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 how to spawn actors

In Chapter 1, Introduction to Unreal Engine, you learned how to place an actor that you created in the level through the editor, but what if you wanted to place that actor in the level as the game is being played? That’s what we’re going to be taking a look at now.

UE5, much like most other game development tools, allows you to place an actor in the game while the game itself is running. This process is called spawning. To spawn an actor in UE5, we need to call the SpawnActor function, available from the World object (which we can access using the GetWorld function, as mentioned previously). However, the SpawnActor function has a few parameters that need to be passed, as follows:

  • A UClass* property, which lets the function know the class of the object that will be spawned. This property can be a C++ class, available through the NameOfC++Class::StaticClass() function, or a Blueprint class, available through the TSubclassOf property...