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

Configuring your character to use your AnimTree


This recipe shows how to set up the environment of UDK to allow our character to use an AnimTree we have been working on. While in the editor we can preview the AnimTree performance, that isn't the same as seeing it in action during gameplay. To deploy our AnimTree requires us to create a custom pawn class derived from the default pawn UDK includes. To do so, we first need to adjust some of UDK's configuration so it will accept the adjustments we're going to make.

Getting ready

The configuration steps are not very difficult, it is just that all the changes are made outside of the editor, an approach which may feel unfamiliar to designers used to working totally inside a software environment to produce content. In short, we just edit a few UnrealScript files to alert UDK to use our AnimTree when it loads. I am going to use a tool called ConTEXT for this example. This is a text editor which sits in the middle ground between Notepad and Microsoft...