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 murky liquid


It is possible to change an object's surface visibility based on its distance from the camera. You can also get the distance to the next surface underneath it or behind it, even where it varies pixel for pixel. Some kinds of netted curtain fabric exhibit this effect; where the fabric is close to the window it is see through, and where it's further off the surface, it isn't. In a game environment, a fringe of transparency created by a DepthBiasedAlpha node is often used at the converging edge of water and land so that some of the shore is visible under shallow water, while the water opacity increases further out. It is also possible to create holographic or scanning effects using this node. In this recipe and the next we'll do both, creating a murky pool and a passageway scanner.

Coverage of DepthBiasedAlpha and other depth based Material nodes can be found at http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/MaterialsCompendium.html. Look up SceneDepth and PixelDepth too.

Getting ready...