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- .uproject file
- The file that opens your Unreal project. Its path tells Duke where your project lives.
A
- Accessibility
- Options that let more people play: subtitles, bigger text, remappable controls, colorblind modes and less camera shake.
- ActorMixer
- A Character Creator tool that blends up to six characters into a new face and body, like mixing paint. It is how a few seed characters become thousands of different people.
- Adaptive music
- Music that changes with what is happening in the game, rising into combat and calming down after.
- AI agent
- An AI that does a multi-step job on its own, such as placing a district of buildings, then checks its work and reports back for your approval.
- Ambience
- The background sound of a place: wind, distant crowds, birds, machinery.
- Animation Blueprint
- The Unreal graph that decides which animation plays and how animations blend, for example walk into run.
- Art direction
- The one or two sentences that define how everything should look, used to keep every asset consistent.
- Asset
- Anything the game uses that is not code: a model, animation, texture, sound or music track.
- Auto Setup
- Reallusion's free plugin that sends a Character Creator character into Unreal or Blender with its materials built for you.
B
- Bark
- A short line an NPC says on its own, like "Watch it!" or "Fresh bread here!"
- Biome
- A type of natural area with its own plants, rocks and ground, like desert, forest or volcanic flats.
- Blender
- Free professional 3D software for modeling, sculpting, UVs, texturing and rigging.
- Blockout
- A level built from plain gray boxes to test sizes, routes and fun before any real art is made.
- Blueprint
- Unreal's visual scripting: you build game logic by connecting boxes (nodes) instead of typing code.
- Bottleneck
- The one thing slowing the game down the most. Fixing anything else barely helps.
- Budget
- A limit you set in advance, for money, time, frame rate or memory.
- Build agent
- A small Duke program that runs on your PC. It reports your hardware and tools, and builds and packages your game when you press Build.
C
- Camera
- The player's point of view. Third-person cameras follow behind the character.
- Character
- In Unreal, the Character class is the piece that holds a moving person: its body, movement and abilities.
- Character Creator 5
- Reallusion's character software (CC5). It builds realistic, fully rigged people from sliders, presets and photos, ready for Unreal.
- Checkpoint
- A saved spot the player returns to after dying.
- Color grading
- Adjusting the final colors of the image to set a mood, like a film colorist does.
- Commit
- A saved snapshot of your project in version control that you can return to later.
- Cook
- Unreal's step that converts your project's files into the compact format the finished game loads.
- Copyright
- Legal ownership of a creative work. It decides who may copy, sell or reuse it.
- Crowd
- Many NPCs simulated together as a group so thousands can exist at once.
D
- Data layer
- A switchable layer of a World Partition map, used for world states such as a town before and after a fire.
- DeLight
- A Headshot tool that removes the lighting and shadows baked into a photo, so the skin reacts correctly to game lights.
- Displacement
- Using a texture to push a surface in and out for fine detail like pores, wrinkles or cracks.
- District
- A named part of your world with its own style and mood.
- Ducking
- Automatically lowering one sound (like music) when a more important one plays (like dialogue).
E
- Enhanced Input
- Unreal's system for mapping keys, mouse and controller buttons to actions like Jump or Attack.
- Expansion loop
- Duke's repeating cycle after the vertical slice: measure the gap, build more in a sandbox, check it, you approve, merge, repeat until every requirement is met.
F
- Facial capture
- Recording a real person's face with a camera and turning it into facial animation.
- Foley
- Everyday sound effects like footsteps, cloth rustle and objects being handled.
- Frame rate
- How many images the game draws per second (fps). 60 fps feels smooth; under 30 feels choppy.
G
- Game loop
- The complete cycle a player repeats: start, play, win or lose, try again.
- Game rules
- Exactly how the game behaves, written so each rule can be tested.
- GameMode
- The Unreal piece that holds the rules of the game: how you win, lose and respawn.
- Gameplay framework
- Unreal's set of building blocks (Character, PlayerController, GameMode, GameState) that keep a game organized.
- Git LFS
- An add-on to Git that stores big files like models and textures efficiently.
- Global illumination
- Light that bounces off surfaces onto other surfaces, the main reason a scene looks real.
- Graphics card
- The part of the PC that draws the game (GPU). It matters more than anything else for Unreal Engine.
H
- HD base
- Character Creator 5's high-detail starting body, with up to 16 times more mesh detail than earlier versions.
- Headshot 3
- A Character Creator plugin that uses AI to build a realistic 3D head from a single photo of a face.
- Heightmap
- A grayscale image where brighter means higher, used to shape terrain.
- Hero asset
- A model players see up close and often, so it is made by hand to the highest standard.
- Hit detection
- The code that decides whether an attack actually touched its target.
- Hitbox
- An invisible shape used to detect hits.
- HLOD
- Hierarchical level of detail: a simplified version of a whole area shown when it is far away.
- HUD
- Heads-up display: health, ammo, objectives and minimap drawn over the game.
K
- Keyframe
- A pose an animator sets at a moment in time; the software fills in the motion between keyframes.
L
- Landmark
- A memorable location players navigate by, like a tower or a lake.
- Landscape
- Unreal's system for large outdoor ground you can sculpt and paint.
- Language model
- The kind of AI that writes text and holds conversations (LLM), used here for NPC dialogue.
- Latency
- The delay between asking for something and getting it, such as an NPC answering you.
- Level
- A playable space or map in the game.
- License
- Permission to use something you did not make, with rules about how. Keep every license file.
