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Unreal Engine Virtual Reality Quick Start Guide
Unreal Engine Virtual Reality Quick Start Guide

Unreal Engine Virtual Reality Quick Start Guide: Design and Develop immersive virtual reality experiences with Unreal Engine 4

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Unreal Engine Virtual Reality Quick Start Guide

Locomotion, Design, and Starting Our Project

With our knowledge of the current state of VR technology and game development, we may now begin working on our first title. As we mentioned in Chapter 1, Introducing VR Technology in Unreal Engine 4, Server 17 puts the player in the role of an intrepid hacker in search of the truth in a corrupt dystopian future. Everyone has secrets, and some will pay big sums of money for the secrets of others. In design terms, this means we're going to create a puzzle game in which the player solves puzzles and uses different tools to crack open different puzzle boxes that represent computer servers on a network. Through the building of this simple game, we'll address all of the steps of VR game design with the goal of arming you with the tools and know-how to begin work on your own title. The first step in the process is design and, for...

The Human-Centered Design process

The Human-Centered Design (HCD) process is a flexible set of design principles that allows for the design of pretty much anything, from shoes, to cars, to software. Central to HCD is the principle that the designer is thinking of the end user at every step of the way. Would this decision make the product better for my user? Would making the color customizable delight my user and make them more likely to use my product? By asking these questions and thinking about your user, you're able to create a design that's more likely to be a success with its target audience.

The HCD process has the following steps:

The HCD process
  1. Discovery: In this, we research the problem we're presented with and the target demographic interested in our solution. We search to see whether this is something that someone has attempted to solve before and...

Choosing our locomotion method

One of our goals as VR designers is to leverage the unique advantages of this new technology to create novel experiences that players want to play again and again. The technology is fantastic for making the player feel as if they're interacting in a living and breathing fantasy world they would otherwise not be able to inhabit. Using the hand controllers, our players can touch our world and interact with it in a very visceral sense. However, locomotion systems still haven't caught up to that level of immersion yet.

Player locomotion in VR is still in its infancy, and, as such, there's no one method that has been found to work well. Many methods have been tried. There are vehicle simulation games, where the player remains seated in a cockpit. There are action/adventure games where players run through a landscape using artificial methods...

Setting up new game files in UE4

UE4 is a versatile collection of tools that helps you to create the game of your dreams. To get you started down that path, Epic Games provides a collection of starter projects to jump-start your games by setting up some of the most important features for you. This often includes player character, sample weapons, and other necessary files. In this book, we'll begin creating files within the Virtual Reality Starter project so that we can make use of some of the basic art assets that this project provides. Beyond that, I'll show you how to create the blueprints we'll need from scratch.

Every game or software project needs to stay organized and we use naming conventions to do just that. A naming convention is a naming scheme and folder structure that ensures that every filename is standardized so that anyone in a particular game team...

Project setup

Before we can start creating our custom project files, we need to let Unreal create our project base and begin to lay out our folder structure. This will keep our files organized as we build Server 17.

Start by opening Unreal Engine 4.20.2 and starting a new project:

The screen you're greeted with when you first open UE4

Welcome to the new project window. From here, we'll create our project based on the UR template:

  1. Choose the new project tab from the top of the screen.
  2. Select the Blueprint section.
  3. Choose the Virtual Reality template near the bottom of the list.

  1. Change the middle project setting to Scalable 3D or 2D.
  2. Ensure the project folder is in a space you can find easily. Change the name to VRQuickStart.

Smack that Create Project button, and let's continue! Now take a look at the interface:

Much of the interaction with the game engine...

Summary

At the beginning of this chapter, we learned one of the best ways to design with a particular type of user in mind: the HCD process. When using HCD, we always want to keep our player in mind as we make each design decision, ensuring that the game we create meets every one of our player's expectations and is a delight to play. This is our goal for Server 17. With a few of our design decisions in place, we then created our project and began to customize our files by creating our custom GameMode, GameState, and PlayerPawn files.

In the next chapter, we'll further flesh out the design for Server 17 and look at the different types of gameplay that are popular in today's current VR market. Specifically, we'll focus on gameplay that takes advantage of the unique input methods and immersive qualities that VR has to offer and how we can apply those to our own...

