Book Image

Game Development Patterns with Unreal Engine 5

By : Stuart Butler, Tom Oliver
3.5 (2)
Book Image

Game Development Patterns with Unreal Engine 5

3.5 (2)
By: Stuart Butler, Tom Oliver

Overview of this book

Design patterns serve as a toolkit of techniques and practices that enable you to write code that’s not only faster, but also more manageable. With this book, you’ll explore a range of design patterns and learn how to apply them to projects developed in Unreal Engine 5. You’ll begin by delving into the foundational principles of coding and develop a solid understanding of the concepts, challenges, and benefits of using patterns in your code. As you progress, you’ll identify patterns that are woven into the core of Unreal Engine 5 such as Double Buffer, Flyweight, and Spatial Partitioning, followed by some of the existing tool sets that embody patterns in their design and usage including Component, Behavior Tree, and Update. In the next section of the book, you’ll start developing a series of gameplay use cases in C++ to implement a variety of design patterns such as Interface and Event-based Observers to build a decoupled communications hierarchy. You’ll also work with Singleton, Command, and State, along with Behavioral Patterns, Template, Subclass Sandbox, and Type Object. The final section focuses on using design patterns for optimization, covering Dirty Flag, Data Locality, and Object Pooling. By the end of this book, you’ll be proficient in designing systems with the perfect C++/Blueprint blend for maintainable and scalable systems.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
1
Part 1:Learning from Unreal Engine 5
6
Part 2: Anonymous Modular Design
10
Part 3: Building on Top of Unreal

Structuring Code with Behavioral Patterns – Template, Subclass Sandbox, and Type Object

This chapter focuses on the three most common structural patterns. Structural patterns allow us to plan our code with the end usage in mind. For example, if we know that the end users of our system are likely to be designers with no code experience, we could plan to use the type object pattern to provide a system for easy dynamic expansion. We have already covered some of the concepts around code structure when we discussed using interfaces and events to achieve anonymous modular design in Chapter 7. The three patterns in this chapter (template, subclass sandbox, and type object) are a little more zoomed-in in terms of scope compared to what we have looked at before. The first two are interchangeable depending on your preference, both working as extensions to the standard inheritance property of the C++ programming language. The last is by far the most useful pattern in game design, giving...