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

Binding a keyboard shortcut to a player action


It is relatively easy to reassign an existing action to a different keystroke in the files UDKInput.INI or DefaultInput.INI. It is somewhat harder to create a unique action. In this recipe we will be making the O key toggle a burst of light which lasts as long as you hold the key, then fades back out. I've chosen the letter O just because this key isn't defined by default in the UDK configuration. What this could be used for is triggering a flash light or lantern carried by the player, or illuminating the scene when casting spells.

Getting ready

The scene we'll use has a dark ambiance, Packt_06_KeyChange_Start.UDK.

The next screenshot is the result (when we've reached our goal) of flashing a bright light in the room:

How to do it...

The configuration part

  1. Open the scene if you like and look around, but eventually you should close it, and close UDK, as we need to set configuration with UDK closed.

  2. Open ConTEXT and choose File | Open and browse for...