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

Creating game actor classes

The term game actor classes refers to the AActor, APawn, and ACharacter classes. These three classes are used to instantiate game actors that will be placed in the game levels, as follows:

  • AActor is the base class for creating a wide range of objects, such as buildings, spawn points, portals, vehicles, characters, and so on. We will extend this class to create ADefenseTower, AWeapon, and AProjectile classes.
  • APawn is a subclass of AActor that is used to create non-character, player-controllable actors (not characters) that accept and react to player inputs—racing cars, for example.
  • ACharacter extends the APawn class for creating characters. A character can not only accept user inputs and moves but also has at least one skeletal mesh and the character state animations, such as idle, walk, run, attack, die, and so on. We will extend this class to create a new APlayerAvatar class.

Let’s practice creating the three important...