tell us
‫what you've already tried doing so that we aren't suggesting things that you've already done.
‫What did you expect to happen?
‫This may seem obvious to you, but sometimes to the person answering the question, it's not obvious
‫what you were expecting to happen in the first place.
‫So it's not clear why it's gone wrong or if it has gone wrong at all.
‫And then tell us actually what did happen that wasn't what you expected.
‫And be specific with all of this.
‫Use exact error messages, use exact wording, use screenshots if possible, and logs and messages and
‫all these sorts of things.
‫So what kinds of things can we include?
‫What useful information really helps us to debug your situation?
‫Well, like I said already, the steps you've taken is absolutely crucial.
‫That really helps.
‫Any screenshots you can provide a super helpful too.
‫If it's a textual log message, then actually some text is usually easier for us to search through and
‫deal with, and I'll share how you can share long pieces of logs without swamping your question in just
‫a second.
‫The editor logs, so build logs will come later on when we're dealing more with C++.
‫But the editor logs you can provide right now and if there's you've had a bit of back and forth with
‫someone and they're like, how do you could you send your project across and I'll have a play with it
‫and see if I can find the issue.
‫Then I'll show you how to do that as well in this lecture.
‫So let's have a look at screenshots.
‫I'm going to assume you can do that.
‫But in terms of getting the log messages, well, there one way is you've got this log output in your
‫edits down at the bottom.
‫If you click on this, it kind of shows you loads and loads and reams of information.
‫This is not always the easiest way to go and select all of this and copy it.
‫So another way you can get to the same log is to go into your project folder, go into saved, go into
‫logs, and then this log file contains your project log.
‫Now on a mac, you're going to go to a slightly different place.
‫Now, there's a couple of ways you could actually go to get the logs.
‫You could also do it via finder in a similar way to we use Explorer on Windows, but a slightly easier
‫way is to have a look at your console app, which looks like so.
‫And in the console app you can see down the left hand side there are a bunch of different reports and
‫different areas that you can look for.
‫Logs when we're looking for is the log reports and then you can scroll down through this list and you
‫can see logs from all sorts of applications.
‫Now you'll.
‫Looking for the one that has the same name as your project.
‫So in my case you can see I've got my project too.
‫I've got the intro project pro logs, so you can go and click into that and you can see the the log
‫is very long just like on windows and you can copy and paste from here if you hover over this.
‫It also shows you where it is on disk.
‫In my case, it's under my user library logs, Unreal Engine, and then the name of the particular project
‫and then the log file within there.
‫But because it's so long, please don't paste that into your question.
‫It's going to make it really hard to figure out go to jist dot github dot com and what you can do is
‫you can take the file, the project log file and you can just drag it onto this web page and you can
‫see it just uploads the contents of that log.
‫You can go and say, create secret gist.
‫And then what you're going to do is you can just copy the URL from the URL bar and paste that into your
‫question instead.
‫And that's going to allow someone to come through, search through for the relevant bit of the log and
‫maybe help identify what has actually gone wrong in your setup.
‫So that's how you would share your log messages.
‫You can do the same thing with build errors that are particularly long in C++ when we get to the C++
‫section.
‫But the other thing, the last resort sort of is to share your actual project.
‫Now it might be tempting to just zip up the entire project folder, but there's a lot of stuff in here
‫that we don't need to send a lot of build information that can just be recreated.
‫So the best way to produce the output here is to go to your file menu, go to zip project and then select
‫where you want this zip project to go.
‫You might go and put this on your desktop, for example.
‫I've already got one here, but I'm going to overwrite that and then you can go ahead and hit save and
‫say, I want to replace it in this case.
‫And you'll just see a little pop up saying that it's zipping up the project and when it's complete,
‫it's complete and you can go and upload that to something like Dropbox or Google Drive and then share
‫that in your question.
‫So I hope you've got a better idea of how you can ask really great questions and hopefully get really
‫great answers in return.
‫See you in the next lecture.