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

Exploring 'following' and 'attracting' behaviors


Suppose you have to guide an AI Bot from one location to another, but don't want to use a set path or ideal path based on PathNodes. The problems that can occur with having the Bot flexibly follow your position are as follows:

  • The Bot can get stuck against geometry and lose its trace on you

  • The Bot can block you as it encroaches on your position, in a corner especially

  • The Bot may require respawning at its location and this can create a jitter

  • The Bot can run out of the level trying to arrive at your location

If a level is flat, free of obstructions, and only needs a short time period, following behaviour will be easier to set up than if it involves climbing, moving obstacles and has interrupted or lengthy following times. Since there will never be a single way that will work in every case, we're going to focus on an example that provides an approach to each of the problems above. It not only requires the Bot to move to the player, but also has...