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

Editing DefaultEngineUDK to allow 4096x4096 texture compression


This is a method for enabling UDK to use textures larger than its default limit. Conventional wisdom says that game textures should be highly optimized, but large resolution artwork is always enticing for many designers, and computers are getting better all the time. Performance issues aside, it's a good goal to push the graphic envelope and larger textures allow detail to hold up better on close inspection.

Getting ready

We've provided one really large texture that is 4096x4096 that you may find convenient, intended for use as a Skydome. If you are going to use a large texture it would most likely be on a very important model like a key character always close to the camera or else of a very large model which is always visible, such as a Skydome, or Skybox. A simple tutorial for making a Skybox is at http://www.worldofleveldesign.com/categories/UDK/UDK-how-add-skybox.php but this recipe assumes the use of a provided one.

How to...