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

Controlling sort order for translucent Materials


Most particle emitters contain Materials with a translucent channel. If you have a few different particle Emitters overlapping, along with scene objects that also have translucent Materials, such as water or glass, you may see strange defects in the way the overlap occurs, as if objects behind are rendered in front. UDK requires us to set the priority of overlapping objects using, or the sort order, in the properties of each Emitter or object with a translucent Material. In the example, we're going to examine a simple waterfall scene with mist and swimmable water that has already been laid out, but needs the sort order fixed up.

Getting ready

Load and build the map Packt_07_SortOrder_Start.UDK and familiarize yourself with the layout. Notice that the waterfall is comprised of several Emitters stacked close to each other at the top and bottom of the waterfall.

How to do it...

  1. Some of the particles cut through the water surface, which makes their...