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

Spawning objects from a hit impact


This recipe is a guest tutorial. Ryan Pelcz gave me his kind permission to adapt his solution to spawning objects as a result of impacts upon another object. Imagine a vending machine that spits out plastic balls full of sweets each time it is hit. This is the kind of scenario we're going to create. The goal is to introduce the concept of placeable actors, spawnable actors, actors taking damage, and applying impulses to rigid bodies.

How to do it...

The placeable actor :

We have to code a placeable actor because it will have functionality a regular StaticMesh placed in the scene wouldn't have, which is the ability to produce other objects. Placeable objects are added from the Actor Classes tab not the Content Browser.

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

  2. The code starts: class MyPowerCore extends Actor...