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

Just the facts


When you realize something is going wrong in your software, write down what you see happening. Not what you think you see happening—just what you see. It's far too easy in debugging to jump to a conclusion about why something is happening and then dive into trying to solve that problem before you've really ascertained what problem you actually have. Take a step back and just look at what you can concretely observe.

 

Think like this: That torch is appearing in the wrong position when it spawns, as opposed to The spawning routine is putting things in the wrong place. You don't know that yet. You just know that one torch isn't where you expected it to be. Do an experiment. Spawn a different object. Does it appear in the right place? OK, then maybe there's a weird offset in your model. Another object is also out of position? OK, then, yes, it might be the routine that's spawning it. Or it might be some collision in your level that's keeping things from spawning where you want them and is shoving them to the closest available spot. Try moving the spawn point and see whether that changes things.

See what we're doing here? We're applying a basic scientific method to the problem we're solving. What do we see? What can we think of that might be causing that? How could we test it to see whether we're right? What new information did our test just give us? Do we know enough to work on a solution now?

It's very very easy to jump to a conclusion and burn a lot of time debugging the wrong problem. Taking the time to take a step back will help to keep you from doing this and keep you from a lot of frustrated stabbing in the dark. You'll solve problems this way.