Book Image

Unreal Development Kit Game Programming with UnrealScript: Beginner's Guide

By : Rachel Cordone
Book Image

Unreal Development Kit Game Programming with UnrealScript: Beginner's Guide

By: Rachel Cordone

Overview of this book

Unreal Development Kit is the free edition of Unreal Engine—the largest game engine in existence with hundreds of shipped commercial titles. The Unreal Engine is a very powerful tool for game development but with something so complex it's hard to know where to start.This book will teach you how to use the UnrealScript language to create your own games with the Unreal Development Kit by using an example game that you can create and play for yourself. It breaks down the UnrealScript language into easy to follow chapters that will quickly bring you up to speed with UnrealScript game programming.Unreal Development Kit Game Programming with UnrealScript takes you through the UnrealScript language for the Unreal Development Kit. It starts by walking through a project setup and setting up programs to write and browse code. It then takes you through using variables, functions, and custom classes to alter the game's behavior and create our own functionality. The use and creation of Kismet is also covered. Later, using replication to create and test multiplayer games is discussed. The book closes with code optimization and error handling as well as a few of the less common but useful features of UnrealScript.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Unreal Development Kit Game Programming with UnrealScript
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Time for action – Installing the UDK


Epic's official UDK website is the best place to stay up to date with the latest UDK releases and features, so we'll be heading there for the download.

  1. Go to http://udk.com/download and get the latest release.

  2. Run the installer. It will ask us to accept the license agreement and where we want to install the UDK. By default, it will use the UDK version for the installation, but to help keep things organized it's better to use a project name. This helps if you have more than one project using the same UDK version. In this book we will be calling our project Awesome Game, so let's change the installation directory.

  3. After installing the prerequisites and the UDK, the installer will ask us what to do next. Let's click on Return to Desktop for now.

What just happened?

Now we have a working copy of the UDK installed on our computer. We can play the example game that comes with it to get an idea of what the UDK can do by going into C:\UDK\UDK-AwesomeGame\Binaries\Win32 (or Win64 if we have a 64 bit operating system) and running UDK.exe. Take a few minutes and look through the game's menus and play the Deathmatch map DM-Deck to get an idea of what the UDK is capable of.

Now we're ready to take a peek under the hood of the UDK. Where are the files that the UDK uses to make our game work?