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.

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Unreal Engine 4.X By Example
Benjamin Carnall
Jul, 2016 | 506 pages
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Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Unreal Engine 4.X By Example
Unreal Engine 4.X By Example
Credits
Credits
About the Author
About the Author
About the Reviewer
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Preface
Free Chapter
1
Introduction to Unreal Engine 4
Introduction to Unreal Engine 4
Navigating this book
Installing Unreal Engine 4
Creating your first project!
Navigating the Unreal Engine UI
Creating a basic actor
Pre-Built projects as a learning resource
Summary
2
Blueprints and Barrels – Your First Game
Blueprints and Barrels – Your First Game
Creating your first Blueprint
Modifying the Hello Sphere Blueprint
Creating the Barrel Hopper project!
Creating our Character
Game modes and how to make them
Creating and receiving input events
Building the level!
Getting our barrels rolling
Debugging our Blueprints
Masking our destruction with particles
Respawning the player
Summary
3
Advanced Blueprint, Animation, and Sound
Advanced Blueprint, Animation, and Sound
Cleaning up shop
Animation with UE4
Creating your first sound scape
Adding the finishing touches to Barrel Hopper
Summary
4
Unreal Engine, C++, and You
Unreal Engine, C++, and You
UE and C++
Hello World for C++
Extending C++ into Blueprint
Blueprint native events and you!
Summary
5
Upgrade Activated – Making Bounty Dash with C++
Upgrade Activated – Making Bounty Dash with C++
Creating a C++ character
Creating the Character
Creating the C++ world objects
Creating the interactions between the world objects
Summary
6
Power Ups for Your Character, Power Ups for the User
Power Ups for Your Character, Power Ups for the User
Cleaning up shop and object hierarchies
Creating a Plug-in with C++
Working with our first plugin module
Incorporating power-ups into Bounty Dash
Creating HUDs using C++
Completing the Bounty Dash game loop!
Finishing the wall of death and polishing the project
Summary
7
Boss Mode Activated – Unreal Robots
Boss Mode Activated – Unreal Robots
Setting up the project
The first-person character
Adding a custom HUD and drawing a cross hair
Creating the projectile
Unreal Robots
Creating a basic behavior tree and black-board!
Creating a custom task via blueprint
Creating a custom decorator using blueprint
Creating a custom service using C++
Advanced collision in UE4
Integrating the AI Character
Creating a custom object collision channel
Modifying the level to support AI
Placing the AI in the level and testing
Summary
8
Advanced AI and Unreal Rendering
Advanced AI and Unreal Rendering
Expanded AI and tracking projectiles
Tracking projectiles and you
Expanded AI
Rendering in UE4
UE4 Materials
Summary
9
Creating a Networked Shooter
Creating a Networked Shooter
Creating the project
Network multiplayer theory
UE4 Networking
Starting the networked First Person Shooter
Preparing the ANSCharacter blueprint
Spawn points and spawning the players
Game modes and servers
Preparing our game map
Drawing the HUD and preparing the lobby
Testing our Game
Summary
10
Goodbyes and Thank yous
Goodbyes and Thank yous
Packaging a project
Testing the NS package
Console commands
What we have learned so far
Summary
Index
Index

Working with our first plugin module

Now that we have described our plugin and its module, we can begin to specify what our only code module within the plugin is going to do. The purpose of the PowerUpPlugin is to create a power-up type we can include in a game code object that will be constructed with a random power-up type. We can then identify this type from within the game code and enact functionality based on that type. As we are going to be creating a type that needs to be identified by the engine, we will need to inherit our type from UObject. This means our plugin is going to need access to the CoreUObject module provided by the engine. This also means that our plugin module will need to be publically exposed to our project codebase so we may include the plugin type. This is creating the aforementioned static link between the plugin and the project codebase.

PowerUpPlugin.Build.cs

We can create these associations by modifying the .Build.cs file. You will notice that the Build.cs file...

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