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 – Making a custom weapon


The best way to learn about inheritance is to see it in action, and the most basic way to see it is through a game's weapons. They're easy to modify and are a good starting point for learning about the UDK's classes.

  1. Create a new .uc file in our AwesomeGame/Classes folder and call it AwesomeGun.uc . Write the following code in it:

    class AwesomeGun extends UTWeap_RocketLauncher_Content;
    
    defaultproperties
    {
        FireInterval(0)=0.1
        ShotCost(0)=0
    }
  2. Compile our class. Now here's where we would ask, "How did it compile? I didn't declare any variables, but we're putting some in our default properties!" This is how inheritance works. We already saw the ShotCost variable in UTWeapon on line 27:

    /** Holds the amount of ammo used for a given shot */
    var array<int> ShotCost;

    If we look higher up in the class tree at Weapon, we can see FireInterval on line 44 (as of the October 2011 build):

    /** Holds the amount of time a single shot takes */
    var()       ...