Book Image

Unreal Development Kit Game Design Cookbook

By : Thomas Mooney
Book Image

Unreal Development Kit Game Design Cookbook

By: Thomas Mooney

Overview of this book

UDK is a free, world class game editing tool and being so powerful it can be daunting to learn. This guide offers an excellent set of targeted recipes to help game artists get up to speed with game designing in UDK.Unreal Development Kit Game Design Cookbook contains everything you need to jumpstart your game design efforts. The lessons are aimed squarely at the artist's field of production, with recipes on asset handling, creating content within the editor, animation and visual scripting to get the content working in gameplay.Unreal Game Development Kit Game Design Cookbook exposes how real-time environments are built using UDK tools. Key features are examined ñ assets, animation, light, materials, game controls, user interface, special effects, and game interactivity - with the view of making UDK technically accessible so users can transcend technique and focus on their creative design process. The book has well prepared recipes for level designers and artists of all levels. It covers core design tools and processes in the editor, particularly setting up characters, UI approaches, configuration and scripting gameplay. It is a technical guide that allows game artists to go beyond just creating assets, and it includes creative, extensive demonstrations that extend on mere functionality.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Unreal Development Kit Game Design Cookbook
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Importing SWF content to UDK


Once you have made some SWF cursors, buttons, menu content and so on, you'll want to try it out in UDK. UDK allows users to run a commandlet (gfximport) external to the editor. This process assumes your content is in the correct relative file structure, as it should be, which has been discussed in previous recipes. So if you wanted to bring in your Mouse.SWF and your EasyButton.SWF you'd type in the windows Run command line C:\UDK\~\UDKGame\Binaries\Win64>UDKGame.exe gfximport UI\Mouse.SWF\EasyButton.SWF and all the subfolders involved would be parsed into UDK, to a package saved as C:\UDK\~\UDKGame\Content\Gfx\UI. Naturally this is like an express service.

Let's assume that you want to take a more hands-on role in handling your belongings, and will import content yourself.

How to do it...

  1. If you didn't already, in Windows, make a folder in the UDKGame\Flash\ path of your UDK installation called YourfolderUI. That's where your Mouse.SWF and MyButton.SWF...