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

Setting up the character’s SkeletalMeshComponent

To set up the player avatar, we set the skeletal mesh and its animations for the BP_PlayerAvatar blueprint and replace the default player pawn in the game mode settings.

But before the setting up works, we need to import the fancy character model and its animations.

Importing the character model

For the player avatar, we want to use another skeletal model to substitute the default skeletal mesh provided by Unreal Engine. You may choose to use any character models that are compatible with UE5. In this book, we are going to use the Hero model (the .FBX and .TGA files), which you can download from the book’s GitHub repository under the PangaeaAssets/Hero folder, to set up the player avatar’s SkeletalMesh component.

The next thing is to create a subfolder for importing the character assets. Here, we choose to create the new Hero folder under All | Content | Characters:

Figure 6.3 – Creating a new Hero folder

Figure 6...