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

Understanding the usage of Named Variables


In this recipe we'll introduce a way to simplify the connections of Object Variables. The reason to do so is because in the next recipe we'll introduce Sub-Sequences, which are a way to layer out sections of Kismet, and using Named Variables are often necessary when doing so. A good case for introducing the benefit of Named Variables is in the case of Bots. When a spawned actor is referenced by actions many times, you wind up with connections to it from multiple locations, which can get messy. We'll take steps to clean up a section of Kismet we've made in previous recipes to show how Named Variables are set up.

Getting ready

Open Packt_04_NamedVariable_Start.UDK or continue from where you were in the last recipe if you completed it. In this map the Bot handling is already set up, from previous recipes. Look at the section Bot Handling.

How to do it...

  1. In the top row of Kismet there is a means to set bookmarks of the Kismet canvas so you can jump around...