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)

Understanding Line Traces

One of the most important features of any game development tool is its ability to execute Line Traces. These are available through the physics engine that the tool is using.

Line Traces are a way of asking the game to tell you whether anything stands between two points in the game world. The game will shoot a ray between those two points, specified by you, and return the objects that were hit (if any), where they were hit, at what angle, and much more.

In Figure 5.4, you can see a representation of a Line Trace where we assume object 1 is ignored and object 2 is detected,due to their Trace Channel properties (further explained in the following paragraphs):

Figure 5.4 – A Line Trace being executed from point A to point B

Figure 5.4 is explained as follows:

  • The dashed line represents the Line Trace before it hits an object.
  • The arrows represent the direction of the Line Trace.
  • The dotted line represents the...