- Likeness
- How closely a 3D character resembles a real person.
- Lip sync
- Moving a character's mouth to match spoken audio.
- LOD
- Level of detail: simpler versions of a model used when it is far away, so the game runs faster.
- Lumen
- Unreal's real-time lighting system for bounce light and reflections.
M
- Mass AI
- Unreal's system for simulating thousands of characters, cars or creatures efficiently.
- Material
- Instructions that tell the engine how a surface looks under light: skin, cloth, metal, wet stone.
- MCP plugin
- An experimental Unreal 5.8 plugin that lets AI agents operate the editor, such as placing objects or running tools, with your approval.
- MegaLights
- An Unreal 5.8 lighting feature that allows many shadow-casting lights at once, ideal for cities at night.
- Megascans
- A large library of photoscanned real-world surfaces and objects, available on Fab for Unreal projects.
- Mesh Mode
- A Headshot mode that turns an existing 3D head, such as a scan or sculpt, into a rigged character head.
- Mesh Terrain
- An experimental Unreal 5.8 terrain system that can make overhangs, caves and floating islands, which a normal landscape cannot.
- MetaSounds
- Unreal's system for building sounds and music that react to the game.
- Mission
- A task with a goal, a place and a reward that moves the game forward.
- Mix
- Balancing the volume of every sound so the important ones are clear.
- Modular kit
- A set of building pieces (walls, floors, roofs, doors) that snap together into many buildings.
- Modular wardrobe
- Clothing split into interchangeable pieces so outfits can be mixed automatically.
- Morph
- A slider that reshapes a character's body or face.
- Motion capture
- Recording a real person's movement and turning it into animation.
- Multiplayer
- More than one player in the same game over a network. It affects every system, so it is decided early.
N
- Navigation mesh
- An invisible map of where characters can walk, so NPCs can find routes around obstacles.
- Normal map
- A texture that fakes small bumps and detail on a surface without adding polygons.
- NPC
- Non-player character: anyone in the game the player does not control.
O
- Open world
- A game world the player can roam freely instead of following fixed levels.
P
- Packaging
- Turning your Unreal project into a standalone game that runs without the editor.
- Patch
- An update that fixes bugs or adds content after release.
- PCG
- Procedural content generation: Unreal places trees, rocks, buildings and clutter by rules you set, instead of by hand.
- Photogrammetry
- Making 3D models from many photos of a real object.
- Playtest
- Watching someone play your game to see where it confuses or bores them.
- Plugin
- An add-on that gives Unreal extra features.
- Point of interest
- A spot in the world worth visiting: a camp, a cave, a shop.
- Procedural
- Made by rules and randomness instead of by hand, so it can produce a lot of variety.
- Profiling
- Measuring exactly what takes time in each frame, using tools like Unreal Insights.
R
- Reference board
- A collection of images that show the look you are aiming for.
- Regression
- Something that worked before but broke after a change.
- Requirements
- The numbers your finished game must reach, such as districts, NPC looks and frame rate.
- Retargeting
- Moving an animation from one skeleton to another so it plays on your character.
- Retopology
- Rebuilding a model's polygon layout so it is lighter and bends cleanly.
- Rig
- The skeleton and controls inside a model that make it move.
S
- Sandbox
- An isolated copy of the project where AI agents work, so nothing touches your real project until you approve.
- Save game
- The stored progress of a player: checkpoints, items, settings.
- Scope
- How much the game includes. Keeping scope realistic is the number one reason solo games get finished.
- Sculpting
- Shaping a 3D model like digital clay.
- Seed cast
- The small set of hand-made base characters the variation system mixes into thousands.
- Sequencer
- Unreal's tool for cutscenes and trailers, like a film editing timeline.
- Shipping build
- The final, optimized version of the game meant for players.
- Side quest
- An optional mission outside the main story.
- Skin weights
- Which bones move which parts of a model or its clothes.
- Smart Object
- A place NPCs know how to use, like a bench to sit on or a counter to work at.
- Socket
- A named attachment point on a skeleton, for example the hand where a sword is held.
- Species
- A kind of being in your world, human or not, with its own look, movement and voice.
- Spline
- A curved line you draw in the editor to lay roads, rivers or fences.
- State Tree
- Unreal's system for NPC behavior: states like idle, alert, chase and attack, and the rules for switching between them.
- Streaming
- Loading parts of the world as the player approaches and unloading them behind, so huge worlds fit in memory.
- Subtitles
- On-screen text of what is said.
T
- Texture
- An image wrapped onto a model to give it color and surface detail.
- Topology
- How a model's polygons are arranged. Good topology bends cleanly at joints.
- Turnaround
- Concept art showing a design from the front, side and back.
U
- Unreal Engine
- Epic Games' engine used for Star Wars Outlaws-class graphics. Free until a game earns $1 million, then a 5% royalty.
- UVs
- A flat layout of a 3D model's surface that says where each part of a texture goes.
V
- Variation
- Differences between copies, so no two NPCs, buildings or trees look the same.
- Version control
- A system (like Git) that records every change to your project so you can undo mistakes and recover old versions.
- Vertical slice
- One small part of the game finished to final quality in every way. It proves the game can be made and sets the bar for everything else.
- Voice design
- Creating the sound of a character's voice, often with AI voice tools.
- VRAM
- The graphics card's own memory. Unreal's detailed worlds need at least 8 GB.
W
- World Partition
- Unreal's system that splits a big map into cells and loads only those near the player.