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

Understanding subclass sandbox

The Subclass Sandbox pattern takes the idea of the template’s limited extension through subclasses (to provide security) and applies it the exact opposite way round. Here, the children define the order of execution for a set of pre-defined code blocks through an abstract spine function. These blocks take the form of functions that are defined in the parent class and can never be overridden. Each function deals with one thing to do with an external system in a standardized way. The following pseudocode makes a better visual point of how this is literally the opposite of the template pattern we explored previously, where everything previously marked as abstract gets functionality and the one function we had code in is now abstract:

Subclass sandbox pattern parent pseudocode

public class Sandbox_Parent
{
public:
    abstract void DoAThing();
protected:
    void PlaySound() { //Plays sound correctly }
...