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 collision components

In UE5, two types of components can affect and be affected by collision; they are as follows:

  • Meshes
  • Shape objects

Meshes can be as simple as a cube, or as complex as a high-resolution character with tens of thousands of vertices. A mesh’s collision can be specified with a custom file imported alongside the mesh into UE5 (which is outside the scope of this book), or it can be calculated automatically by UE5 and customized by you.

It is generally a good practice to keep the collision mesh as simple (for example, a few triangles) as possible so that the physics engine can efficiently calculate collision at runtime. The types of meshes that can have collision are as follows:

  • Static Meshes: Meshes that are defined as static and do not change.
  • Skeletal Meshes: Meshes that can have a skeleton and change their poses, which allows them to be animated. Character meshes, for instance, are skeletal meshes.
  • Procedural...