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

Replacing the HUD


The HUD is provisioned in the file MyGame.UC and the example HUD Epic Games includes is 'UTGame.UTHUD', which has a dynamic compass, a health bar, and an ammo count, and a crosshair for aiming. These can be either modified or completely replaced, and there are various ways to make a working HUD, so what we will do here is just assume you want to remove the existing HUD and are comfortable adding your own content once you know what goes where. Most HUDs are now built upon Scaleform, and to get started with that, in respect of UI, it could be a good idea to look at http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/ScaleformWorkflow.html. An example of how the HUD and camera relate is at http://forums.epicgames.com/showthread.php?t=721726. Chapter 10, The Way of the Flash UI also discusses the basics of working with Scaleform.

In this section we are not going to cover comprehensive HUD provisioning, only some simple configuration tricks that are handy, that will expose users to the bare bones...