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)

Ragdoll physics


In computer physics engines, ragdoll physics is a type of procedural animation that is often used as a replacement for traditional static death animations. A ragdoll is a collection of multiple rigid bodies (each of which is ordinarily tied to a bone in our Skeletal Mesh) tied together by joints that restrict their movement. When the player dies, each rigid body collapses to the ground and thanks to its constraints the death looks realistic.

This is the ragdoll of our familiar mannequin, and it actually looks quite dead.

This technique is improving year by year thanks to the new technologies, and there are games that use it in a non-traditional way, such as the FlatOut series, where you can control the dead mannequin while flying, or Rag Doll Kung Fu, where you control one part of the body and the rest follows along.

In Unreal Engine, achieving ragdoll physics is really simple. Any object can be set to answer at the physic stimulations, as long as that object has Physics Asset...