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

Summary

The three patterns we have covered in this chapter are the most widely used structural patterns. Use of the first two is a personal preference, as we saw they can both be used to achieve the same thing in different ways. Template and subclass sandbox are also being superseded by other techniques in modern code, such as interfaces and modular design, but understanding where they came from and the workflow they encourage is useful. Template and subclass Sandbox both highlight the need to constrain designers with limited access to ensure the maintainability of the codebase. The type object pattern, on the other hand, is one of the most useful patterns in game development with widespread application across all aspects of game design. Its utility in allowing artists, designers, and programmers to work together is invaluable.

In the next chapter, we will dive into a few patterns that we can apply once we have a working game to improve our performance using the concepts of object...