Book Image

Elevating Game Experiences with Unreal Engine 5 - Second Edition

By : Gonçalo Marques, Devin Sherry, David Pereira, Hammad Fozi
Book Image

Elevating Game Experiences with Unreal Engine 5 - Second Edition

By: Gonçalo Marques, Devin Sherry, David Pereira, Hammad Fozi

Overview of this book

Immerse yourself in the Unreal game projects with this book, written by four highly experienced industry professionals with many years of combined experience with Unreal Engine. Elevating Game Experiences with Unreal Engine 5 will walk you through the latest version of Unreal Engine by helping you get hands-on with the game creation projects. The book starts with an introduction to the Unreal Editor and key concepts such as actors, blueprints, animations, inheritance, and player input. You'll then move on to the first of three projects, building a dodgeball game, where you'll learn the concepts of line traces, collisions, projectiles, user interface, and sound effects. You’ll also discover how to combine these concepts to showcase your new skills. The second project, a side-scroller game, will help you implement concepts such as animation blending, enemy AI, spawning objects, and collectibles. And finally, you'll cover the key concepts in creating a multiplayer environment as you work on the third project, an FPS game. By the end of this Unreal Engine book, you'll have a broad understanding of how to use the tools that the game engine provides to start building your own games.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)

Behavior trees and Blackboards

Behavior Trees and Blackboards work together to allow our AI to follow different logical paths and make decisions based on a variety of conditions and variables.

A behavior tree is a visual scripting tool that allows you to tell a pawn what to do based on certain factors and parameters. For example, a Behavior Tree can tell an AI to move to a certain location based on whether the AI can see the player.

To give an example of how Behavior Trees and Blackboards are used in games, let’s look at the game Gears of War 5, which was developed with UE5. The AI in Gears of War 5, and throughout the Gears of War series, always tries to flank the player or force the player out of cover. To do this, a key component of the AI logic is to know who the player is and where they are. A reference variable to the player, and a location vector to store the location of the player, exist in the Blackboard. The logic that determines how these variables are used...