Multiplayer Game Development with Unreal Engine 5. Create compelling multiplayer games with C++, Blueprints, and Unreal Engine's networking features

Marco Secchi

If you’re fascinated by the immersive gaming experiences that enable multiple users to engage in collaborative or competitive gameplay, this Unreal Engine 5 game development book is for you.In this book, you’ll learn the foundational principles behind multiplayer games. Starting with a sample project, you’ll learn how to set up a networked system and make it work. Once the prototype of the project is functional, you’ll start adding game logic, including obstacles and AI opponents, to heighten the challenges and engagement, offering a captivating experience for players. Next, you’ll learn how to debug and optimize the project, before finally deploying the game build and integrating it with cloud services such as the Epic Online Services system.By the end of this book, you’ll have the confidence to develop and manage multiplayer experiences using the Unreal Engine environment, taking your newfound programming skills in your upcoming projects.

Managing State in Flutter Pragmatically. Discover how to adopt the best state management approach for scaling your Flutter app

Waleed Arshad

Flutter is a cross-platform user interface (UI) toolkit that enables developers to create beautiful native applications for mobile, desktop, and the web with a single codebase. State management in Flutter is one of the most crucial and complex topics within Flutter, with a wide array of approaches available that can make it easy to get lost due to information overload.Managing State in Flutter Pragmatically is a definitive guide to starting out with Flutter and learning about state management, helping developers with some experience of state management to choose the most appropriate solutions and techniques to use. The book takes a hands-on approach and begins by covering the basics of Flutter state management before exploring how to build and manipulate a shopping cart app using popular approaches such as BLoC/Cubit, Provider, MobX, and Riverpod. Throughout the book, you'll also learn how to adopt approaches from React such as Redux and all its types.By the end of this Flutter book, you'll have gained a holistic view of all the state management approaches in Flutter, and learned which approach is the best solution for managing state in your app development journey.

Implementing Domain-Specific Languages with Xtext and Xtend. Click here to enter text. - Second Edition

Lorenzo Bettini

Xtext is an open source Eclipse framework for implementing domain-specific languages together with IDE functionalities. It lets you implement languages really quickly; most of all, it covers all aspects of a complete language infrastructure, including the parser, code generator, interpreter, and more.This book will enable you to implement Domain Specific Languages (DSL) efficiently, together with their IDE tooling, with Xtext and Xtend. Opening with brief coverage of Xtext features involved in DSL implementation, including integration in an IDE, the book will then introduce you to Xtend as this language will be used in all the examples throughout the book. You will then explore the typical programming development workflow with Xtext when we modify the grammar of the DSL. Further, the Xtend programming language (a fully-featured Java-like language tightly integrated with Java) will be introduced. We then explain the main concepts of Xtext, such as validation, code generation, and customizations of runtime and UI aspects. You will have learned how to test a DSL implemented in Xtext with JUnit and will progress to advanced concepts such as type checking and scoping. You will then integrate the typical Continuous Integration systems built in to Xtext DSLs and familiarize yourself with Xbase. By the end of the book, you will manually maintain the EMF model for an Xtext DSL and will see how an Xtext DSL can also be used in IntelliJ.

Empowering Organizations with Power Virtual Agents. A practical guide to building intelligent chatbots with Microsoft Power Platform

Nicolae Tarla

Power Virtual Agents is a set of technologies released under the Power Platform umbrella by Microsoft. It allows non-developers to create solutions to automate customer interactions and provide services using a conversational interface, thus relieving the pressure on front-line staff providing this kind of support.Empowering Organizations with Power Virtual Agents is a guide to building chatbots that can be deployed to handle front desk services without having to write code. The book takes a scenario-based approach to implementing bot services and automation to serve employees in the organization and external customers. You will uncover the features available in Power Virtual Agents for creating bots that can be integrated into an organization’s public site as well as specific web pages. Next, you will understand how to build bots and integrate them within the Teams environment for internal users. As you progress, you will explore complete examples for implementing automated agents (bots) that can be deployed on sites for interacting with external customers.By the end of this Power Virtual Agents chatbot book, you will have implemented several scenarios to serve external client requests for information, created scenarios to help internal users retrieve relevant information, and processed these in an automated conversational manner.

