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

Trace actions in a shooting situation


In this recipe we'll introduce the Trace action, which is very useful for testing whether the space between two actors is obstructed or unobstructed. The example we'll use continues from the last scene, where a wall drops down to reveal a Bot who wants to shoot at us. Being told to shoot at us, he does so regardless of the wall, which is not plausible, so adding the Trace will help with that.

Getting ready

Open Packt_04_SimpleTrace_Start.UDK or continue from where you were in the last recipe if you wish.

How to do it...

  1. Open Kismet and, following the existing Actor Factory that provisions and spawns an enemy Bot, right-click and choose New Action | Misc | Trace. A Trace action draws a line between a Start object and an End object. You can also specify an exact HitObject it is looking for but in this case we don't need to. That would be more likely if you wanted to check against a NPC rather just a wall, which is what's getting in the robot's firing line...