UDK and UnrealScript books? What do you recommend?
Hello!
I've been learning UDK and UScript very slowly over the last few months. While there are a lot of resources online, there's no guarantee I'll be able to access them (especially when I'm in the hospital with not-so-good internet). I'm wondering what books you'd recommend to use as both a learning tool and for reference for UDK and UScript. I've seen some mentioned in member's signatures as well. Any insight would be greatly appreciated. Thank you! ^_^
Oh I forgot to mention I already own the following books:
UDK Game Development by Alan Thorn
Unreal Game Development by Ashish Amresh & Alex Okita
I've been learning UDK and UScript very slowly over the last few months. While there are a lot of resources online, there's no guarantee I'll be able to access them (especially when I'm in the hospital with not-so-good internet). I'm wondering what books you'd recommend to use as both a learning tool and for reference for UDK and UScript. I've seen some mentioned in member's signatures as well. Any insight would be greatly appreciated. Thank you! ^_^
Oh I forgot to mention I already own the following books:
UDK Game Development by Alan Thorn
Unreal Game Development by Ashish Amresh & Alex Okita
Replies
If you're set on analog media though you might be better off to ask this directly in the unrealscript subsection of the Epic forums
I would recommend learning Java before C# if the end goal is learning UnrealScript, as UScript was largely based on Java. Either one is good though, because the hardest part for a new programmer (at least for me) is understanding the concept of object oriented programming, especially in games.
As for a learning tool specific to UDK, I really recommend a tool called UnCodeX. One of the biggest challenges of learning UnrealScript (besides understanding OOP) is learning about the existing parent classes, what functionality they already have, and how to use that to your advantage. UnCodeX organizes all of your .uc classes into a hierarchy tree in an easy to use interface, and it also lets you search through all of the separate classes. I always have it open when I'm programming UScript to search for function declarations and variables and stuff like that in the classes I'm extending from.
though it also depends on how deep into programing too since for programming for almost all games you really do need to have good skills with object orients programming practices.
One book that I have come across though (that looks pretty good to me) is:
http://davidvoyles.wordpress.com/2013/02/21/my-book-unrealscript-game-programming-cookbook-has-been-published/
you can look through the camera chapter and see what it's like.
I don't own this book, but if I were to buy one, I would look into getting this one.
Hope that helps
UScript is really it's own language, a bit distinct from anything else, but i f you know either of those other languages, it can't hurt.
UE3 is far from dead - think about how many AAA studios are using it right now. UE4 looks incredible, and the tools have been cleaned up big time, but I'd imagine it will be quite a while before they make a UDK version for indies like us.
It took nearly a decade for us to get UE3 (which is free!) but I'd imagine that they would charge for 4. Then again, you'd have to learn C++ for that. C++ is great if you want to build games, but it's far more complicated and tedious than C# or JavaScript, as those two languages handle memory allocation and garbage collection for you.
I can't give you the book text (the publisher won't allow it
-Dave
I bought this book and so far it is easy to follow and well structured. If you buy a digital copy stay away from the Google play version, its fucked. I wish I would have paid a little extra and got the pdf or a book.
I ask, because I've never seen it before. I assumed it was identical to the .PDF or Kindle version. I'll speak to the publisher about this.
Shoot me an e-mail at D N Voyles at G Mail dot com and I'll be able to get you squared away with another copy.
For example. Flowing text might read:
Begin Object
Name=SVehicleMesh
and that will cause compilation errors where as the scan pages mode might read
Begin Object Name=SVehicleMe
It's not really an issue now that I found the link to download the PDF though.
Like I said before, I've never seen how Google handles the text (or if they use their own proprietary format for it), but now I'm aware.
Hope you're enjoying it. Let me know if I can be of any help.
http://www.packtpub.com/mastering-ud...velopment/book
it has a bunch for cool projects - covering some kismet a little bit of UScript and HUD/GUI interface.
I agree, Rachel's book is spectacular. I was a technical reviewer for that one, and it's incredible for learning UnrealScript. Mine on the other hand, is basically the second step in this process, and allows you to add more gameplay elements once you've completed her book.