Sharan Volin - Learning C++ by Building Games with Unreal Engine 4: A beginners guide to learning 3D game development with C++ and UE4, 2nd Edition

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First published: February 2015
Second edition: December 2018

Production reference: 1261218

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Sharan Volin has been programming games for more than a decade. In the past, she worked on AAA and other titles for such companies as Sony Online Entertainment, Electronic Arts (Los Angeles), and 7 Studios (Activision). She primarily specialized in UI Programming. She also taught Game Programming for a year at the Art Institute of California. Sharan has both a BS in Computer Science (Games) and an MS in Computer Science from the University of Southern California, as well as degrees and certificates from other schools. Originally from New York, she lived in Los Angeles until she moved to Montreal, Canada with her 3 cats in early 2018 to work as a System Programmer at Behavior Interactive.

Agne Skripkaite is a UE4 software engineer with a particular interest in virtual reality applications. Agne has a BSc physics degree with honors from the University of Edinburgh and became a full-time engineer partway through a physics PhD program at Caltech. Over the last few years, Agne has developed for room-scale and seated VR games as part of teams of various sizes, right from two-engineer teams to large development teams. Agne has also served as a user comfort and motion sickness mitigation expert for seated VR applications.

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So, you want to program your own games using Unreal Engine 4 (UE4). You have a great number of reasons to do so: UE4 is powerfulUE4 provides some of the most state-of-the-art, beautiful, and realistic lighting and physics effects available, of the kind used by AAA studios.

UE4 is device-agnostic: code written for UE4 will work on Windows desktop machines, Mac desktop machines, all the major game consoles (if you're an official developer), Android devices, and iOS devices (at the time of writing this bookeven more devices may be supported in the future!). So, you can use UE4 to write the main parts of your game once, and after that, deploy to iOS and Android marketplaces without a hitch. (Of course, there will be a few hitches: iOS and Android in-app purchases and notifications will have to be programmed separately, and there could be other differences.)

This book is for anyone who wants to learn game programming. We'll be going through and creating a simple game, so you will get a good idea of the whole process.

This book is also for anyone who wants to learn C++, particularly C++ 17. We'll be going over the basics of C++ and how to program in it, with an introduction to some of the new features in the latest C++ version.

Finally, the book is for anyone who wants to learn UE4. We'll be using this to create our game. We will be primarily focused on the C++ side, but we will be looking at some basic blueprint development.

, Getting Started with C++ 17 , covers creating your first C++ project in either Visual Studio Community 2017 or Xcode. We'll be creating our first simple C++ program.

, Variables and Memory , covers different types of variables, the basic method of storing data in C++, as well as pointers, namespaces, and basic input and output in a console application.