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

Editing the color graph of a particle over time


Changing colors in a particle using a curve is (for some reason) a little tricky to get used to in UDK. The UI design is probably to blame for this. Once you know how to enable curve display for a particular module, this topic can probably be considered rather easy. While we're going to focus on changing particle colors using RGB values, the same approach also works with changing alpha in order to fade visible particles and make them transparent.

How to do it...

  1. Create a new particle system, YourFolder.Cascade.ColorChanger. In the Required module of this, set the Material to a white one, such as Envy_Effects.flares.Materials.M_EFX_Flare_Burst_01 that comes with UDK.

  2. We chose that Material because it has a Particle | Vertex Color node that the TextureSample is moderated by through a Multiply node, as shown in the next screenshot. Without it present, the color change we want to make won't work. You can read more information about this in the Vertex...