Legacy:Niaht/Developer Journal

Welcome to niaht's Developer Journal.

Here I will detail out my travels and journeys through the world of UnrealEd and all things related to Unreal Level Design.

Niaht's UnrealEd Journal

[Fri May 31 2002 19:25:46] Beginning Again.

It has been about a year since I last worked with UnrealEd. It's high time I started up again.

Today I started working through the tutorials on UnrealEd. I remember going through quite a few of these and so I skimmed through most of the super basic interface stuff.

Colored lights are pretty simple. The tutorial on Colored Lights from UnrealEd is straight forward and to the point. It has good information to help you set the color values the way you desire.

Using Intersections to condense complex objects into single brushes that can be saved and reused is a very handy feature. I feel that there are implications in using it that I am unaware of. There is definately something odd about the results of the Intersection that while not damaging (so far) to the functionality of the object, is confusing, and at least once that I experienced, frustrating.

I created some Kickers, a'la Quake, which worked out quite nicely. I can see how botpathing can be difficult. I will need to revisit the Kicker Tutorial on UnrealEd once I go over a tutorial on Lifts and Bothpathing.

Vertex Editing turned out to be quite difficult to learn. The tutorials I found had instructions that did not work or were difficult to read. I eventually figured out by trial and error how to do some editing in Vertex Editing Mode and Camera Mode. I still need to learn how exactly the Vertex Snap and other Grid features effect Vertex Editing.

Note: There is much more to these instructions, however these basics will get you started.

• Vertex Editing Mode

In any one of your Orthagonal (Top/Front/Side) Windows:

Hold Down Ctl-Alt and drag to select a Vertex or set of Vertexes. It is important to note that this will select any Vertexes in view as well as any that are underneith them.

Hold down Ctl and drag the mouse to move the selected points. This can be kinda tricky on certain shapes, so make sure you watch what you are doing in the other windows.

• Camera Movement Mode

In ANY window

Click once on the Vertex you wish to edit.

Hold down Alt and drag the mouse to move the selected point. This will move only the vertex selected.

I started the tutorial for Curved Hallways on UnrealEd a while ago, but had trouble when I couldn't do the needed Vertex editing. Once I got the Vertex basics down I was able to create the "Circular Room" that the tutorial appears to reference. This tutorial is difficult to follow, but I got the point. ;)

{{{1}}}

[Sat June 1 2002 9:29:38] Raising a Wumpus.

Today I found the Unreal Wiki! This place is amazing. I found the Vertex Editing stuff that I had been needing so much.. ohh well. sometimes you gotta figure it out the hard way. The most important point being the 'doing it' part.

I didn't end up doing a single tutorial today and instead spent all my time learning about the Wiki. I am truely amazed, and humbled. I really like the whole concept that drives the Wiki and am both grateful and excited to be able to participate. I'm going to take a little lesson from this and see if I can bring Wiki to my workplace. I think it would fit well with the type of people we tend to draw.

While scooting about the Wiki I found the item General_Scale_And_Dimensions which is probably the most useful bits of information a beginner can read.

Niaht: I must have been on crack. I had two days yesterday and didn't even realize it.

Something I need to focus on in the near future is getting these Journal entries looking pretty.

Tutorials

: Vertex_Editing - Unreal Wiki

: General_Scale_And_Dimensions - Wiki

[Sun Jun 2 2002 12:14:22] Continue the Wiki.

Bahh... grunt.. didn't really do squat here. Started a trigger tut, but had to hit the sack before I finished. Ohh well. But I did hash out a bunch of Wiki stuff so being that I'm new to Wiki this is a good thing.

[Mon Jun 3 2002 00:00:00] Finally

Well, I'm back to doing some tutorials.

The first tutorial is on Triggers (UT). I've been through this, but need a refresher badly. Triggers being a big part of making really engaging Assault maps, which are my personal fav.

oop.. I'm having a hard-disk failure.. gotta shut down and do some upgrades real quick so I can get back to doing stuff.. I hate it when this happens, but at least I caught it this time.. SMART really does work. - Niaht

Comments

Niaht: If the minor edit feature has the total effect I *think* it have, it might be a good idea if I use it on this page each time I do an update. Updates here will be quite frequent. Any thoughts?

Tarquin: most Wiki elders & wiki guardians have Recent Changes set to show minor edits anyway, so we see all edit to the wiki. No matter how many times you edit a page, it still shows only once in the RC list. Feel free to make as any edits as you need.

MythOpus: Yo Niaht -> I'm not 2 sure if u actually had a hard drive failure, but thats besides the point :) GET A NEW HARD DRIVE :D And if it is nu, then I think it may have someth'n to do with not enough of your power suply going to it.... or it wasn't any good to start out wit... hm... l8r.