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

Introducing terrain manipulation


Terrain manipulation is needed when you want to create large natural landscape areas, such as mountainous or valley areas that are covered with foliage. This can be in the form of trees/grass, lakes, and rivers that are covered with rocks or snow, and so on. The Landscape tool in Unreal Engine 4 allows you to creatively design a variety of terrains for your game maps easily, while allowing the game to run at a reasonable frame rate.

When playing in a map that has large outdoor terrains, for example, maps with a large number of trees or many elevations, such as mountains, the effective frame rate is expected to be reduced due to an increase in the number of polygons that need to be rendered on the screen. Hence, being well-versed in landscaping so that polygon counts are kept under control is important to ensure that the map is actually playable. It is also good to bear in mind to make use of optimization techniques, such as LOD and fog to mask the distant...