Book Image

Unreal Engine 4.X By Example

By : Benjamin Carnall
Book Image

Unreal Engine 4.X By Example

By: Benjamin Carnall

Overview of this book

With Unreal Engine 4 being made free to use, for any keen game developer it is quickly becoming the most popular game engine in today’s development industry. The engine offers a rich feature set that can be customized and built upon through the use of C++. This book will cover how to work with Unreal Engine’s tool set all the way from the basics of the editor and the visual scripting system blueprint to the in-depth low-level creation of content using C++. This book will provide you with the skills you need to create feature-rich, captivating, and refined game titles with Unreal Engine 4. This book will take you through the creation of four unique game projects, designed so that you will be ready to apply the engine’s rich development capabilities. You will learn not only to take advantage of the visual tools of the engine, but also the vast and powerful programming feature set of Unreal Engine 4.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Unreal Engine 4.X By Example
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Extending C++ into Blueprint


Ok, now that we have implemented a purely C++ based object, let's look at the ways we can extend our code classes into Blueprint and utilize specifiers to communicate more information from our code classes to the engine.

The first thing we are going to do is extend a custom class into Blueprint! This is a very powerful feature of the engine as it allows us to write backend functionality for objects in code, but utilize all of the association tools of the Editor for things such as assigning materials, meshes, sounds, and other asset-based functionality. To successfully extend a code class into blueprint you must provide information to the engine about the class through specifiers. These specifiers act as input arguments for macros such as UFUNCITON(), UPROPERTY(), and UCLASS().

Extending a class with no macro specifier support

Let's see what happens when we attempt to extend our AHelloSphere C++ class we just made, which exists purely in C++. The AHelloSphere has...