Book Image

Unreal Engine 4 Virtual Reality Projects

By : Kevin Mack, Robert Ruud
Book Image

Unreal Engine 4 Virtual Reality Projects

By: Kevin Mack, Robert Ruud

Overview of this book

Unreal Engine 4 (UE4) is a powerful tool for developing VR games and applications. With its visual scripting language, Blueprint, and built-in support for all major VR headsets, it's a perfect tool for designers, artists, and engineers to realize their visions in VR. This book will guide you step-by-step through a series of projects that teach essential concepts and techniques for VR development in UE4. You will begin by learning how to think about (and design for) VR and then proceed to set up a development environment. A series of practical projects follows, taking you through essential VR concepts. Through these exercises, you'll learn how to set up UE4 projects that run effectively in VR, how to build player locomotion schemes, and how to use hand controllers to interact with the world. You'll then move on to create user interfaces in 3D space, use the editor's VR mode to build environments directly in VR, and profile/optimize worlds you've built. Finally, you'll explore more advanced topics, such as displaying stereo media in VR, networking in Unreal, and using plugins to extend the engine. Throughout, this book focuses on creating a deeper understanding of why the relevant tools and techniques work as they do, so you can use the techniques and concepts learned here as a springboard for further learning and exploration in VR.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Title Page
About Packt
Contributors
Preface
12
Where to Go from Here
Index

Chapter 10. Creating a Multiplayer Experience in VR

In this chapter, we're going to move into some more advanced territory. Multiplayer software is significantly more complicated to write than single-player applications. There's no way around the reality that to write successful multiplayer code, you have to build a clear mental model of what's going on and how your data is getting from one computer to the other. The good news is that's what we're here to do. We're going to be dropping a lot more theory in this chapter than we usually do, and the reason for this is that if we simply walked you through the steps of setting up a networked application, that's really not going to help you. You have to understand how networking works to understand how you need to build your application. But don't worry—we'll try to alternate between theory and practical examples so you can build a hands-on understanding of how this stuff works.

We also need to be clear that networking is a big topic and it's fairly...