Preliminary Information
This chapter explains some of the basics behind creating an Unreal Map.
Intended Audience for this chapter
The Basics
I guess all of you have heard of the game QUAKE by id Software :)
Well, many of you have created add-on maps for QUAKE. You know how
a door works, what a brush is, what to look out for while
creating a level.
While the Unreal engine is rather more powerful than id's (see
below for a list of differences), it is similar enough for all
the experts to skip this chapter.
What? You've never created a QUAKE map? Never heard of brushes? Don't
know how a light source works?
Ok, this chapter here's for you.
First off, let me explain that I've created quite a few
maps. Thus if I take some things for granted you don't know
about, please write me and ask! That way I'll be able to work it
into this chapter, making it easier to understand.
Let's start by taking a look at the basics behind map building.
Do yourself a favour and don't skip this section!
I know many of you have met computers through Windoze or some
other GUI toy and don't know much about the underlying
intricacies of your system, but please - the more you know about
how Unreal works, the better your maps will be.
Besides, it's fun to learn things :)
What's an engine?
Since I'm going to use the term Engine or (better) Game Engine
a lot, allow me to quickly explain to you I mean.
A game like Unreal consists of two parts: the engine and the game data.
While the game data defines what the game is (the monsters, the weapons, the sounds,
the maps, the textures, etc), the engine is the bit responsible for actually
showing the game to you. Thus you could license the engine and write your very
own game data for it (in fact, that's what some people did with Quake: Hexen II uses
the Quake engine, but has it's very own weapons, textures, etc).
The engine is therefore of great interest to us, as it defines what we can and
can not do with the game.
(This, btw, makes discussions like 'The Quake Engine has better weapons than Unreal'
rather pointless, as the weapons are part of the game data. You can create a exact
copy of the BFG in Unreal as well).
Differences between the Unreal and Quake II Engines
Those of you who don't know Quake (gasp!), feel free to skip this
section.
- Large Areas
-
The biggest problem in Quake were the size of the maps.
Perhaps I should clarify this a bit: while you could make very large maps,
you couldn't really create very large rooms. Not only would the engine
run very slowly, the compilation time was abysmal. This made outside areas very difficult.
Unreal is capable of displaying extremely large rooms - witness the different village maps or
the waterfall area in the beginning of the game.
- 32 bit Textures
-
Textures are now in 32 bit color, which actually makes quite a large difference: we are now
no longer limited to a certain palette of colors but can create whatever we feel like.
- Light
-
Light have received a major face lift: not only is quite a number of different effects
possible (not just strobing, but disco lights, interference patterns, and the like), but you
can now also create coronas around bright lights.
- Skybox
-
The skies look quite a bit better. Backgrounds can be more or less uniquely designed for each
level, and the result looks quite photo realistic.
- Fog
-
Areas can be foggy, which allows us to create some truly creepy effects.
- Translucency
-
Now not only Brushes can be translucent, but objects and creatures as well. This has many
uses, the most obvious one being ghosts.
- Mirrors
-
Finally, mirrors are possible. This allows many effects, from bathroom mirrors to highly
polished floors.
- Liquids
-
Liquids are not in brush form anymore - instead, you have to create closed-off
Zone and mark that as liquid. Has advantages and disadvantages over the Quake method.
- Light-emitting Brushes
-
In Quake II, a brush face could emit light (making glowing lava particularly easy to do,
as well as realistic colored lights), whereas in Unreal this is not possible.
A major disadvantage.
- Texture Skinning
-
Texture skinning is much better now. While Quake II simply textures an object from two
sides (for example, a creatures front and back), Unreal textures each polygon separately.
This doesn't sound like much, but a Skinner will immediately see why textures both look
much better now and are easier to create.
- Map Editing
-
The Quake .BSP files have two major disadvantages: they take ages to create (some of the
maps took a whole night to compile on my P200), and they were very hard to
reverse-engineer to find out how a cool trick was produced.
Unreal maps compile in a few seconds and can be edited at any time - this makes learning
new and interesting tricks quite a bit easier.
- Scripting
-
While not really an engine difference, I should note that creature scripting is very well
implemented, allowing many new behaviour s for your monsters. This is especially interesting
for singleplayer maps.
Useful cheats for testing levels
Read the handbook for a list of all Unreal cheats, but here is a quick list of the ones I
find myself using while testing levels. All cheats are activated by typing them into the
console.
| GOD |
Toggles invincibility. |
| SUMMON |
Allows you to create anything defined in the game.
For example, SUMMON EIGHTBALL will create the Eightball Launcher
in front of you. |
| FLY |
Allows you to fly around at will. |
| GHOST |
Activates non-clipping mode (allows you to walk through walls). |
| WALK |
Turns off the FLY and GHOST modes. |
| INVISIBLE 1 |
Makes you invisible (until you attack somebody). Turn it off via INVISIBLE 0. |
| ALLAMMO |
Fills all weapons with ammo. |
Maps consist of Brushes, Textures and Objects:
Brushes
A brush is simply a three dimensional object, like a cube. The whole map architecture
consists of such brushes: a high narrow rectangle is a wall, a broad flat one a roof,
a thin cylinder forms a column, and so on.
When you start up UnrealEd (the program used to create Unreal worlds), think of the blank
sheet as a single, solid block. You can form a simple room just by carving a rectangular
brush out of it.
By adding or subtracting brushes from each other, you can create pretty much any shape
you want - a major advantage over the pseudo-3D games like DOOM or Duke Nukem 3D.
Brushes can also move, creating anything from moving escalators to elevators or doors.
Textures
Textures define what the surface of a wall, a floor or the ceiling actually looks like.
They make the difference between a wall looking like a brick wall or a steel slab.
Unreal has quite a lot of textures for us, ranging from plush red
wall-to-wall carpeting to green alien slime. Some textures are
even animated, meaning they look as if they were moving - water
is a nice example of this.
Textures always make me feel a bit like a magician - with a wave
of my wand (ok: mouse) I can change a wall from flimsy straw to
solid steel and back.
Any face of a brush can be textured.
Objects
Objects are everything else: player start positions, monsters, weapons, waypoints, and
so on.
Basically, they can be subdivided into two parts: visible objects (like a box of ammunition)
and invisible objects (like a sound source).
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