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

Implementing event delegate communication across UE5

The other form of anonymous communication is the event delegate. Delegates are essentially function pointers that allow us to change the flow of logic dynamically at runtime. When invoked, they allow a signal to be sent to potentially several other parts of a program, without the sender knowing where the signal has gone. Using these as part of an event-driven approach is called an event delegate.

Event delegates can be compared to a radio station. The delegate exists as the station, transmitting a signal into the air when it is told to. Then, there are radios that can choose to subscribe to the station, receiving the signal. This forms a one-to-many relationship, with one-way communication. The radios cannot send messages back to the station, and the station does not know how many radios are tuned in.

Like when we explored interfaces, let’s begin with the Blueprint implementation before moving on to the more complex...