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Key benefits

  • Build VR games from scratch with the power of Unreal Engine 4
  • Learn User Experience design practices to take your VR game to the next level
  • Understand the best practices to creating art for games on HTC Vive, Oculus Rift, and PSVR

Description

With the ability to put players directly in the game, virtual reality gives users the chance to experience digital worlds directly. Nevertheless, many designers are unsure where to start when working with this amazing technology. With this book, you will learn user experience design processes and create immersive gameplay experiences designed for entertainment and player comfort. Using the power of Unreal Engine 4’s Blueprint visual scripting language, you will build player interaction and locomotion systems from scratch and use these flexible systems to create a sample game, as well as develop functional 2D and 3D user interfaces for players to interact with. And also learn the best practices for creating game art for virtual reality. Finally, you will learn how to test your application with your target audience and finalize your game for distribution. By the end of this book, you will have the knowledge to be able to make the leap from traditional game development to creating immersive virtual reality experiences using Unreal Engine 4.

Who is this book for?

The audience for this book is intermediate or advanced users of Unreal Engine 4 but who have not begun working with VR technology. These users are familiar with the game engine and have an interest in VR technology. They are just beginning to explore the VR features that the game engine has to offer.

What you will learn

  • Understand how to get started with VR development in Unreal Engine 4
  • Design and create interaction and locomotion systems from scratch
  • Plan and program a sample game for VR
  • Understand how VR affects user experience and user interfaces
  • Discuss what is needed to create optimized art for VR
  • Test your game with users and prepare for distribution

Product Details

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Publication date, Length, Edition, Language, ISBN-13
Publication date : Feb 27, 2019
Length: 178 pages
Edition : 1st
Language : English
ISBN-13 : 9781789615043
Vendor :
Epic Games
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Product Details

Publication date : Feb 27, 2019
Length: 178 pages
Edition : 1st
Language : English
ISBN-13 : 9781789615043
Vendor :
Epic Games
Languages :
Tools :

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Frequently bought together


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Table of Contents

7 Chapters
Introducing VR Technology in Unreal Engine 4 Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Locomotion, Design, and Starting Our Project Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Exploring Riveting Gameplay in Virtual Reality Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
User Interface and User Experience inside VR Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Creating Optimized Game Art for VR in UE4 Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Finalizing Our VR Game and Next Steps Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Other Books You May Enjoy Chevron down icon Chevron up icon

Customer reviews

Rating distribution
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Half star icon Empty star icon 3.7
(3 Ratings)
5 star 66.7%
4 star 0%
3 star 0%
2 star 0%
1 star 33.3%
Nick Pattison Jun 03, 2019
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon 5
A wonderful introduction to VR concepts that can actually back-up the theory with tons of technical knowledge as well.This book is chock full of step-by-step tutorials for producing VR games in Unreal Engine 4. All of the examples are scripted with UE4's Blueprint system. Each chapter focuses on a different aspect of game development: player movement, gameplay design, user interface, optimizing art, and more - and each chapter goes into detail about VR-specific considerations.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
Amy Badovinac Aug 23, 2019
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon 5
The author provides the user with all of the necessary tools to design and create a VR white box level using UE. With the user friendly directions and example photos the process is designed to provide the user with a positive rewarding experience. I did find that having basic UE experience was beneficial, I was able to use another book that this author wrote to improve my UE knowledge.This book is also being used with my students to help create VR games.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
Michael Hickman Mar 17, 2020
Full star icon Empty star icon Empty star icon Empty star icon Empty star icon 1
This book has skipped over major steps when it comes down to learning how VR actually works and how to set it up.A major problem that I have that hit me like a stack of bricks was at the end of chapter 2. After I did everything word for word the whole thing failed to work. And then it slowly started to click. This whole book was written for a much older Unreal Engine. Making this book a bit more obsolete.To make matters much worse I understand that you need to sell books but maybe having some sort of video series to go along with this so I can see you enter in these equations and test them would make matters a lot easier for following alone but that's not really the case.The final nail in the coffin that made me want to get a refund was the fact that this book is made in black and white. Just some that may not mean much but in unreal certain colors have meaning especially when you're setting up a Boolean or a vector. Not being able to see the colors makes matters a lot more difficult coupled with the fact that your images are blurry and hard to read
Amazon Verified review Amazon
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