Book Image

Unreal Development Kit Game Design Cookbook

By : Thomas Mooney
Book Image

Unreal Development Kit Game Design Cookbook

By: Thomas Mooney

Overview of this book

UDK is a free, world class game editing tool and being so powerful it can be daunting to learn. This guide offers an excellent set of targeted recipes to help game artists get up to speed with game designing in UDK.Unreal Development Kit Game Design Cookbook contains everything you need to jumpstart your game design efforts. The lessons are aimed squarely at the artist's field of production, with recipes on asset handling, creating content within the editor, animation and visual scripting to get the content working in gameplay.Unreal Game Development Kit Game Design Cookbook exposes how real-time environments are built using UDK tools. Key features are examined ñ assets, animation, light, materials, game controls, user interface, special effects, and game interactivity - with the view of making UDK technically accessible so users can transcend technique and focus on their creative design process. The book has well prepared recipes for level designers and artists of all levels. It covers core design tools and processes in the editor, particularly setting up characters, UI approaches, configuration and scripting gameplay. It is a technical guide that allows game artists to go beyond just creating assets, and it includes creative, extensive demonstrations that extend on mere functionality.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Unreal Development Kit Game Design Cookbook
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Toggling lights through Kismet


In the previous recipe we set a Material toggle using two Set Material actions in Kismet. This only changes the Material on a mesh however, not the light cast in the scene. For that we are using PointLights. However, to make a PointLight so it can be turned on and off, it must be converted to a PointLightToggleable. This is what we'll cover in the recipe, along with setting up a control for this converted light using a simple Toggle action.

Getting ready

The scene we'll work with would take a while to set up, so a starting point has been provided. From the provided content, load the map Packt_04_ToggleableLights_Start.UDK. The scene includes at one end of a passage two switch elements and some lamp meshes. The lamps have a Material with a flickering Emissive channel, but the Material is insufficient to illuminate the surroundings. A standard PointLight sits in front of the smallest lamp, and we'll convert it to a light type that can be toggled in Kismet.

How...