Unreal Books

Mastering Unreal Technology: The Art of Level Design

Jason Busby, Zak Parrish, Joel VanEenwyk

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 29 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

A Very Helpful Book 4 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

I am a Game Art Development student, and this book has been indespensible in aiding in my understanding of the Unreal Editor. Without this book, I'm sure that it would've taken me waaaaayyy longer to get things done than the limited time that I had. Even though the book is more expensive than the game itself, it is a must have for any aspiring modder or game creator.

Editorial Review:

Let your imagination run wild in the world of Unreal Technology. Mastering Unreal Technology: The Art of Level Design knows no boundaries as it shows you how to build custom mods, maps and levels with the Unreal engine. Its tutorial format will give you immediate results through the tips and demos provided from the industry's top level designers. Learn to create your own characters, weapons and gaming environments, as well as how to go beyond the Unreal environment and export custom elements from 3D modeling applications. A CD that contains the Unreal Engine, graphics, examples and code is also included, giving you everything you need to create custom levels in Unreal or build your own games and virtual environments. Mastering Unreal Technology will help put you on the cutting-edge of gaming technology.

The Game Artist's Guide to Maya

Michael McKinley

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 9 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

The Definitive Resource for Up-and-Coming 3D Game Artists

Alias' award-winning Maya 3D animation and effects software continues to lead the industry in technological innovation and is being adopted by more and more console and computer game developers. The Game Artist's Guide to Maya is an official introduction to creating 3D game art and animations with Maya, brought to you by Maya Press, a publishing partnership between Alias and Sybex. Written by a production artist at a prominent game company, this detailed book focuses on the skills real game artists use daily to create stunning characters and environments.

By following the discussions and tutorials, you'll bring a concept through the entire game art development pipeline, learning everything from modeling, texturing, rigging, and animation, to special effects. You'll also glean insights from industry professionals and see how Maya has been used in popular games. If you're a 3D game artist, or looking to become one, this book will help you master the skills and techniques you'll need to excel in the competitive games industry.

Inside, you'll learn how to:

• Create a game model using a concept image as your guide
• Model with predetermined real-time polycount limitations in mind
• View martial arts videos on the book's CD to animate your character more realistically
• Prepare a model for texturing with UV mapping and layout techniques
• Create different kinds of textures
• Master the rigging process, from setting up a skeleton to preparing blend shapes
• Practice techniques for creating animation clips to work with in the Trax Editor
• Use particle effects, such as sprites and animated geometry, to add pizzazz to your model

Unreal Tournament 3 Signature Series Guide

BradyGames

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 2 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Only for the Hardcore 3 out of 5 stars.
4 of 4 people found this review helpful.

This is a beautiful guide that is pretty well-laid out. However, it's got more extraneous info than anyone could really use given the nature of the game, which is "in your face" action. If you want to know all of the damage points your weapons can inflict or how much damage your armor can withstand, this is the guide for you. Information about the single player campaign is scant. I liked the descriptions of each weapon, but you can probably get enough info from the instruction guide that comes with the game. It's not really what I was expecting, which I guess was more walk-through help. However, since the single player campaign is almost non-existent in the game, it stands to reason that this guide wouldn't have much info on it. Again, the pictures are great and it has voluminous amounts of info about damage points. It's just that I probably will never use it since the game is all about online multiplayer, and you really don't need a guide for simple balls to wall action.

Editorial Review:

The Unreal Tournament guide book contains 272 fully colored pages.In-Depth Strategy for all 38 MapsThis guide was written by an expert with the help and support of the entire Epic Games team. Its not the fluffy coverage youre used to from other guides.Detailed Dissection of every WeaponOur Arsenal has an incredible level of detail on how best to use the weapon, how it rates against other weapons, which maps allow it to show its best qualities, and even some tricks that will improve your game. Nobody should overlook this content!Exhaustive Vehicle CoverageDiscover the most miniscule statistics and learn how best to use everything to your advantage. Find out how a Scorpion stands up to all the others--even the monstrous Leviathan!Complete Single Player CampaignThis isnt a typical A to B to End storyline. There are multiple paths, choices to be made, alliances to break, and different unlockables to discover. Our flowcharts examine the entire storyline and illustrate every possible path!

Mastering Unreal 3 Technology: A Beginner's Guide to Level Design in Unreal Engine 3

Jason Busby, Zak Parrish

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Editorial Review:

Unreal Engine 3 is the gaming platform for today's hottest games, period. It is the primary development platform for the Xbox 360, the PlayStation 3, and a massive force in the PC gaming world. Unreal Engine 3 is the technology that works behind the scenes to actually put the video game on the screen. It handles all of the visuals, sounds, and takes in everything the user does (such as push buttons or move a mouse) in order to deliver the final gaming experience to the player. It is the core of the actual game, without which the game could not exist. The creators of Unreal, Epic Games, have extended their full cooperation in the writing of the book. The authors are widely known in the industry, through the previous edition and through the specialized training mods they supplied as part of the hit game Unreal Tournament 2004. Starting from the very basics, this book walks you through the entire process of level design, covering Unreal's level editing application, UnrealEd, and many key topics you'll need to create your own gaming environments. This book will bring you into the world of game development and modding with thorough and easy-to-understand explanations, in-depth tutorials, and all the information you need to start creating your own Unreal environments.

