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

Making trails with AnimTrail TypeData


Trails can be used for many purposes. They can be attached to machines to create exhaust. They can be attached as floating whiskers to Chinese dragons. How they are made is by drawing steps between particles. A stretchy sprite is interpolated in the space between particles rather than at each particle location. It is not very difficult to create a ribbon effect, but it can be tricky to get it to scale correctly into the scene and animate nicely over its lifetime.

How to do it...

  1. Create a new particle system in your package called MyTrailTest.

  2. In Cascade, set the Required module's settings to Sort Mode: PSORTMODE_Age_NewestFirst so new particles will be in front of older ones, and Sub UV | Interpolation Method: PSUVIM_Linear, with a Sub Images Horizontal and Vertical count of 4. This will mean the SubUV texture we'll use will render out in a linear order, as we discussed earlier in this chapter in the recipe: Using SubUV charts to achieve particle diversity...