Welcome to Mastering Unreal Engine 4! The goal of this book is to take individuals who are familiar with UE4 and C++ development to the next level in a holistic way. While some chapters will focus on specific system implementations and best practices in depth, others may give a more broad view of the large UE4 systems that are often used by content creation team members. By the end, you should have a solid foundation on which to make the best decisions concerning the use of UE4's technology with any scope or platform of project, and you will be able to guide a whole team towards seeing the project through to the end. There will be many areas in which you can directly implement these systems into game projects, but the overall goal of this book is to be able to address any needs from a technical direction side, giving you a base of knowledge that's a step above that of those who simply write code.
In this chapter, we will start a project for a basic combat game so that we have a basis for adding and working on more advanced features when we go forward. While some of this is automatically managed from UE4's game templates, we will go through all the necessary steps to make sure that the core setup referenced through the rest of the book is added, built, and tested, and that some new gameplay systems are implemented and demonstrated.
The major topics to be covered through the rest of this chapter are as follows:
- Setting up and creating a new first-person shooter project
- Overriding existing UE4 classes
- Adding and implementing simple C++ functions for them
- Quick review of build and running options