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

Creating a per-session checkpoint series


It's important to understand the difference between a "save game" and a "level checkpoint" right from the start. A save game writes information out to disk, external to UDK. This can be done with an understanding of DLLBind for example, or by using the SAPITU classes provided in UDK. For more information about this, take a look at the official documentation: http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/ConfigSavegameSystem.html.

In this case, the topic is on checkpoints, which enable a player to respawn on death in an updated location, according to navigation progress or other achievements. Our example is useful even though it doesn't save external data or permit closing the game and reloading its last status; it elaborates slightly on the toggling of Triggers by toggling PlayerStart actors, along with setting the appropriate properties so this will work.

Getting ready

Load up Pactk_05_CheckPoints_START.UDK, a very simple scene with a string of platforms and some...