Book Image

Unreal Engine 5 Game Development with C++ Scripting

By : ZHENYU GEORGE LI
Book Image

Unreal Engine 5 Game Development with C++ Scripting

By: ZHENYU GEORGE LI

Overview of this book

Unreal Engine is one of the most popular and accessible game engines in the industry, creating multiple job opportunities. Owing to C++ scripting's high performance, advanced algorithms, and engineering maintenance, it has become the industry standard for developing commercial games. However, C++ scripting can be overwhelming for anyone without a programming background. Unreal Engine 5 Game Development with C++ Scripting will help you master C++ and get a head start on your game development journey. You’ll start by creating an Unreal Engine C++ project from the shooter template and then move on to building the C++ project and the C++ code inside the Visual Studio editor. You’ll be introduced to the fundamental C++ syntax and essential object-oriented programming concepts. For a holistic understanding of game development, you’ll also uncover various aspects of the game, including character creation, player input and character control, gameplay, collision detection, UI, networking, and packaging a completed multiplayer game. By the end of this book, you’ll be well-equipped to create professional, high-quality games using Unreal Engine 5 with C++, and will have built a solid foundation for more advanced C++ programming and game development technologies.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
1
Part 1 – Getting Started with Unreal C++ Scripting
6
Part 2 – C++ Scripting for Unreal Engine
12
Part 3: Making a Complete Multiplayer Game

Understanding the MyShooter C++ project structure

You already learned about the regular C++ project structure in Chapter 3; now, let’s take a close look at an Unreal game’s C++ project structure.

Open MyShooter in Unreal Editor and select the C++ Classes/MyShooter folder in the Content Drawer window. There, you can find five C++ class files:

Figure 4.1 – MyShooter C++ project source files

Figure 4.1 – MyShooter C++ project source files

Double-click on any C++ class file to open the C++ project in VS.

Now, let’s look at Solution Explorer:

Figure 4.2 – MyShooter C++ project Solution Explorer

Figure 4.2 – MyShooter C++ project Solution Explorer

The first layer of the tree has three folder nodes – Engine, Games, and Visualizers:

  • The Engine folder contains the Unreal Engine project and the source code. In some cases, you may want to modify and customize the engine code.
  • The Games folder contains game projects. Here, it only has one project – MyShooter.
  • The...