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

Look it up before you make it up


We mentioned this in Chapter 10, Creating a Multiplayer Experience in VR, and want to reiterate it here: one of the core mistakes new developers make is failing to do research before they dive into a problem, and they wind up rewriting code that's already been written.

Do your homework. When you're trying to solve a problem, before you start hacking away at it, see whether anybody else has tacked anything similar and left footprints behind. Is there already a tool in the engine that does this or does most of it? Are there examples in the templates or the sample projects that show how it can be solved? Has someone written a tutorial somewhere? Sometimes, the answer is going to be no, but far more often, you're going to find something that either points you directly toward a solution or gets you closer than you would have gotten without it.

We once saw a small team of engineers waste weeks of development budget on a problem that had already been solved with a single function in a freely-licensed plugin. That's time that didn't go into making the game better, and you don't need to fall into this trap. Research is part of your development process and should always happen before you start typing or dragging nodes.

This leads us right into our next topic of discussion where can you look when you need to find information?