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

Animating PointLights in Matinee to mimic texture animation


In this recipe we'll animate PointLights associated with a lamp asset, a model with a flickering texture, so that the light emitted in the scene also appears to flicker. We'll do this using Matinee, and in particular the Constant interpolation mode of a set of noisily keyed values.

Getting ready

Open the map Packt_04_MatineeFlicker_Start.UDK. This progresses on from the previous recipes on toggling materials and toggling lights. Notice that that functionality has been compacted into a Sub-Sequence ToggleableLighting.

How to do it...

  1. In the previous screenshot, you can see the Kismet for the entire sequence. Notice the importance of the highlighted Level Loaded event to set initial conditions. We can drive a Matinee for the light flicker straight from the Level Loaded event because the animation will just loop whether or not the lights involved are toggled on or off.

  2. In Kismet hold M and click to add a Matinee next to the Sub-Sequence...