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

Assigning Level Of Detail (LOD) to a particle system


In Cascade, an LOD keeps the settings of level of detail for the particle system. LOD ranges define the point of change between set levels of detail, based on distance from the camera. Using LODs can reduce the processing load for the visual effect. The idea is to have optimal performance but maintain persuasive quality at close range, and smoothly ramp up the detail as the viewer gets closer to the Emitter actor. When passing the range, the transition between LOD settings should not be noticeable.

Getting ready

A little theory is probably a good thing to start with here. To take a particle system and create LOD variants, begin by selecting Regenerate Lowest LOD, to clear out any pre-existing levels. The lowest LOD is automatically generated from the highest LOD with a lower spawn rate. All the modules in the system will be grayed out, but can be edited per LOD by turning them back on to tweak their values to suit the current LOD. Before...