Procedural Content Generation for Unity Game Development. Harness the power of procedural content generation to design unique games with Unity

Ryan Watkins

Procedural Content Generation is a process by which game content is developed using computer algorithms, rather than through the manual efforts of game developers. This book teaches readers how to develop algorithms for procedural generation that they can use in their own games. These concepts are put into practice using C# and Unity is used as the game development engine.This book provides the fundamentals of learning and continued learning using PCG. You'll discover the theory of PCG and the mighty Pseudo Random Number Generator. Random numbers such as die rolls and card drafting provide the chance factor that makes games fun and supplies spontaneity. This book also takes you through the full development of a 2D game. Starting with level generation, you'll learn how PCG can make the game environment for you. You'll move into item generation and learn the different techniques to procedurally create game items. Thereafter, you'll be guided through the more abstract PCG areas such as scaling difficulty to the player and even generating music! The book helps you set up systems within your games where algorithms create computationally generated levels, art assets, quests, stories, characters, and weapons; these can substantially reduce the burden of manually creating every aspect of the game.Finally, you'll get to try out your new PCG skills on 3D terrain generation.

Scalable Data Streaming with Amazon Kinesis. Design and secure highly available, cost-effective data streaming applications with Amazon Kinesis

Tarik Makota, Brian Maguire, Danny Gagne, Rajeev Chakrabarti

Amazon Kinesis is a collection of secure, serverless, durable, and highly available purpose-built data streaming services. This data streaming service provides APIs and client SDKs that enable you to produce and consume data at scale.Scalable Data Streaming with Amazon Kinesis begins with a quick overview of the core concepts of data streams, along with the essentials of the AWS Kinesis landscape. You'll then explore the requirements of the use case shown through the book to help you get started and cover the key pain points encountered in the data stream life cycle. As you advance, you'll get to grips with the architectural components of Kinesis, understand how they are configured to build data pipelines, and delve into the applications that connect to them for consumption and processing. You'll also build a Kinesis data pipeline from scratch and learn how to implement and apply practical solutions. Moving on, you'll learn how to configure Kinesis on a cloud platform. Finally, you’ll learn how other AWS services can be integrated into Kinesis. These services include Redshift, Dynamo Database, AWS S3, Elastic Search, and third-party applications such as Splunk.By the end of this AWS book, you’ll be able to build and deploy your own Kinesis data pipelines with Kinesis Data Streams (KDS), Kinesis Data Firehose (KFH), Kinesis Video Streams (KVS), and Kinesis Data Analytics (KDA).

Mastering JavaScript. Explore and master modern JavaScript techniques in order to build large-scale web applications

Ved Antani

JavaScript is a high-level, dynamic, untyped, lightweight, and interpreted programming language. Along with HTML and CSS, it is one of the three essential technologies of World Wide Web content production, and is an open source and cross-platform technology. The majority of websites employ JavaScript, and it is well supported by all modern web browsers without plugins. However, the JavaScript landscape has changed dramatically in recent years, and you need to adapt to the new world of JavaScript that people now expect. Mastering modern JavaScript techniques and the toolchain are essential to develop web-scale applications. Mastering JavaScript will be your companion as you master JavaScript and build innovative web applications. To begin with, you will get familiarized with the language constructs and how to make code easy to organize. You will gain a concrete understanding of variable scoping, loops, and best practices on using types and data structures, as well as the coding style and recommended code organization patterns in JavaScript. The book will also teach you how to use arrays and objects as data structures. You will graduate from intermediate-level skills to advanced techniques as you come to understand crucial language concepts and design principles. You will learn about modern libraries and tools so you can write better code. By the end of the book, you will understand how reactive JavaScript is going to be the new paradigm.

Working Smarter with Microsoft Outlook. Supercharge your office and personal productivity with expert Outlook tips and techniques

Staci Warne

Millions of users across the globe spend their working hours using Microsoft Outlook to manage tasks, schedules, emails, and more. Post-pandemic, many organizations have started adopting remote working, and the need to stay productive in workspace collaboration has been increasing.Working Smarter with Microsoft Outlook takes you through smart techniques, tips, and productivity hacks that will help you become an expert Outlook user. This book brings together everything you need to know about automating your daily repetitive tasks. You’ll gain the skills necessary for working with calendars, contacts, notes, and tasks, and using them to collaborate with Microsoft SharePoint, OneNote, and many other services. You’ll learn how to use powerful tools such as Quick Steps, customized Rules, and Mail Merge with Power Automate for added functionality. Later, the book covers how to use Outlook for sharing information between Microsoft Exchange and cloud services. Toward the concluding chapters, you’ll get an introduction to Outlook programming by creating macros and seeing how you can integrate it within Outlook.By the end of this Microsoft Outlook book, you’ll be able to use Outlook and its features and capabilities efficiently to enhance your workspace collaboration and time management.