Book Image

Unreal Development Kit Game Design Cookbook

By : Thomas Mooney
Book Image

Unreal Development Kit Game Design Cookbook

By: Thomas Mooney

Overview of this book

UDK is a free, world class game editing tool and being so powerful it can be daunting to learn. This guide offers an excellent set of targeted recipes to help game artists get up to speed with game designing in UDK.Unreal Development Kit Game Design Cookbook contains everything you need to jumpstart your game design efforts. The lessons are aimed squarely at the artist's field of production, with recipes on asset handling, creating content within the editor, animation and visual scripting to get the content working in gameplay.Unreal Game Development Kit Game Design Cookbook exposes how real-time environments are built using UDK tools. Key features are examined ñ assets, animation, light, materials, game controls, user interface, special effects, and game interactivity - with the view of making UDK technically accessible so users can transcend technique and focus on their creative design process. The book has well prepared recipes for level designers and artists of all levels. It covers core design tools and processes in the editor, particularly setting up characters, UI approaches, configuration and scripting gameplay. It is a technical guide that allows game artists to go beyond just creating assets, and it includes creative, extensive demonstrations that extend on mere functionality.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Unreal Development Kit Game Design Cookbook
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

How to handle BSP geometry


BSP stands for Binary Space Partition. BSP allows you to quickly create and lay out surfaces such as floors, walls, and ceilings which are lined up with each other without having to worry about using any other software. BSP helps you in the design stage, and generally geometry made with BSP can later be replaced by more efficient, more detailed StaticMesh assets. But besides being a modeling tool, BSP can be used to do a lot more, like serve as triggers, lighting volumes, and collision. We'll look at how to generate BSP and how to convert it to a StaticMesh and to a Volume.

Getting ready

Open a Blank Map from the UDK templates. Make sure you follow these steps:

  1. Go to Viewport Options [ ] (which appears in the upper corner of each viewport) and choose Show | Use Defaults. If you ever hide scene elements accidentally and get lost, restore them by using Show | Use Defaults.
  2. In the main menu choose View | Viewport Configuration | 2x2 split.

  3. In the perspective viewport...