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 – Examining inheritance


  1. We can see an example of this by taking a look at the class tree in UnCodeX, under Actor | Inventory | Weapon | UDKWeapon. Expanding UTWeapon we can see the different types of weapons provided as examples in the UDK:

    We can see that UTBeamWeapon (like the plasma gun we start with when running the game), UTWeap_RocketLauncher , and UTWeap_ShockRifleBase are amongst our weaponry. Each of these behaves differently, but all of them have common functionality.

  2. Clicking on UTWeapon , we can see some of its variables.

    /** Initial ammo count if in weapon locker */
    var int LockerAmmoCount;
    
    /** Max ammo count */
    var int MaxAmmoCount;
    
    /** Holds the amount of ammo used for a given shot */
    var array<int> ShotCost;

What just happened?

Things like MaxAmmoCount and ShotCost are common to all of the weapons, so instead of having to duplicate the variables to all of the subclasses, they're declared in all of the weapons' parent class, UTWeapon. Indeed, if we...