Book Image

Unreal Engine Game Development Blueprints

By : Nicola Valcasara
Book Image

Unreal Engine Game Development Blueprints

By: Nicola Valcasara

Overview of this book

With the arrival of Unreal Engine 4, a new wonderful tool was born: Blueprint. This visual scripting tool allows even non-programmers to develop the logic for their games, allowing almost anyone to create entire games without the need to write a single line of code. The range of features you can access with Blueprint script is pretty extensive, making it one of the foremost choices for many game developers. Unreal Engine Game Development Blueprints helps you unleash the real power of Unreal by helping you to create engaging and spectacular games. It will explain all the aspects of developing a game, focusing on visual scripting, and giving you all the information you need to create your own games. We start with an introductory chapter to help you move fluidly inside the Blueprint user interface, recognize its different components, and understand any already written Blueprint script. Following this, you will learn how to modify generated Blueprint classes to produce a single player tic-tac-toe game and personalize it. Next, you will learn how to create simple user interfaces, and how to extend Blueprints through code. This will help you make an informed decision between choosing Blueprint or code. You will then see the real power of Unreal unleashed as you create a beautiful scene with moving, AI controlled objects, particles, and lights. Then, you will learn how to create AI using a behavior tree and a global level Blueprint, how to modify the camera, and how to shoot custom bullets. Finally, you will create a complex game using Blueprintable components complete with a menu, power-up, dangerous objects, and different weapons.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)

Particle system


A particle system, for those of you that don't know, is a technique in computer graphics that uses a large number of very small graphic objects to simulate a certain kind of fuzzy phenomena, which is otherwise very hard to reproduce with conventional rendering techniques. Examples of particles could be fire, explosion, smoke, waterfall, spark and so on.

Having said that, you can imagine how essential it is to know how to create and manipulate particle systems (pfx from now) in your projects. A few well-made pfx around the level can drastically change a scene from static and boring to dynamic and enjoyable.

UE4 has a robust and extremely powerful particle system creation tool called Cascade.

Cascade

Cascade is a fully integrated and modular particle effects editor. It offers real-time feedback and modular effects editing, allowing fast and easy creation of even the most complex effects.

Particle systems are also very closely related to the various materials and textures that are...