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

Network replication


Now that we've talked a bit about servers and clients, let's learn more about how information moves between them.

The first and most important concept to talk about is replication. Replication is a process by which an actor or a variable value that exists on one system is communicated to another connected system so it can be used there as well.

 

This brings up an important point: only those items that you choose to replicate will be communicated to the other connected systems, and this is deliberate. Unreal's networking infrastructure is designed for efficiency, and a major way to maintain that efficiency, especially if you have a lot of players, is to send only the information you absolutely need to send over the network, and send it only to those who actually need to receive it. Think about a massively-scoped game such as Fortnite. It simply could not run if every single piece of data about every connected player was being sent to every other player. Unreal can handle...