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

Technical requirements

Before embarking on this journey of discovery, know that this book will assume some working knowledge of C++ syntax and the Unreal Engine Editor. Familiarity with pointers and how to follow code in your chosen integrated development environment (IDE) will be key to understanding the Unreal core API.

You will require the following software:

  • Unreal Engine 5 (this book has been written with version 5.0.3).
  • Visual Studio is a decent free IDE (basic support for the engine is present, meaning projects may show errors and IntelliSense may not auto-complete some keywords, but the project will compile and run).
  • If you have access, JetBrains Rider version 2022 or later has built-in support for Unreal Engine, which will make the development process a lot easier. Rider is an alternative IDE to Visual Studio that is often preferred among programmers working with Unreal. It offers improved support for working with C++ in Unreal Engine, including auto-complete. You can learn more about it by visiting https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/rider-unreal/.