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 Actors as local variables


Let's take a look at the PostBeginPlay function from our AwesomeGame class:

simulated function PostBeginPlay()
{
    local AwesomeEnemySpawner ES;

    super.PostBeginPlay();

    GoalScore = EnemiesLeft;

    foreach DynamicActors(class'AwesomeEnemySpawner', ES)
        EnemySpawners[EnemySpawners.length] = ES;

    ActivateSpawners();
}

Here we're declaring a local variable of type AwesomeEnemySpawner and giving it a name of ES (short for Enemy Spawner). Near the end of the function we use the foreach iterator to find all of the AwesomeEnemySpawners in the map. The way the iterator works is that it gives us a reference to all of those actors it can find, as well as subclasses of that class, one at a time instead of in an array. To be able to sort through them we need to store the reference in a variable, so it makes sense to use a local variable here. We then take that temporary reference and assign it to the end of our more permanent array...