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)

Introducing anchors

As you might be aware, video games are played on many different screen sizes with many different resolutions. Because of that, it is important to make sure that the menus you create can adapt to all these different resolutions effectively. That is the main purpose of Anchors.

Anchors allow you to specify how you want a UI element’s size to adapt as the screen resolution changes by specifying the proportion of the screen you want it to occupy. Using anchors, you can always have a UI element in the upper-left corner of the screen, or always occupying half of the screen, no matter the size and resolution of that screen.

As the size of the screen or resolution changes, your widget will scale and move relative to its anchor. Only elements that are direct children of a Canvas Panel element can have an anchor, which you can visualize through the Anchor Medallion (which is a white flower-like shape in the Designer tab) when you select said element:

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