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

Learning How to Use UE Gameplay Framework Base Classes

Based on what you learned in the previous chapters, you should already know how to write C++ scripts for UE games and have an overall view of a typical UE C++ project structure. Now is the time to start learning basic C++ scripting skills in this chapter.

Games usually include a game environment, some actors (or game objects), and the interactions between the actors. Player characters are controlled by players, whereas non-player characters (NPCs) are controlled by game logic or artificial intelligence (AI) agents. In this chapter, you will learn how to derive base classes from Unreal Engine’s gameplay framework to create your own game actors and characters. Here, three game project configuration classes—PlayerController, GameMode, and GameInstance—are going to be introduced, which will help us to define the game’s specific players and rules.

Knowing the framework base classes is fundamental to...