Game Development Patterns with Unreal Engine 5 : Build Maintainable and Scalable Systems with C++ and Blueprint / Stuart Butler, Tom Oliver, and Christopher J. Headleand.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Butler, Stuart, author.

Oliver, Tom, author.

Contributor:

Headleand, Christopher J., Forward author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Video games--Development.

Video games.

Three-dimensional display systems.

Video games--Programming.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (254 pages)

Edition:

First edition.

Distribution:

London : Bloomsbury Publishing (UK), 2025.

Place of Publication:

Birmingham : Packt Publishing, 2024.

System Details:

text file HTML

Biography/History:

Butler Stuart: Stuart Butler is an Unreal Engine Expert with over 13 years of experience in teaching Games Development in Higher Education. Stuart has published projects in a multitude of disciplines including Technical Design, Art, and Animation. Stuart is the Course Director for Games Technology at Staffordshire University, responsible for the programming team within the UK's largest Games Education Department. Stuart is also an Unreal Authorised Instructor and Educational Content Creator who works with Epic Games on developing learning materials for Unreal Engine 5. Stuart holds a BSc (Hons) in Computer Games Design and a PgC in Higher and Professional Education. Oliver Tom: Tom Oliver is a game programmer with over 10 years of experience in working with game engines both commercially and in an educational capacity. He has used Unreal Engine for contract work both in and out of the games industry, creating systems for games to mixed reality training simulations. Tom is the Course Leader for the BSc (Hons) Computer Games Design and Programming program at Staffordshire University, responsible for maintaining the award winning structure and teaching of the course in the UK's largest Games Education Department. Tom holds a BSc (Hons) in Computer Games Design and Programming and a PGc in Higher and Professional Education. Tom specialises in researching gameplay systems driven through mathematical phenomena.

Summary:

Improve your game's code to make it more readable, reusable, modular, and optimized, guided by design patterns to enhance your overall use of C++ with Unreal Engine Key Features Explore the fascinating world of design patterns and their applications in Unreal Engine 5 game development Learn how to translate code from Blueprint to C++ to implement performant solutions in game development Discover best practices for writing clean code and applying it to Unreal Engine 5 and C++ Purchase of the print or Kindle book includes a free PDF eBook Book Description Design patterns serve as a toolkit of techniques and practices that enable you to write code that's not only faster, but also more manageable. With this book, you'll explore a range of design patterns and learn how to apply them to projects developed in Unreal Engine 5. You'll begin by delving into the foundational principles of coding and develop a solid understanding of the concepts, challenges, and benefits of using patterns in your code. As you progress, you'll identify patterns that are woven into the core of Unreal Engine 5 such as Double Buffer, Flyweight, and Spatial Partitioning, followed by some of the existing tool sets that embody patterns in their design and usage including Component, Behavior Tree, and Update. In the next section of the book, you'll start developing a series of gameplay use cases in C++ to implement a variety of design patterns such as Interface and Event-based Observers to build a decoupled communications hierarchy. You'll also work with Singleton, Command, and State, along with Behavioral Patterns, Template, Subclass Sandbox, and Type Object. The final section focuses on using design patterns for optimization, covering Dirty Flag, Data Locality, and Object Pooling. By the end of this book, you'll be proficient in designing systems with the perfect C++/Blueprint blend for maintainable and scalable systems. What you will learn Grasp the essence of design patterns and their inherent utility Understand the layers within UE 5 and how they work together Identify the relationship between C++ code and Blueprint in Unreal Engine 5 Recognize the design patterns found within existing Unreal Engine 5 functions Explore design patterns to understand their purpose and application within Unreal Engine 5 Creatively apply design patterns to existing code to overcome common challenges Who this book is for If you are a beginner or intermediate game developer working with Unreal Engine and looking to improve your C++ coding practices, this book is tailor-made to help you produce clean, reusable code through the application of design patterns. While this book will cover introductory tasks to show the fundamentals of Unreal Engine 5, its primary purpose is not to teach Unreal Engine from scratch. Prior experience with Unreal Engine will be beneficial, but don't fret if your knowledge isn't in-depth; the book will introduce tools and features as needed.

Contents:

Cover

Title page

Copyright and credits

Dedication

Foreword

Contributors

Table of Contents

Preface

Part 1: Learning from Unreal Engine 5

Chapter 1: Understanding Unreal Engine 5 and its Layers

Technical requirements

Introducing Unreal Engine 5

Installing Unreal Engine 5 and preparing your development environment

The "Fuzzy" layer - bridging the gap from C++ to Blueprint

Property Specifiers

Function Specifiers

Useful inheritance

Translating back from Blueprint to C++

Worked example

Summary

Questions

Answers

Chapter 2: "Hello Patterns"

S.O.L.I.D. principles

Single responsibility

Open-closed

Liskov substitution

Interface segregation

Dependency inversion

Exploring solutions to common problems

The moving box problem

The rotating box problem

The cascading cast chain problem

The trade-off

Chapter 3: UE5 Patterns in Action - Double Buffer, Flyweight, and Spatial Partitioning

Double buffer

Flyweight

Spatial partitioning

Introducing World Partition

Understanding when objects are loaded

Ensuring actors are loaded when required

Enabling World Partition on an existing level

Chapter 4: Premade Patterns in UE5 - Component, Update Method, and Behavior Tree

Understanding and creating components

Applying the update method for prototyping gameplay

Working with behavior trees

Creating the AI controller

Creating the Blackboard asset

Building the behavior tree

Part 2: Anonymous Modular Design

Chapter 5: Forgetting Tick

Before we begin

A world that ticks

A clock that stops

Event driven systems

Summary.

Chapter 6: Clean Communication - Interface and Event Observer Patterns

Interfacing communication across classes in UE5

Blueprint interfaces

Interface events versus functions

Interfaces in C++

Building an example interface communication

Implementing event delegate communication across UE5

Event delegates in Blueprint

Event delegates in C++

Building a useful delegate tool

Chapter 7: A Perfectly Decoupled System

Using UML to plan a sample hierarchy

What are the types of class relations?

What is a sequence diagram?

Decoupling the reference train

Modularity and decoupling

Establishing infrastructure

Implementing decoupled design in an example

Benefits of decoupling

Part 3: Building on Top of Unreal

Chapter 8: Building Design Patterns - Singleton, Command, and State

Implementing a Singleton pattern - understanding why it's a Pandora's box

Implementing the Command pattern for different use cases

Command pattern for undo functionality in Blueprint Utilities

Command pattern for gameplay in C++

Creating the many levels of a state machine

Exploring animation state machines

Enum/switch implementation

Static versus instanced states

Concurrent state machines

Hierarchical state machines

Pushdown automata

Chapter 9: Structuring Code with Behavioral Patterns -Template, Subclass Sandbox, and Type Object

Exploring the template pattern

Building the template (parent class)

Creating child classes

Template pistol

Template shotgun

Understanding subclass sandbox

Building the sandbox (parent class)

Sandbox pistol

Sandbox shotgun

Type object pattern

Variants

Data Tables.

Data Assets

Chapter 10: Optimization through Patterns

Using dirty flags to reduce unnecessary processing

Application of dirty flags

How data locality affects code efficiency

Hot/cold splitting

Contiguous arrays

Object pooling our resources to save time later

Implementing object pooling

Making an object pool

Index

Other Books You May Enjoy.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9781803246185

1803246189

OCLC:

1414110768