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

Event driven systems

A software engineer’s job is to solve problems. Most of the time, this means special treatment in certain cases to make sure eventualities are handled. Sometimes, perfection is found, and the problem is not solved but erased from existence. In our current system, we want to solve the problem of needing to trace a sphere through our world for the player in every frame.

The question is not, how do we make this more efficient? Instead, we should be asking, why sphere trace? There isn’t really a clear answer to this. Yes, it allows us to check the volume of space for a player, but so do colliders. Yes, we can check all the space between the light mesh and the floor, but in our game, the player cannot jump. Yes, we can tell whether there are objects blocking a view of the player, but so can a cheaper line trace on the frames when we are not sure.

From these three answers, we can form a new solution. In principle, we will attach a sphere collider...