Unreal Tournament Game Programming for Teens

Comment: 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.