Book Image

Unreal Engine 4 Virtual Reality Projects

By : Kevin Mack, Robert Ruud
Book Image

Unreal Engine 4 Virtual Reality Projects

By: Kevin Mack, Robert Ruud

Overview of this book

Unreal Engine 4 (UE4) is a powerful tool for developing VR games and applications. With its visual scripting language, Blueprint, and built-in support for all major VR headsets, it's a perfect tool for designers, artists, and engineers to realize their visions in VR. This book will guide you step-by-step through a series of projects that teach essential concepts and techniques for VR development in UE4. You will begin by learning how to think about (and design for) VR and then proceed to set up a development environment. A series of practical projects follows, taking you through essential VR concepts. Through these exercises, you'll learn how to set up UE4 projects that run effectively in VR, how to build player locomotion schemes, and how to use hand controllers to interact with the world. You'll then move on to create user interfaces in 3D space, use the editor's VR mode to build environments directly in VR, and profile/optimize worlds you've built. Finally, you'll explore more advanced topics, such as displaying stereo media in VR, networking in Unreal, and using plugins to extend the engine. Throughout, this book focuses on creating a deeper understanding of why the relevant tools and techniques work as they do, so you can use the techniques and concepts learned here as a springboard for further learning and exploration in VR.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Title Page
About Packt
Contributors
Preface
12
Where to Go from Here
Index

Going further


Networking is a substantial topic, and, to be honest, we've only scratched the surface here. Our purpose in writing this has been to give you a solid mental model from which you can understand what Unreal's network framework looks like, and what sorts of things you need to understand to work within it.

 

 

This is heady stuff, and it can get fairly confusing to new developers. The trick to network development is to create a clear mental model of what's going on. Take your time to understand these concepts, and you'll have a much easier time.

There are a few topics we didn't cover here, such as hosting sessions and making it possible for others to join them, and quite a lot of the finer points of how networking works, such as relevance. These things are worth understanding, and there are a few good resources available to you to take your understanding further.

First, check out the Network Examples map in your Content Examples project, and take some time to understand what they're...