Welcome to Game Development Patterns with Unreal Engine 5. In this book, we will be exploring design patterns, a series of tools and practices through which we can learn to write faster and easier to work with code. We will also be exploring a range of different patterns and learn to apply them to project development in Unreal Engine 5.
By the end of this book, you will be able to design systems with the perfect C++/Blueprint blend for maintainable and scalable systems.
This book is targeted at beginner and intermediate game developers who are working with Unreal Engine and would like to improve their C++ coding practices. This book will help you produce clean, reusable code using design patterns. We will be covering some introductory tasks to show the key fundamentals of using Unreal Engine 5 and some of its tools; however, we will not be teaching you Unreal Engine from scratch.
You would benefit from having some experience with Unreal Engine 4 or 5, but you do not need a deep working understanding of the toolset.
Chapter 1, Understanding Unreal Engine 5 and Its Layers, explores Unreal Engine 5 and offers a brief history. We will look at the “fuzzy” layer that bridges the gap between C++ and Blueprint and learn how to translate Blueprint back to C++.
Chapter 2, “Hello Patterns”, focuses on the principles that underpin all good code. We will explore design patterns as well as some common Blueprint mistakes, looking at how we can fix them.
Chapter 3, UE5 Patterns in Action – Double Buffer, Flyweight, and Spatial Partitioning, discovers how Unreal Engine 5 employs these three design patterns as we explore a range of tools within the engine.
Chapter 4, Premade Patterns in UE5 – Component, Behavior Tree, and Update Method, utilizes the pre-built implementations of these three design patterns and explores the tools within the engine to expand simple systems.
Chapter 5, Forgetting Tick, develops your understanding of Tick, looks at why its usage can cause issues, and explores two approaches to building systems without it.
Chapter 6, Clean Communication – Interface and Event Observer Patterns, explores design patterns that allow us to improve how different actors communicate with each other, producing more efficient solutions to communication.
Chapter 7, A Perfectly Decoupled System, discovers how we can use UML as a methodology for planning class hierarchies, to decouple the reference train.
Chapter 8, Building Design Patterns – Singleton, Command, and State, examines these three design patterns to understand their usage, limitations, and suitability across a range of game genres.
Chapter 9, Structuring Code with Behavioral Patterns – Template, Subclass Sandbox, and Type Object, explores the three most common structural patterns while building weapons classes in C++, which we will expand with Blueprint, exploring how the two languages can be used together.
Chapter 10, Optimization through Patterns, dives into the key elements of optimization before releasing games by exploring the Dirty Flag, Data Locality, and Object Pooling design patterns.
You will need a version of Unreal Engine 5 installed on your computer. All code examples have been tested on Unreal Engine 5.0.3, and they should work with later versions of the Engine. However, this may not be the case if Epic Games makes any major changes to the core engine.
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Software/hardware covered in the book |
Operating system requirements |
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Unreal Engine 5 |
Windows |
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Visual Studio or JetBrains Rider |
Windows |
If you are using the digital version of this book, we advise you to type the code yourself or access the code from the book’s GitHub repository (a link is available in the next section). Doing so will help you avoid any potential errors related to the copying and pasting of code.
We’ve included commented versions of the code found within the book as part of the GitHub repository, as opposed to including comments in the code samples, making the code easier to read and follow within the book.
You can download the example code files for this book from GitHub at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Game-Development-Patterns-with-Unreal-Engine-5. If there’s an update to the code, it will be updated in the GitHub repository.
We also have other code bundles from our rich catalog of books and videos available at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/. Check them out!
There are a number of text conventions used throughout this book.
Code in text: Indicates code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles. Here is an example: “This also applies to the ScoreWidget class we will use to display the player’s score, which has been provided as part of the Chapter Resources folder.”
A block of code is set as follows:
class APlayerController_CH7 : public APlayerController
{
public:
void Init();
protected:
UPROPERTY(EditAnywhere)
TSubclassOf<APawn> _PlayerPawn;
UPROPERTY(VisibleAnywhere, BlueprintReadOnly)
TObjectPtr<ACharacter_CH7> _Character;
} Bold: Indicates a new term, an important word, or words that you see on screen. For instance, words in menus or dialog boxes appear in bold. Here is an example: “Enable the checkbox next to Editor symbols for debugging and click Apply.”
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