Mastering Unreal Engine 4.X: Take your game development skills to the next level with one of the best engines on the market

Cover
Copyright
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgments
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Table of Contents
Preface
Chapter 1: Preparing for a Big Project
Overview of the game
Creating a C++ project
The project settings
The editor settings
Mapping the inputs
Migrating assets
Using MarketPlace assets
Retargeting animations
Summary
Chapter 2: Setting Up Your Warrior
The code project
Creating the C++ class
Editing and adding code
The Gladiator header (.h) file
The Gladiator source (.cpp) file
The includes
The constructor
BeginPlay
SetupPlayerInputComponent
Jump
StopJumping
OnAttack
OnPostAttack
OnChangeWeapon
TurnAtRate
LookUpAtRate
OnSetPlayerController
OnChangeHealthByAmount
MoveForward
MoveRight
Compiling the code
Animation assets
Adding sockets to the skeleton
Creating the blend space
The animation blueprint
Building the blueprint
Adding the blueprint to the GameMode
Summary
Chapter 3: Designing Your Playground
The art of level design
Placing assets into the world
Using brushes to enhance level design
Adding lights to the level
Building lightmaps for a level
Creating water surfaces
Player Start
The navigation mesh
Summary
Chapter 4: The Road to Thinkable AI
The overall idea
The AI assets
Behavior Tree
BTTask
BTService
Blackboard
The animation blueprint
Building the C++ logic
EnemyAIController
EnemyAIController.h
EnemyAIController.cpp
Enemy
Enemy.h
Enemy.cpp
Building the behavior tree
Creating the blueprint
Adding notifies
What else?
Summary
Chapter 5: Adding Collectables
The idea behind collectables
The base class
PickupBase.h
PickupBase.cpp
The coin class
CoinPickup.h
CoinPickup.cpp
Making it collectable
Building the blueprint
Going forward
Summary
Chapter 6: The Magic of Particles
The particles editor
Toolbar
The viewport panel
The emitters panel
The details panel
Particle system
Thumbnail
LOD
Bounds
Delay
Macro UV
Occlusion
Materials
The particle emitter
Particle
Cascade
Particle modules
Cascade
Curve Editor
Interpolation modes
Organizing curves
Adding curves to the graph
Removing curves from the graph
Organizing the curve editor with tabs
Spawning particles
Changing parameters at runtime
Summary
Chapter 7: Enhancing the Visual Quality
The lightmass
The Swarm Agent
The ambient occlusion
AO settings
Lightmass settings
World Settings
Importance volume settings
The post process project settings
The post process volume
The properties
The available effects
Reflection Capture
Reflection Capture actors
The fog effects
Atmospheric Fog
Adding it
Exponential Height Fog
Adding it
Summary
Chapter 8: Cinematics and In-Game Cutscenes
Matinee actor (cinematic actor)
Matinee Editor
Groups
Tracks
Bellz cinematic
The animated fog
Color
Animating exponential height fog
Saving the cinematic as video
Summary
Chapter 9: Implementing the Game UI
UMG as Unreal's UI system
The game UI widget
UMG Designer
The Toggle mode
Palette
The hierarchy
Animations
Canvas
The Details panel
Constructing the UI
Adding animations to the UI
Connecting the UI with the game logic
What else?
Summary
Chapter 10: Save the Game Progress
Building the SaveGame class
Saving and loading game data in C++
The *.sav file
Saving and loading game data in blueprints
Summary
Chapter 11: Controlling Gameplay
via Data Tables
Data table sheets
Creating the data table asset
Creating a data structure
Blueprint data structure
C++ data structure
GameDataTables.h
GameDataTables.cpp
Reading from data tables
Reading data through C++
Reading through blueprints
Summary
Chapter 12: Ear Candy
Importing audio files
Sound assets
Dialogue Voice
Dialogue Wave
Media sound wave
Reverb effect
Sound attenuation
Sound Class
Sound cue
Sound mixes
Sound cue editor
Audio volumes
Playing sound effects
Summary
Chapter 13: Profiling the Game Performance
The blueprint debugger
The Collision Analyzer
The console
The FPS charts
The view modes and visualizers
The GPU visualizer
The Device Manager
Device Profiles
Summary
Chapter 14: Packaging the Game
Preparing the project for building
Packaging settings
Maps & Modes settings
Description settings
Platform settings
Adding different screens
Packaging the game
Cooking the content
Project Launcher and DLCs
Packaging a release
Packaging a patch or DLC
Summary
Index