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 Actors

Game actors are the main elements of video games; they are controlled by either players (player actors or player characters) or AI controllers (non-player characters). A game actor may be represented by either a skeletal mesh (a warrior character, for instance) or a static mesh (a spaceship, for instance). The interactions between various game actors make up the gameplay.

This chapter will mainly guide you in creating your own player character (PlayerAvatar) for Pangaea. You will start by creating the animation instance class in C++, and then based on it, you will create the animation blueprint.

For the new animation blueprint, you will add the State Machine and define the states’ animations. You will also set up the character’s visual display in the character blueprint, define user inputs, and write code to implement the player controller and control the character states via the parameters defined in the animation instance class.

Once the...