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

Adding components to the new actors

Unreal provides useful components that can be added to actors; for example, you can add a static mesh component to an actor so that the actor is visually represented in the game levels. In our case, we want to add a box collision component and a static mesh component to ADefenseTower and AProjectile, as follows:

  • UBoxComponent: This is added as the actor’s root component for collision detection
  • UstaticMeshComponent: This is added as the child of the actor’s root component, which allows us to select and display a 3D mesh in the game levels

To use these two components, you should include their header files at the beginning of ADefenseTower.h and AProjectile.h files.

Including component header files

The order of #include statements in C++ is not a big concern, but you should ensure that the *.generated.h statement is placed as the last include statement and right before the UCLASS definition.

Here is the example...