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

Summary

We just investigated the C++ MyShooter project by looking at the basic project structure and reviewing the source code. You should now have an overall idea about what the C++ scripts do and how they collaborate with the engine and the Blueprints.

From the sample game code, you have also learned some useful Unreal C++ scripting skills.

First, we reviewed the code for creating Unreal recognizable C++ classes by marking them with the UCLASS macro and the specifiers. You now understand that the Unreal Engine Reflection System will use the information associated with the macros and the specifiers to spawn objects and components. You then got to know some Unreal base classes such as ACharacter, AActor, USphereComponent, UActorComponent, and AGameModeBase that can be inherited to create new game classes.

Second, we looked at the code that defines class variables and declares class functions with the UPROPERTY and UFUNCTION macros. Like the UCLASS macro you learned about before...