Book Image

Unreal Engine 4 Virtual Reality Projects

By : Kevin Mack, Robert Ruud
Book Image

Unreal Engine 4 Virtual Reality Projects

By: Kevin Mack, Robert Ruud

Overview of this book

Unreal Engine 4 (UE4) is a powerful tool for developing VR games and applications. With its visual scripting language, Blueprint, and built-in support for all major VR headsets, it's a perfect tool for designers, artists, and engineers to realize their visions in VR. This book will guide you step-by-step through a series of projects that teach essential concepts and techniques for VR development in UE4. You will begin by learning how to think about (and design for) VR and then proceed to set up a development environment. A series of practical projects follows, taking you through essential VR concepts. Through these exercises, you'll learn how to set up UE4 projects that run effectively in VR, how to build player locomotion schemes, and how to use hand controllers to interact with the world. You'll then move on to create user interfaces in 3D space, use the editor's VR mode to build environments directly in VR, and profile/optimize worlds you've built. Finally, you'll explore more advanced topics, such as displaying stereo media in VR, networking in Unreal, and using plugins to extend the engine. Throughout, this book focuses on creating a deeper understanding of why the relevant tools and techniques work as they do, so you can use the techniques and concepts learned here as a springboard for further learning and exploration in VR.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Title Page
About Packt
Contributors
Preface
12
Where to Go from Here
Index

Testing multiplayer sessions


Before we get into the weeds talking about how networking works, let's learn how to launch a multiplayer session. There are a number of ways you can do this. The easiest is to launch the multiplayer session directly from within your editor, and most of the time when you're testing network replication, this is going to be fine. For more comprehensive tests, or if you need one of the sessions to run in VR, you can launch two separate game sessions and connect them to each other. We'll show examples of how to do this a little later on when we discuss session types.

Testing multiplayer from the editor

Fortunately, the Unreal editor makes it fairly easy to set up a multiplayer session from within the editor on a single machine. To perform this test, we're going to use the Content Examples project:

Note

If you haven't already downloaded the Content Examples project, do so now by selecting Content Examples | Create Project from the Unreal Engine | Learn tab in your Epic...