Greetings, all!
It's been almost one year exactly since I've been around to update this blog. Since that time, I've been taken into a company and am now doing programming work for an MMO. As I install the UDK again, I'll go over a brief concept tutorial on object oriented programming and the concept of deriving.
Assuming that you end up diving into the world of programming, a very powerful concept you'll find is that of an object. If you've learned any C programming, you can compare this to the idea of a struct. Within this object, you may hold lot's of different variables and even create new ones where they're needed. Then, when you go to access them, you would ask for the defined variable on the object instead of asking for a simple variable. It is this way that we can pass lot's of information around instead of just holding on to a single value. For instance, say that your object is going to be a requirement for something to happen, tied to an entity in your world. You can say the type of requirement, following by values that are checked depending on the type and access them by object.value.
The concept of deriving is used in a lot of different gaming application, such as UnrealScript. When you derive a new class, you're essentially saying "this thing is ALMOST the same as that thing, but I'm going to put some new stuff on it." In this way, you can take a blank character class who has a spawning function to set his name and rank to derive a new one with the same function defined in a different way. This time, instead of just setting his name and rank, he's also going to set himself to a value of a team because this is a team based mod. How this will work differs greatly on the way the language you're using is setup and the code already in place in the project at hand. At any rate though, deriving a new class usually always works the same way, creating a new entities with functions that better suit the current objective!
