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 – Experiments with function overriding


Let's get to our experiment with function overriding by changing the way the player's camera works. If you've ever played any overhead view games like Gauntlet you'll know what we're going to do. In games like that, the camera stays in a fixed position high above the player's head, looking down towards the player. To do that, we're going to override the GetPlayerViewPoint function.

  1. We know from our look at vectors in the previous chapter that we can get the location of actors in the world. If we wanted to move our camera away from the player, we'll need the player's location and an offset that we can use to make sure the camera stays in the same location relative to the player, like in the following diagram:

    We could just directly add the values in the function, but to keep things organized it's usually a good idea to keep variables like that in the default properties where they can easily be found and changed if desired. We may also want...