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

Creating your own Kismet node for speed


In an earlier recipe in this chapter we discussed changing the player speed with a shortcut key. Being a designer, there will be times when you want the game to influence the player's speed. For this, the handiest way is probably by scripting a custom node we can hook up to events.

How to do it...

  1. Turn off UDK, open ConTEXT, and begin a new file. Choose from the drop-down menu list which says Text Files, the item UnrealEd, so that the text we'll type is format friendly for UnrealScript.

  2. The code starts: class PawnGroundSpeed extends SequenceAction;

  3. This is because the class which drives all Kismet action nodes is C:\UDK\~\Development\Src\Engine\Classes\SequenceAction.UC, and our changes will extend from that, adding to it or changing values it already sets up.

  4. Groundspeed is the property that we're changing and it will only work on a pawn, be it player or NPC, hence the class name PawnGroundSpeed.

  5. Type: var() float PawnSpeed; in order to add a channel in...