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Unreal Tournament Architecture Overview

 

In UnrealTournament, all of the things in the world that you interact with, from Bots to elevators to bodies of water, are represented by hierarchical structured objects. The base class, like Java, is object. From this class, all Objects get the nominal amount of data and behavior for their use in the UnrealTournament environment. Examples are UWindow, UT's windowing system, Bitmap, a reference for externally stored bitmaps, and Time, a reference for the system's clock. These are all Objects that are independent of a map and may interact with UT outside of a given map's environment. Another class that extends Object is Actor. Classes that sublass from Actor are anything that will interact with the virtual world once a map has been initiated and the user becomes immersed in the 3D environment. Not all of these are visible or tangible. GameInfo, for example, defines the specifics of the gametype that will be played (DeathMatch, CTF, etc…). However, Actors are all relevant during execution of running map, so they are given special capabilities that are not present in base Objects, like physics, renderability, and network replication. With the possible exception of UWindow, writing a Mod will be done mostly through interaction with those classes that subclass from Actor. I will briefly introduce some of the more relevant Actors and expound upon them in later documents as they become relevant in certain contexts.