Mastering Unreal Engine

A Beginner's Guide

Sufyan bin Uzayr

• Publisher: CRC Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781032103136
• eBook ISBN: 9781000579444
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Programming
• Index: Computer Science

Mastering Unreal Engine: A Beginner's Guide introduces developers of all ages to the beautiful and valuable world of Unreal Engine in particular and game development in general.

Unreal Engine is a complete development suite for anyone working with real-time technology when it comes to game development. It provides flexibility and power to artists across many sectors to generate cutting-edge entertainment, engaging visualizations, and immersive virtual environments for games and infotainment alike.

Unreal Engine is a prominent game creation engine that is free to use. The majority of people associate Unreal Engine with 3D games. However, it may also be used to create 2D games with ease. It is the de facto standard in the world of game development. That said, it is not hard to be confused when getting started with Unreal Engine because of the wide range of features that it provides.

Mastering Unreal Engine will teach you exactly where to begin. You will learn how to download Unreal Engine, construct your first game, start your game, receive an introduction to blueprints, and ultimately, develop a workable framework.

Unreal Engine is a robust game development engine that offers a wide range of features for creating 2D and 3D games on various platforms. Unreal Engine technology powers hundreds of games, and thousands of people have created careers and businesses on the skills they learned while working with this engine.

To help you get the most out of this powerful piece of technology, Mastering Unreal Engine begins with simple game ideas and playable projects that you can complete at your own pace. The book starts by covering the foundations of using Unreal Engine to build a simple game level. You will also learn how to add such details to the game as actors, animation, and effects.

Mastering Unreal Engine talks at length about the various features of the Unreal Engine game engine, how to install it and how to construct a project in C++, and good coding practices for game development. Furthermore, the book also covers certain niche areas, such as how to utilize Visual Studio in gaming, and how to use existing predefined blueprints to grow and foster a game. More importantly, Mastering Unreal Engine is perhaps one of the first beginner-level books in its league that covers topics related to the Behavior Tree and Blackboard with Artificial Intelligence and multiplayer gameplay in Unreal Engine.

Note: This book assumes you have a working knowledge of C++ programming.

Learn more about our other Mastering titles at:

https://www.routledge.com/Mastering-Computer-Science/book-series/MCS

CHAPTER 1Introduction to Unreal Engine

DOI: 10.1201/​9781003214731-1

Epic Games released the original Unreal Engine in 1998. This engine’s primary advantage was that thanks to UnrealScript, the engine became fairly popular with the community since it made modding quite easy and accessible. Then, in 2002, Epic launched Unreal Engine 2, which was a significant upgrade over the previous engine. It came with UnrealEd 2 (and subsequently, UnrealEd 3), a level editor you could use to construct Unreal levels. This, in conjunction with UnrealScript, may be used to develop entirely new games. The engine outperformed its predecessor in terms of rendering, physics, and collision. It also supported the current generation platforms at the time, particularly the PlayStation 2, Xbox, and GameCube. Epic launched Unreal 3, its next and most successful and extensively used engine, in 2006. In terms of technology, it was a huge step forward. This was when Unreal Engine gained traction. However, Kismet was probably the most crucial feature given by Unreal Engine 3.

Kismet is a highly effective visual scripting tool. It works by having multiple nodes that may be linked to make a logical sequence, similar to a flowchart. The most excellent aspect about Kismet is that you don’t need any programming skills to use it.

Kismet allows you to create a complete game without writing a single line of code.

It is a handy tool for artists and designers since it allows them to create rapid prototypes or experiment with a specific feature without relying on programmers. We have now arrived in a more recent epoch. Epic introduced Unreal 4 in February 2012, and it was ultimately launched on March 19, 2014. It has been in development since 2003. This Engine was a significant improvement over the previous one. For one thing, it completely replaced UnrealScript with C++. If you wanted to change the engine to create your game in earlier versions of Unreal, you had to do it using UnrealScript, which entailed learning a new language.

However, if you want to alter the Engine, you may now do so using C++. This was a significant step forward for engine programmers since it allowed them to change and tweak everything they wanted using a language they already knew and loved. Not only that, but the engine’s source code is accessible for developers to download from the GitHub site. This implies that developers have complete control over the engine and may change almost everything, including the physics, graphics, and user interface (UI).

It also has a feature known as the Hot Reload. Normally, if you wish to make changes to a game’s code, you must first stop the game, make the necessary modification, and then restart it to see how it impacts the game. On the other hand, the hot reload option allows you to make adjustments without stopping or halting it. Any changes you make to the game’s code are immediately updated, and you can view the results in real time.

Unreal four also allows you to create games on various platforms, including Xbox One, PlayStation 4 (including Project Morpheus), Windows PC, Linux, Mac OS X, HTML 5, iOS, and Android. It also supports the Oculus Rift. Another significant modification implemented by Epic is the licensing mechanism geared toward smaller, independent developers. To be more explicit, to license Unreal Development Kit (UDK), the previous version of Unreal Engine, developers had to pay a $99 licensing fee and 25% of royalties collected after the firm had generated at least $50,000 in sales. However, in Unreal 4, the framework has been altered.

Unreal Engine has been free to use and download since 2015. There is no license cost, no membership price, nothing. You may download it, create a game on it, and publish it without paying a dime for the engine. After you generate more than $3,000 in income, you only pay 5% of the royalties.

