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

Replicating variables


Variable replication is probably the most important part of working in a network environment. From variables like an actor's Location and Rotation to the amount of ammo a weapon has, the server has a lot of variables to keep track of and keep the clients in sync with. Unlike functions, variables are always reliable and will always reach the clients regardless of bandwidth saturation or packet loss. It may just take a bit of time, as replicated function calls take priority.

When dealing with replication, it's important to realize that all types of variables can be replicated EXCEPT dynamic arrays. Static arrays work just fine, but if you need to replicate a dynamic array the only way you'll be able to do that is by passing the individual elements of the array through a replicated function one at a time, which can get messy. If possible it's best to avoid having dynamic arrays that the client needs to know about. For our game, if we wanted to replicate the GameInfo's array...