Book on UDK! Interested to author it?

[UnspoiledWalnut]

Yeah dude. Well including the indexes and stuff it's like 650, but the reading part that we used in class is only like 400.

[ambershee]

The Mastering Unreal series (including the 3rd book) didn't cover everything (and UT3 had less features than UDK), and that came to over 1800 pages.

[UnspoiledWalnut]

I'm thinking like we take that number and double it. And then double that just for show. Nice big like thirty pound book.

[SwizzleFish]

do Max users find the Inside 3dsMax books worthwhile?

I wrote close to half the chapters of Inside 3dsmax4 (including making the slimy character on the cover) and i was always surprised by how many people bought that book, then shelved it, looking at it like it was a reference, rather than a bunch of tutorials (which is what it was). Also, the games tutorials were inter-mixed with the commercial/film tutorials, making it even more confusing.

my point is that i wouldnt get hung up on how many pages something that has yet to be defined will take. First step is working out specifically what the book will be about, as i dont think "UnrealScript: the book" makes sense.

I'd buy a 200 page book on Unrealscript:Camera and Character control. In fact, i'd prefer several smaller books, rather than the big dog encyclopedia deal. actually, a pdf would be best no need to waste more trees

If someone took Epic's already good online documentation, and expanded it into working examples, with sample files and tutorials, I'm sure many would enjoy and learn from that.

[ambershee]

It costs money to get books published, so many smaller books doesn't financially make sense - it won't make them much cheaper.

[DeathGaze]

That would be awesome. A simple game with simple things, but all in unrealscript step by step for people who never script. Just for beginners can start scripting and understand it, with little tweaks so we can see what do every part, example: Create a ball as player, make ball rotate when walk, acceleration, deceleration, some physics (like need some speed to run up a ramp, make it bounce whan fall to floor or hit a wall), etc...

I'll be happy doing what I do in kismet, in unrealscript and a little more, the firsts steps are hardests.

@ambershee: Pretty much this.

Simple templates for different types of games would fit the title. You could do a sidescroller template, an RTS template, an RPG template, etc.

I hope you're prepared to do a lot of proofreading, as the rate they change the source script in UDK by the time the book comes out things will probably be broken. Hopefully it will be out of "Beta" by then.

[NikSha]

I hope you're prepared to do a lot of proofreading, as the rate they change the source script in UDK by the time the book comes out things will probably be broken. Hopefully it will be out of "Beta" by then.

Not if the book is PDF only. I have seen some books published online which are updated for a few months by the author (including the bug fixes in the code "printed").

If the book doesn't have tutorials for artists (read = scripting for beginners), it will be useless like thousand other video tutorials on YouTube.

[ambershee]

The book won't be a PDF, and will be set up to work with a specific version of UDK.

Writing a book covering "scripting for artists" is redundant. You need to learn some programming elsewhere before moving into UDK, because it is too difficult to learn (and too difficult to teach) programming fundamentals from game code. The book would assume you're relatively new, but it can't teach everything from scratch - and there are better books out there to do that.

[agentfx]

Books for UDK... Argh, its SO much work to make even a video tutorial, let alone a 400 page book. UDK is updated every 2+/- months, you write a book on it and you're out of date literally by the time it hits the presses.
The only reason I see to write a book is for cocktail parties "I wrote the book on UDK!" preferably in a British accent. (Hopefully the cocktail party has lots of nerds who know what UDK is)

Anyway, I can't imagine someone wants to spend 1000+ hours putting a book together who wouldn't have already done it.

[NikSha]

You need to learn some programming elsewhere before moving into UDK, because it is too difficult to learn (and too difficult to teach) programming fundamentals from game code. The book would assume you're relatively new, but it can't teach everything from scratch - and there are better books out there to do that.

No one said anything about teaching programming from scratch. The "beginners" are the beginners to Uscript and how it works in UDK. Doesn't have to teach us definition of variables or booleans.

[ambershee]

In any case, I haven't heard anything from these guys for a while. The editor contacted me with a format that was completely infeasible for the subject material (essentially ~70 different 1-2 page tutorials for 'advanced' UDK users). I wrote back saying that you can't really cover anything worth reading about in 1-2 pages, and haven't had a response.

[NikSha]

Oh well. Anyone has any nice links to Uscript tutorials then? (excluding UDN) :P

[sueds]

I really think there is a Lack of good unrealscript book, other tutorials are well covered by 3dbuzz or other free or paid tutorial.

To me is then up to the other to put key concept and explanation on what is necessary to understand unrealscript way of doing thing and interesting input tips or implementation. This should not be a book about programming but more a book about unrealscripting.

[sueds]

edit: double post