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

Event-based movement of scene objects in Matinee


For the Bot in the previous recipe, we have an activation delay for his spawning, which means he seems to pop into existence out of nowhere. We can disguise this with a moving wall that surrounds him, then drops down to expose him to view after he's already spawned. To do so, we'll use the Matinee Editor to key the moving object's motion.

Getting ready

Open Packt_04_SimpleMatinee_Start.UDK or continue from where you were in the last recipe if you wish.

How to do it...

  1. Open the Content Browser (Ctrl + Shift + F) and set the filter type to StaticMesh. Type Dropper in the search field. If nothing shows up, right-click on the PacktKismet package and choose Fully Load.

  2. You should see a StaticMesh that looks like a four-sided tube. Drag it into the scene and place it where the Bot spawns on top of the cube in the middle of the scene. Scale it up too, by about 5.5. You can do this using the numerical input at the bottom of the editor called DrawScale...