Local versus instance variables

Most of our work so far has involved instance variables, that is, variables in a class that are accessible from any function in that class and even from other classes. Instance variables persist until that object is destroyed, so they're used for things we need to know about that object all the time, like Health for our Pawn class or the amount of ammo we have in our weapon. We've also used a few when we needed to store a variable until a different function needed to use it, like the CurrentCameraLocation and CurrentCameraRotation in our AwesomePlayerController class, which were processed in PlayerTick and used in GetPlayerViewPoint .

Sometimes, however, we'll want "throwaway" variables that we only need while we're in a function, and we don't need to keep them or access them from anywhere else. For this, we use local variables.

Local Variables

Let's try some experiments with local variables in our AwesomeGame class.