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

Setting a LookAt target for head rotation in code


Our model can look in an XY cone of rotation while swimming, but so far we haven't associated this looking behavior with any controller in gameplay. Normally, either the player controls the look, or the look is controlled by an object in the scene dynamically, using a LookAt control.

How to do it…

  1. Fully load the Packt package by right-clicking on it in the Content Browser Packages List, then highlight the group Anims. Create a copy of the AnimTree Packt_CharTree. Call the copy MyTreeLookat.

  2. Select the main AnimTree node and right-click on it and choose Add SkelControl Chain using b_head. Right-click on the canvas and choose New Skeletal Control | SkelControlLookAt.

  3. In the Properties of the new SkelControlLookAt expand the Controller section and in Control Name type HeadControl. This is a name we'll reference in code. Underneath the Control Name, set the Control Strength to 1.0 so that there will be a visible effect.

  4. In the AnimTree Editor, set...