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

Creating network-aware pawns for multiplayer


Now that we've seen a bit about how information moves from the server to the clients, let's explore the ways player actions get communicated from the clients back to the server. To get ready for this, we're going to take a shortcut and add a pawn that can already perform a few basic actions, and we'll get right to the task of making these actions work in a multiplayer setting.

Adding a first-person pawn

We're going to set ourselves up by adding the pawn from the First Person template:

  1. Create or open a project made using the Blueprint | First Person template.
  2. Select Content | FirstPersonBP | Blueprints | FirstPersonCharacter, and migrate this character into our working project.

Now, we need to tell our game mode to use it.

  1. Open BP_MultiplayerGameMode, and set its Default Pawn Class to the FirstPersonCharacter we just migrated in.

Let's test it. We should see a number of problems here. Our projectiles are bouncing off invisible walls. When players fire...