Gaming Hacks

Add a Vehicle to Unreal Tournament 2004

Add a new object type to an existing game, for standalone play or as part of new content.

Earlier, we created and imported a car model into UnrealEd to use in Unreal Tournament 2004 ( [Hack #82] ). Now it’s time to take that model (the 1969 Plymouth Barracuda from Clone Bandits, http://www.demiurgestudios.com/CloneBandits/) and turn it into an Actor that can be placed in a map, driven around, and used in game types such as Onslaught. The obvious next step is to enhance the ‘Cuda by adding nitrous-style speed boosts ( [Hack #84] ).

Tip

You can download the source code mentioned in this hack as well as the art packages necessary to use this example from http://www.demiurgestudios.com/CudaExample/.

Creating a Class for the ‘Cuda

To make the ‘Cuda its own object or Actor in the world of Unreal, you need to create a class for it in UnrealScript. UnrealScript is a full-featured programming language “created to provide the development team and the third-party Unreal developers with a powerful, built-in programming language that maps naturally onto the needs and nuances of game programming.”^[18] You can find many UnrealScript references on the Web. Two good ones are http://udn.epicgames.com/Two/UnrealScriptReference and http://udn.epicgames.com/Two/MyFirstCode.

To create a new class, you first need to create a new UnrealScript package. From your Unreal Tournament 2004 directory (generally C:\UT2004), create a new directory. The name of this directory ...