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

Part 2: Anonymous Modular Design

In this part, we will begin creating more efficient code to build modular solutions that communicate with each other efficiently and cleanly, without the use of direct references and casts.

We will start by reducing the need for gated polling in our code by replacing it with cleaner communication methods, and we will explore interfaces and event delegates to allow our code to be decoupled. This will culminate in a coding design paradigm we call Anonymous Modular Design, which should make our object-oriented code the most maintainable and expandable it can be.

This part has the following chapters:

  • Chapter 5, Forgetting Tick
  • Chapter 6, Clean Communication – Interface and Event Observer Patterns
  • Chapter 7, A Perfectly Decoupled System