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

Handling level content streaming


In this recipe we are going to divide an existing scene into parts so that it can be streamed as required to unload parts that are no longer required, and ensure parts that are not yet required remain on standby. Streaming helps maximize performance by only loading areas the player can see. Moreover, streaming isn't only useful for performance optimization. In many storytelling scenarios, streaming can be used to selectively expose different features of a level based on player actions. This provides a nice way to generate a non-linear experience.

Getting ready

Open the file Packt_06_Persistent_Start.UDK, which represents the shared content persistent across the boundary between two streamed levels. The scenes we're going to stream have already been divided up from the scene we used in the previous recipe. In your own scene, you'd have to work out which elements would be saved to which scene. There is an upper level and a lower level, and the persistent level...