Book Image

Learning Unreal Engine Game Development

By : Joanna Lee
Book Image

Learning Unreal Engine Game Development

By: Joanna Lee

Overview of this book

Unreal Engine 4 is a powerful game development engine that provides rich functionalities to create 2D and 3D games across multiple platforms. Many people know what a game is and they play games every day, but how many of them know how to create a game? Unreal Engine technology powers hundreds of games, and thousands of individuals have built careers and companies around skills developed using this engine. Learning Unreal Engine 4 Game Development starts with small, simple game ideas and playable projects that you can actually finish. The book first teaches you the basics of using Unreal Engine to create a simple game level. Then, you'll learn how to add details such as actors, animation, effects, and so on to the game. The complexity will increase over the chapters and the examples chosen will help you learn a wide variety of game development techniques. This book aims to equip you with the confidence and skills to design and build your own games using Unreal Engine 4. By the end of this book, you'll have learnt about the entire Unreal suite and know how to successfully create fun, simple games.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)
Learning Unreal Engine Game Development
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Exploring an existing particle system


We will start by first seeing what kind of particle systems we get in the default package of Unreal Engine 4. Go to Content Browser | Game | Particles. There are a couple of particle systems that we can already drag and place in the level and check out how they look.

To open a particle system, simply double-click on any of the systems. Let's take a look at P_Fire together. Feel free to check out the rest of the systems as well. However, I will use this as an example to understand what we need in order to create a new particle system for our level. This screenshot shows P_Fire in the editor:

On the left-hand side is Viewport where we can preview the particle system. On the right-hand side, in the Emitters tab, you can see several columns of boxes with Flames (twice), Smoke, Embers, and Sparks mentioned on top of each of the columns.

Emitters can be thought of as separate components that make up the particle system, and you can give each emitter different...