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 Unreal Engine 5 and its Layers

Design patterns are a series of tools and practices by which we can learn to write faster and easier-to-work-with code.

Applying design patterns to projects developed in Unreal Engine 5 (UE5) will allow you to make your projects more performant, easier to read, and build upon, as well as develop an improved understanding of how the engine works.

We’re going to begin by developing an understanding of the history of Unreal Engine and ensuring that we are all set up to work with the engine, covering some basic ideas of how C++ and Unreal Engine’s visual scripting language, Blueprint, are linked.

In this chapter, we’re going to cover the following main topics:

  • Introducing Unreal Engine 5
  • Installing Unreal Engine 5 and preparing your development environment
  • The “Fuzzy” layer – bridging the gap from C++ to Blueprint
  • Translating back from Blueprint to C++