Book Image

Learning Unreal Engine Game Development

By : Joanna Lee
Book Image

Learning Unreal Engine Game Development

By: Joanna Lee

Overview of this book

Unreal Engine 4 is a powerful game development engine that provides rich functionalities to create 2D and 3D games across multiple platforms. Many people know what a game is and they play games every day, but how many of them know how to create a game? Unreal Engine technology powers hundreds of games, and thousands of individuals have built careers and companies around skills developed using this engine. Learning Unreal Engine 4 Game Development starts with small, simple game ideas and playable projects that you can actually finish. The book first teaches you the basics of using Unreal Engine to create a simple game level. Then, you'll learn how to add details such as actors, animation, effects, and so on to the game. The complexity will increase over the chapters and the examples chosen will help you learn a wide variety of game development techniques. This book aims to equip you with the confidence and skills to design and build your own games using Unreal Engine 4. By the end of this book, you'll have learnt about the entire Unreal suite and know how to successfully create fun, simple games.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)
Learning Unreal Engine Game Development
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

APIs – DirectX and OpenGL


Both DirectX and OpenGL are collections of application programming interfaces (APIs) used for handling multimedia information in a computer. They are the two most common APIs used today for video cards.

DirectX is created by Microsoft to allow multimedia related hardware, such as GPU, to communicate with the Windows system. OpenGL is the open source version that can be used on many operating system including Mac OS.

The decision to use DirectX or OpenGL APIs to program is dependent on operating system of the target machine.

DirectX

Unreal Engine 4 was first launched using DirectX11. Following the announcement that DirectX 12 ships with Windows 10, Unreal has created a DirectX 12 branch from the 4.4 version to allow developers to start creating games using this new DirectX 12.

An easy way to identify APIs that are a part of DirectX is that the names all begin with Direct. For computer games, the APIs that we are most concerned about are Direct3D, which is the graphical...