Game Development Patterns with Unreal Engine 5

Improve your game's code to make it more readable, reusable, modular and optimized following design patterns, and enhance your overall use of C++ with Unreal Engine

Key Features

• Explore the fascinating world of design patterns and their application to game development in Unreal Engine 5
• Learn how to translate code from Blueprint to C++ to produce performant solutions for your game's development
• Discover best practices for clean code and apply them to Unreal Engine 5 and C++

Book Description

Design patterns are a series of tools and practices by which we can learn to write faster and easier to work with code. With this book, you will explore a range of design patterns and how they can be applied to projects developed in Unreal Engine 5.

The book begins by exploring the key principles which underpin code and develop an understanding of the concepts, challenges, and key benefits of using patterns in your code. We'll then move on to identifying patterns which are woven into the core of Unreal Engine 5 such as Double Buffer, Flyweight and Spatial Partitioning, then explore some of the existing tool sets which embody patterns in their design and usage including Component, Behaviour Tree and Update. You'll then start to develop a series of gameplay use cases through C++ to implement a range of design patterns including Interface and Event based Observers to build a decoupled communications hierarchy and explore Singleton, Command and State, as well as Behavioural Patterns, Template, Subclass Sandbox and Type Object. The final section of the book will introduce the use of design patterns for optimization including Dirty Flag, Data Locality and Object Pooling.

By the end of this book, you will be able to design systems with the perfect C++/Blueprint blend for maintainable and scalable systems.

What you will learn

• Understand what a design pattern is and why it is useful
• Understand the layers within UE5 and how they work together
• Develop an understanding of the relationship between C++ code and Blueprint in Unreal Engine 5
• Translate code from Blueprint to C++ in Unreal Engine 5
• Understand 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 simplify common problems
• Apply best practice principles for clean code

Who This Book Is For

If you are a beginner or intermediate game developer who is working with Unreal Engine and would like to improve your C++ coding practices, this book will help you produce clean, reusable code using design patterns. The book will cover introductory tasks to show the key fundamentals of using Unreal Engine 5 however learning Unreal Engine from scratch is not the purpose of this book. You would benefit from having some experience of the Unreal Engine but deep working knowledge is not required as activities will introduce the tools and features when needed.

Table of Contents

1. Understanding Unreal Engine 5 and it's layers
2. "Hello Patterns"
3. UE5 patterns in action: Double Buffer, Flyweight and Spatial Partitioning
4. Premade Patterns in UE5: Component, Behaviour Tree and Update Method
5. Forgetting Tick
6. Clean communication: Interface and Event Observer patterns
7. A perfectly decoupled system
8. Building Design Patterns: Singleton, Command and State
9. Structuring Code with Behavioural Patterns: Template, Subclass Sandbox and Type Object
10. Optimisation Through Patterns