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

Controlling your Media Player


Before we wrap things up for this chapter, let's give our players a few ways to control their Media Player.

We could do this work from within the level blueprint, and that's what we've been doing so far, but that's not an ideal solution if we're going to have multiple maps in our project. We're going to wind up copying and pasting Blueprint code from one level to another, and if we update one of them, we have to remember to update the rest. This is bad practice.

 

A much better idea is to create a manager actor that contains all the code we need to manage our media player, and that we can just drop into any level that needs to support it. This way, we're writing our code once, and as we update it, the effects are seen everywhere. Let's do this.

Creating a Media Manager

Let's create a new Blueprints subdirectory inside our project's content directory:

  1. Right-click inside it and select Create Basic Asset | Blueprint Class.
  2. For its Parent Class, select Actor.
  3. Name it BP_MediaManager...