Advanced Level Design with Unreal Technology: Using Unreal Engine 3

Jason Busby, Zak Parrish

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Editorial Review:

This book will enable game developers and modders to take their abilities to the next level, showing how to create more in-depth and interactive levels. It covers the creation of advanced materials, showing the true power of UnrealEd's Material Editor, along with how to employ the use of volumes, which allow you to control and alter the physics and effects of certain areas of your level. Also discussed is the creation and use of physically interactive objects, allowing your levels to come to life with objects that are affected by gravity, collisions, and player influence, after which there is a thorough discussion of Unreal Engine 3's particle effects system, enabling you to create such effects as fire, smoke, sparks, and much more! From there this book moves into much more advanced and technical features of the engine, including the creation of your own custom user interfaces, how to work with your own sound effects, and how to produce your own post processing effects, enabling you to create a variety of real time camera based effects such as depth of field, motion blur, color adjustment, and more. This book also includes complete coverage of UnrealEd's animation system, as well as an introduction to how you can create your own in-game cinematics - also known as Machnima - allowing you to become a virtual film director!

Unreal : Prima's Official Strategy Guide

Joe Grant Bell

List Price: $19.99 By: Prima Games Amazon Marketplace: 14 new & used starting at $1.98

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

In case you haven't heard, Epic Megagames' Unreal finally shipped after four years in development--and the wait was well worth it. Thanks to topnotch-level design, an excellent single-player game, and a breathtaking 3-D graphics engine, Unreal has captured the hearts and minds of action gamers everywhere. Part of Unreal's charm lies in its extremely challenging gameplay, which can become a bit more manageable with the help of Prima's guide to the game. This book starts off with a thorough discussion of the weaponry available to you, providing statistics on the power of each gun's primary and secondary fire options, as well as the speed of the projectiles. Numerous tips, including the ASMD Core "double shot" technique, can help you get the most out of your gunnery. You'll need all the help you can get, because as you'll see in the book's next section, the enemies in Unreal are as tough as they come. Each creature is described in detail, including the many variations on each basic monster. Important statistics such as hit points and special attacks are listed, as is the damage that each creature is capable of inflicting. The next section provides fairly complete walk-throughs of each single-player level in the game. There are no maps, but the text and the screen shots provide a comprehensive description of each map. Finally, the guide explains the basic tactics you'll need to survive online play in Unreal's multiplayer mode. Unfortunately, no book can correct the game's poor Internet performance issues, but when Epic straightens all that out, the multiplayer tips in this book will prove very useful. If you're looking to get the most out of Unreal, the "Next Big Thing" in action gaming, this book (and a really fast PC) can make it happen. --Michael Ryan

Postmortems from Game Developer: Insights from the Developers of Unreal Tournament, Black and White, Age of Empires, and Other Top-Selling Games

Austin Grossman

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 3 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Experience, distilled, in a bottle. 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

Love this book. Each postmortem is full of advice about designing, producing, and shipping a video game - advice from the developers themselves - allowing YOU to learn from THEIR mistakes. Techincal gaffes, hiring snafus, political missteps, project management mistakes; anything that can go wrong in a software project HAS gone wrong in one of these stories.

When you get to the end of this book, you'll feel like a battle-hardened veteran that can take anything a project throws at you; and most of minefields mapped out are surpisingly appicable to ALL software development, not just video games.

Beware: this book may have you rummaging through discount bins to find the games mentioned- good or bad, you feel affection for a game once you've shared the trials and tribs of the creators.

Editorial Review:

The popular Postmortem column in Game Developer magazine features firsthand accounts of how some of the most important and successful games of recent years have been made. This book offers the opportunity to harvest this expertise with one volume. The editor has organized the articles by theme and added previously unpublished analysis to reveal successful management techniques. Readers learn how superstars of the game industry like Peter Molyneux and Warren Spector have dealt with the development challenges such as managing complexity, software and game design issues, schedule challenges, and changing staff needs.

Postmortems from Game Developer enhances your project management skills by showcasing projects from start to finish with candid, thorough, and specific accounts of the good and bad decisions made along the way.

Unreal Tournament Game Programming for Teens

John P Flynt, Brandon Booth

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 3.0 of 5

A good start for the complete novice 3 out of 5 stars.
7 of 7 people found this review helpful.

This must have been a tough book to write. The authors chose a daunting subject--the Unreal scripting language--and attempted to present it to an audience unprepared for its complexities. That isn't to say that the "teens" in the title can't be capable and intelligent or that there aren't many talented programmmers among their ranks. It's the book's premise, however, that it will teach the rank amateur to write Unreal script, which turns out to both be the book's strength and its weakness. On the one hand, it starts by assuming no previous experience with the Unreal engine or programming and begins by building a strong foundation of good programming practice. On the other hand, it means that this slim volume (it's not quite 300 pages long) tries to do a whole lot of things at once.

