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

Decoupling the reference train

Now let’s take knowledge of these three connection types and see how we can associate every class in the example UML class diagram that follows, using a few rules. Once everything is associated, we’ll implement decoupling in an example and look at the benefits this brings.

Modularity and decoupling

We’ll start with a bunch of scattered classes, which are organized in a way that will function but is messy to work with, as shown in Figure 7.5. To make everything function here clearly, the developer has added references, as and when needed, to any class.

Figure 7.5 – Example UML showing a messy system

Figure 7.5 – Example UML showing a messy system

Let’s analyze how the Character to Projectile interaction occurs by looking at the sequence diagram in Figure 7.6. When the character fires, it spawns a projectile but then doesn’t hold onto the reference. Instead, the projectile grabs a reference to the character and when it hits...