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

Function parameters and modifiers


While writing the code in this and previous chapters we've seen plenty of functions that have more than just our plain function declaration here:

function Something()
{
}

There's bools and simulateds and a huge mess of stuff inside the parentheses sometimes, but what does it all mean? Let's take a look at what we can add to our function declarations and what they do. First up are function parameters.

Function parameters

Function parameters are variables that are given to a function so that it can use them for what it needs to do. If we're going to add ammo, we need to know how much to add. If we get shot, we want to know who shot us! To do this we add parameters to our function.

Adding parameters to our functions is pretty simple. We just need to let the game know what type of variable each is, and give it a name. The name is arbitrary; it doesn't need to match the name of the variable we're passing into the function. The only restriction is that it can't have...