The book starts with a whirlwind introduction to programming, the Unreal Editor, and even the architecture of the game itself. It shows how to set up the game and editor for scripting, and gives a quick tour of some features of the editor that the new scriptor will want to know. It then gets the reader scripting with the creation of a new type of trigger derived from an existing one in-game, a simple "Hello world" that's a cool little in-game start. Next, it gets into making new classes and instancing them in the triggers, using a script to check the state of an in-game character (i.e. a pawn), and then doing some basic programming like using conditionals, casting, and so on.

The problem is, it never really gets at the things that many new programmers to Unreal Script probably want to do. Since it covers so many of the basics, it doesn't get much past the point of simple triggers that spur simple events in the game, like showing a short text message on-screen, and it isn't until the final two chapters that the user starts writing scripts that actually interact with visual and audio elements of the game.

Now it's true that the author goes into some depth on scripting topics and offers plenty of variety and complexity about the triggers and how they can affect what goes on in the game. You'll learn how to derive new classes from old and how to use classes together to make clearer code and accomplish more complex tasks. You'll also learn programming essentials like conditionals, loops, arrays and structs. A clever programmer will be able to take this experience, go to a place like the Unreal Developers' Network, and come up with plenty of exciting scripts. It would have been nice, though, to see some of this stuff in the book. If you compare this to Shawn Holmes's book _Focus on Mod Programming in Quake III Arena_, you'll see what I mean. Holmes starts out by throwing the reader right into the middle of the action by tweaking a weapon in a way that teaches basic concepts while also showing the user how to do things he/she might really want to do in a mod. It's a much steeper slope to start out on, but it's a rewarding one.

The CD-ROM that comes with the book includes the code examples, simple Unreal maps to use them in, and
for some reason, one appendix of the book in .pdf format. There seem to be a few more code examples that expand on what's in the book, but not much at all.

So to sum up, this book gives new and inexperienced programmers a solid foundation in UnrealScript. The projects really feel like the kind of stuff you'd do in a beginning Computer Science class. But it's then up to the individual to take the next step and go to other sources for more information on how to make his or her own flashy UT2k4 mods. If you're really new to programming, this is book is likely a good choice. It will get you started and help you understand the tutorials you'll later read on-line. If you're a more experienced programmer and terms like "composition," "data types" and "member variables" are old hat to you, you'll probably do better going directly to the UDN or even working with the 3DBuzz VMTs. They'll jump you right into Unreal scripting without so much of the basic programming review.

Be sure to check the publisher's site (Thompson Course Technology) for a complete table of contents.

Editorial Review:

Unreal Tournament Game Programming for Teens provides you with a structured but entertaining way to learn how to develop your own simple computer games using Unreal Tournament. It addresses the fundamentals of computer programming by allowing you to work with UnrealScript and the Unreal Level Editor. You’ll begin with programming basics and will then quickly progress to creating elementary events and games within the modification framework provided by Unreal Tournament. This book does not involve actual game play with Unreal Tournament, but rather focuses on how to derive classes from the classes in the Unreal Tournament class hierarchy, how to use features of the Unreal Level Editor, and how to work with the syntax of UnrealScript. Using the skills you develop as you work through the book, you can begin exploring how to program a number of events characteristic of Unreal Tournament.

Unreal Championship? 2: The Liandri Conflict Official Strategy Guide (Bradygames Take Your Games Further)

Greg Kramer

Amazon Price: $11.24 List Price: $14.99 Usually ships in 7 to 12 days By: BRADY GAMES Amazon Marketplace: 22 new & used starting at $0.01

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Editorial Review:

BradyGames' Unreal Championship 2: The Liandri Conflict Official Strategy Guide includes the following:

• Comprehensive Arena Analysis: We provide a complete breakdown for all 46 arenas—be the first to find bases, ammo, goals, pick-ups, and prime sniper locations!
• Detailed Character Coverage: Learn all the Races, Character Archetypes, Combatant Personalities, and Abilities—exploit your character’s attributes while turning your opponents’ against them!
• Complete Story Mode Walkthrough: We lead you up the Ascension Rites, Tournament, and Challenge Ladders to ultimate victory!
• That’s Not All: Unlock Characters, Tournaments, Bots, Challenge Matches, Mutators, and Raiden! Complete Weapon and Power-Up Rosters, Adrenaline Abilities, Expert Battle Techniques, and More!

Platform: Xbox
Genre: Fighting

This product is available for sale worldwide.

Unreal Championship (Prima's Official Strategy Guide)

Dan Egger

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Editorial Review:

Predator or prey—which one will you be?
·Detailed maps cover all levels
·Tested strategies for Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, Capture the Flag, Bombing Run, and Double Domination
·Strategies to build the ultimate Championship team
·Full weapons and items descriptions chock with tips and tricks for each
·Breakdowns and bios for every character
·Secrets and cheats inside—get the drop on your opponents