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

Accessing the main PostProcessChain


PostProcess is an area where UDK shines. It offers three ways to grade the look of the game render in real-time. One way affects all the maps in your game, called the PostProcessChain, which is an asset set in the DefaultEngine.INI configuration. Another deals with the current map, called the World Info . Another deals with parts of the current map, through a BSP volume, called a PostProcessVolume . Besides changing the coloration of the level, the PostProcess grading can be used to add DOF (Depth of Field is the measure of focus), blur, motion blur, bloom, and shadow fidelity control, which was discussed briefly in the first recipe of this chapter. Right now, we're going to step through the handling of the primary PostProcess in your game.

How to do it...

  1. In ConTEXT, or your chosen text editor, open C:\UDK\~\UDKGame\Config\DefaultEngine.INI and search for the line DefaultPostProcessName=FX_HitEffects.UTPostProcess_Console. Change this to Packt.PostProcessChain...