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)

Spawn volume


A random spawn can sound easy to handle; however, you will soon see how hard it can be to achieve a not-so-random result. We have a huge map with static objects and a three-dimensional environment. We want to find a random point at a fixed distance from the object above it in the whole game map that is not in a mesh, or in the middle of the floor, or high in the sky.

Components

Let's proceed step by step. First, create a new Blueprint class by extending an Actor class. Change the default root component to a Box Collision component. This will be the bounds volume that is used to calculate the random point.

No other components are needed for this class. The representation, when placed in the level, is like any other volume; a fully transparent box that can be adjusted to fit any dimension / position / rotation.

Note

When having more than one volume around the level, the line color around the box is sometimes not enough. There is a component called Billboard that can help you to easily...