The Marketplace is another fantastic element of Unreal 4. The Marketplace is an excellent location for purchasing and uploading assets. 3D Models, Materials, Animations, Sound Effects, Premade Games, and so on are examples of assets. This is also fantastic news for prospective developers who lack the necessary money and labor to create these assets. They may simply purchase the required components from the Marketplace and incorporate them into their game. Developers can also make money by uploading their work to the Marketplace.

Unreal Engine is a complete development suite for anyone working with real-time technology. It provides flexibility and power to artists across sectors to produce cutting-edge entertainment, captivating visualizations, and immersive virtual environments. Epic Games’ Unreal Engine is a prominent and extensively used gaming engine.

It is utilized in many current AAA games, including Epic’s battle royale shooter Fortnite and other popular titles like Psyonix’s “Rocket League.”

It enables creation on various platforms ranging from PC to consoles such as the PS4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch. Because of its ability to function across platforms, this is one of the reasons it is so popular.

More skilled programmers can create scripts that run in the game engine using the C++ language. More inexperienced developers may use its vital blueprints, which are effectively premade chunks of code that we can apply to our objects to build interactions. This method allows us to create rudimentary interaction in our VR scenarios, such as the ability to pick up or toss items. It also has sophisticated material and animation capabilities for artists, allowing us to create complex scenarios quickly. Setting up some of these features may appear overwhelming at first, but numerous examples are provided to modify the parameters until we achieve the desired result simply.

On top of all of these capabilities, there is a wealth of documentation to assist you in learning the system.

The fact that Unreal Engine is entirely free to use is a significant advantage. There is no upfront charge to utilize Unreal, whether you are a hobbyist developer or a AAA business. Instead, they make their money through a royalty arrangement that pays them 5% of all gaming revenues over $3,000 every quarter.

WHAT TO EXPECT?

Learning to utilize a game engine may be difficult; you don’t know where to start, and UE4 is no exception. However, after you’ve mastered it, you’ll immediately realize how powerful and intuitive it truly is. And what better way to learn how to utilize a game engine than to create a game with it? This book will teach you all you need to know to design games for Android devices using UE4 and create a fully working game in the process.

The rationale for this is simple: simply discussing and showing UE4’s capabilities one at a time is ineffective when learning how to create a game. However, explaining those characteristics by incorporating them into a game would be far more successful since you would have a more excellent grasp of how each element influences the game and each other. The game we’ll be making in this guide is called Bloques, and it’s a first-person puzzle game in which the player’s primary goal is to solve a series of riddles to proceed.

The riddles get increasingly intricate and challenging to complete as the player goes. The game’s scope will be four rooms, each having a riddle that the player must solve to proceed to the next area.

The reason for selecting a puzzle game is that puzzle games have more complex systems in terms of programming and level design. In the tutorial context, concepts like blueprint programming and level technique will be much better taught through a puzzler.

UE CHARACTERISTICS AND FREQUENT USAGE

Unreal Engine would not have survived as long as it has if it wasn’t continuously introducing new features to stay ahead of the competition. Its combination of artistic and development-focused tools provides us with total creative freedom.

For materials and rendering, it employs the widely used PBR process. When combined with dynamic or baked-in shadows and lighting, this results in some incredible photorealistic material that continues to run in real time. The Blueprints tool, which I described before, allows you to create basic scripts that communicate with one another. This is all done using a visual interface, so even if you’ve never programmed before, a few brief lessons will have you well on your way to creating a functional game. When Epic published “Unreal” (the game) in 1998, there were difficulties with its multiplayer features, which were still instead cutting edge at the time.

They spent over a year fixing this, and it finally became a new game called “Unreal Tournament” in 1999. This multiplayer architecture is now one of the key selling features. They made changes as recently as September 2017 that allow up to 100 distinct people to join and play together in a single game, implying that the possibilities are nearly infinite.

Unreal Engine has a decent physics engine that supports soft-body physics, particle effects, and more basic stuff like gravity. The framework is simple to use for creating items such as a swing that responds to being pushed. It’s all quite simple once you’ve mastered the UI.

You have an incredible amount of leeway here. Once you’ve imported your texture maps from another application, such as Substance Painter, you may utilize the hundreds of different material blueprints to endlessly customize the ultimate result to obtain precisely what you want. There are additional tools built in that make it much easier to design for virtual or augmented reality.

In recent years, the growth in popularity of VR has been unmistakable; thus, having access to an engine that can quickly help you develop content for these platforms, such as the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive, is always beneficial. Unreal Engine also has tools that allow you to design your landscape easily. You may use your mouse to paint in your materials and blend them to create grass, for example, progressively bleed into a concrete walkway.¹

Then, using meshes of trees and grass, you may paint in entire forests or patches of flowers. If you use the plant models included with Unreal Engine, you can create whole outdoor scenes in a matter of minutes, and they are fully optimized to run in your game. The content browser is an essential component of the UI. It allows you to rapidly explore your scene’s entire file hierarchy to discover different assets and drag them directly into the viewport.

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¹ https://conceptartempire.com/​what-is-unreal-engine/​, Concept Art

This enables several simplified procedures, which makes working with the engine a delight. The marketplace is the last aspect worth mentioning. This is a collection of assets created by Epic and other Unreal Engine developers. This marketplace allows you to download more art assets and entire dev...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• About the Editor
• Chapter 1 ◾ Introduction to Unreal Engine
• Chapter 2 ◾ Start of the Work with Unreal Engine
• Chapter 3 ◾ Using Blueprints
• Chapter 4 ◾ Blackboard and Behavior Tree with AI
• Chapter 5 ◾ Multiplayer Basics
• Appraisal
• Index