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 and creating components

One of the first things you learn when programming is to try to never repeat yourself. In fact, every technique you learn, from loops to functions to class encapsulation, is focused on reusing code with less typing. Building up the analogy, a loop reuses lines of code in one area so that you don’t need to repeat them next to each other. A function reuses blocks of code so that you don’t need to repeat them across your class. Then a class lets you reuse sets of functions and data in instances, so you don’t need to repeat logic across your program.

How does this help? Well, in games, any object that can be seen probably has some rendering element allowing it to be drawn to the screen. The code for rendering your object in your chosen graphics pipeline follows a standardized structure and is likely to be the same across every object that needs to be rendered. Even thinking about this possible repetition should be ringing alarm...