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

Setting the preview player size reference object


In UDK versions greater than April 2011, pressing the key \ in the editor Perspective view will show a mesh that represents the player height. By default this is just a cube. The mesh to display can be set in the configuration file UDKEditorUserSettings.INI and we'll look at how to adjust this. This is to help designers maintain proper level metrics. You'll be able to gauge how tall and wide to make doors so there's sufficient space for the player to move through without getting stuck.

Getting ready

Back up C:\UDK\~\UDKGame\Config\UDKEditorUserSettings.INI then open it in ConTEXT with UDK closed.

How to do it...

  1. Press Ctrl + F and search for [EditorPreviewMesh]. Under it, we will change the entry PreviewMeshNames=" EditorMeshes.TexPropCube ". Note the we need to replace this with a StaticMesh, and a good place to put this to ensure loading would be the Engine\Content package EditorMeshes.

  2. First, open UDK and in the Content Browser search using...