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

Controlling Characters

In Chapter 6, we created our player character, the PlayerAvatar class, and the BP_PlayerAvatar blueprint. The next thing we want to do is to control the player character. Since the engine automatically generated the default PangaeaPlayerController class when the project was created, moving the player character is already functional. However, that is not enough because we want more control over the player character.

In this chapter, you will learn how to add a new input action to the action map, handle an input event to trigger an attack, as well as how to add a notify to the timelines of attack, hit, and die animations.

This chapter will also introduce the concept of garbage collection, which is the engine’s important mechanism for memory management; the code for destroying characters demonstrates how to manually trigger garbage collection.

Additionally, you will learn how to create an enemy character and control the enemy with AIController. This...