Patrol Points

by: Dafred
dafred@dalnet.se

When writing this tutorial I assume that you can handle the basic interface of UnrealEd, know how to build a basic room and tweak the preferences of Actors. You need to know these things to understand what I´m writing about, even though I´ve included an .unr file for you to refer to and examine.

Getting started

Now you´ll make the world and place all the needed Actors in it.
1, Create a rectangular room about with the approximate dimensions of 512 x 512 units wide and broad. Don´t worry about being precise when working with this tutorial.
2, Then throw in the crucial Light and a PlayerStart Actors, and make the PlayerStart stand in one of the four corners of the room.
3, Now place three PatrolPoint Actors (found in Actor -> NavigationPoint ->PatrolPoint) in the remaining three empty corners.
4, Finally take a Nali (found in Actor -> Pawn -> ScriptedPawn -> Nali), or whatever other friendly Pawn you can find, and place him in the center of the room.
Now you´ve added all the actors you need, the only thing left to do is to make them work together by changing some stuff in their prefs.

Setting up the Actors:

Now comes the tricky (and fun) part of this process.
1, First open up the prefs of one of the RotationPoints and under the "Events" rollout you´ll find the "Tag" type-in. It will have a default value of "PatrolPoint". Change this value to "Point1" or something similar.
2, While still having the prefs box open, click on each of the two remaining PatrolPoints and change their Tag values to "Point2" and "Point3" respectively. Now you´ve given all the PatrolPoints uniqe tags so they can be set up to link each other and form a loop.
3, Still in one of the PatrolPoints´ preferences box, open the "PatrolPoint" rollout and locate the "Nextpatrol" type-in. It´s value will be set to "None" as default. Change this value to match the _next_ PatrolPoint´s Tag.
4, Repeat step 3 with the other two PatrolPoints, setting their NextPatrol values to exactly match the Tag of the next PatrolPoint. When done correctly, all three PatrolPoints will kind of connect to each other and form a loop. Now you´re finished setting up the PatrolPoints.
5, Now select the Nali Actor and open his preferences. In the "Orders" rollout you´ll find the two type-in boxes "Orders" and "OrderTag". In Orders, replace the default value "None" with "Patroling". Observe the _single_ l in that value. The Nali won´t patrol anything if you don´t type the value exactly like that. Then set the type-in OrderTag value to match the Tag of the PatrolPoint you want your Nali to go to first. >BR? Now you´re all set! Just hit F8 and rebuild the geometry and go play the world! Your Nali should walk around the loop of PatrolPoints you set up. If he does not, compare my PPtut1.unr that I´ve included with the one you´ve created. Also check so that you haven´t made any typos in the linking process. Go ahead and play around with the different prefs of the PatrolPoints, like "pausetime" which sets the time the Pawn shall stop at that Point.