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

Chapter 3. Understanding the Class Tree

Who is your daddy and what does he do?

In the last two chapters we've been using classes to write and test our code. But what is a class exactly? What is the importance of the class tree, why use one at all? In this chapter we're going to take a closer look at what it means when we say that UnrealScript is an object-oriented programming language.

In this chapter we will:

  • Discuss the class tree and the principles of object-oriented programming

  • Talk about inheritance and what it means to the class tree

  • Use function overriding to change the behavior of our classes

  • Talk about casting and how to use it on our classes

  • Go over the different class properties that can be used

  • Discuss the difference between Actors and Objects

Let's start by talking about classes, what they are and how to use them.