Book Image

Unreal Development Kit Game Programming with UnrealScript: Beginner's Guide

By : Rachel Cordone
Book Image

Unreal Development Kit Game Programming with UnrealScript: Beginner's Guide

By: Rachel Cordone

Overview of this book

Unreal Development Kit is the free edition of Unreal Engine—the largest game engine in existence with hundreds of shipped commercial titles. The Unreal Engine is a very powerful tool for game development but with something so complex it's hard to know where to start.This book will teach you how to use the UnrealScript language to create your own games with the Unreal Development Kit by using an example game that you can create and play for yourself. It breaks down the UnrealScript language into easy to follow chapters that will quickly bring you up to speed with UnrealScript game programming.Unreal Development Kit Game Programming with UnrealScript takes you through the UnrealScript language for the Unreal Development Kit. It starts by walking through a project setup and setting up programs to write and browse code. It then takes you through using variables, functions, and custom classes to alter the game's behavior and create our own functionality. The use and creation of Kismet is also covered. Later, using replication to create and test multiplayer games is discussed. The book closes with code optimization and error handling as well as a few of the less common but useful features of UnrealScript.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Unreal Development Kit Game Programming with UnrealScript
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Time for action – Using booleans


The first thing we need to do is tell the game about our variable. This is called declaration. Variables need to be declared before they can be used. Our declaration tells the game what type of variable it is as well as its name.

We'll continue with our "is it raining?" scenario for this experiment. In a game we might want to use this variable to check whether we should spawn rain effects or make changes to the lights, and so on.

Variable declaration in UnrealScript happens after the class declaration line, and before any functions. Let's add a variable to AwesomeActor.uc to see if it's raining or not.

  1. Open up our AwesomeActor.uc class in ConTEXT and add this line after our class declaration:

    var bool bIsItRaining;

    The var tells the game that we're declaring a variable. After that, is the variable type, in this case bool for boolean. After that, we tell the game our variable's name, bIsItRaining . Spaces can't be used in variable names, but underscore characters...