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

Toggling Materials through Kismet


Quite often you will want to adjust lights in the scene to turn them on and off according to events that happen during gameplay. Now we'll look at how to convert a lamp mesh so it has a Material with an Emissive feature and an alternative Material with no Emissive feature. This will help create the illusion of a lamp being turned on and off. This will be followed by a lesson on how to toggle a PointLight in the scene to continue to set up of that illusion. We're dealing with a lamp mesh as the source of illumination, and that requires a Material to be swapped for an on and off variant, so we'll look at the use of the Set Material action in Kismet.

Getting ready

The scene we'll work with would take a while to set up, so a starting point has been provided. From the provided content, load the map Packt_04_SetMaterial_Start.UDK. The scene includes at one end of a passage two switch elements and some lamp meshes. The lamps have a Material with a flickering Emissive...