Chapter 1, UE4 Development Tools, outlines basic recipes to get you started with UE4 game development and the basic tools used to create the code that makes your game.

Chapter 2, Creating Classes, focuses on how to create C++ classes and structs that integrate well with the UE4 Blueprints Editor. These classes will be graduated versions of regular C++ classes called UCLASSES.

Chapter 3, Memory Management and Smart Pointers, takes the reader through using all three types of pointer and mentions some common pitfalls regarding automatic garbage collection. This chapter also shows readers how to use Visual Studio or XCode to interpret crashes or confirm that the functionality is implemented correctly.

Chapter 4, Actors and Components, deals with creating custom actors and components, what purpose each serves, and how they work together.

Chapter 5, Handling Events and Delegates, describes delegates, events, and event handlers, and guides you through creating their own implementations.

Chapter 6, Input and Collision, shows how to connect user input to C++ functions and how to handle collisions in C++ from UE4. It will also provide default handling of game events such as user input and collision, allowing designers to override when necessary, using Blueprint.

Chapter 7, Communication between Classes and Interfaces, shows you how to write your own UInterfaces, and demonstrates how to take advantage of them within C++ to minimize class coupling and help keep your code clean.

Chapter 8, Integrating C++ and the Unreal Editor, shows you how to customize the editor by creating custom Blueprint and animation nodes from scratch. We will also implement custom editor windows and custom detail panels to inspect types created by users.

Chapter 9, User Interfaces – UI and UMG, demonstrates that displaying feedback to the player is one of the most important elements within game design, and this will usually involve some sort of HUD, or at least menus, within your game.

Chapter 10, AI for Controlling NPCs, covers recipes to control your NPC characters with a bit of Artificial Intelligence (AI).

Chapter 11, Custom Materials and Shaders, talks about creating custom materials and audio graph nodes used in the UE4 editor.

Chapter 12, Working with UE4 APIs, explains that the application programming interface (API) is the way in which you, as the programmer, can instruct the engine (and so the PC) on what to do. Each module has an API for it. To use an API, there is a very important linkage step where you must list all APIs that you will use in your build in ProjectName.Build.cs file.

Creating a game is an elaborate task that will require a combination of assets and code. To create assets and code, we'll need some pretty advanced tools, including art tools, sound tools, level-editing tools, and code-editing tools. Assets include any visual artwork (2D sprites, 3D models), audio (music and sound effects), and game levels. To perform that, we'll set up a C++ coding environment to build our UE4 applications. We'll download Visual Studio 2015, install it, and set it up for UE4 C++ coding. (Visual Studio is an essential package for code editing when editing the C++ code for your UE4 game.)

This book is intended for game developers who understand the fundamentals of game design and C++ and would like to incorporate native code into the games they make with Unreal. They will be programmers who want to extend the engine or implement systems and actors that allow designers control and flexibility when building levels.

In this book, you will find several headings that appear frequently (Getting ready, How to do it, How it works, There's more, and See also).

To give clear instructions on how to complete a recipe, we use these sections as follows:

In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "The parameters passed to the UPROPERTY() macro specify a couple of important pieces of information regarding the variable."

A block of code is set as follows:

#include<stdio.h>

int main()
{
  puts("Welcome to Visual Studio 2015 Community Edition!");
}

When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:

int intVar = 5;
float floatVar = 3.7f;
FString fstringVar = "an fstring variable";
UE_LOG(LogTemp, Warning, TEXT("Text, %d %f %s"), intVar, floatVar, *fstringVar );

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: "After you select the tools you'd like to add on to Visual Studio, click the Next button."

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