Monster Properties

by: Marc EG Gravett
marc@avatar.co.uk

In this tutorial/document I"ll be taking you through some advanced features of the Monster/Creature Properties. Included HERE is the Sample Map.
I take it you know how to make a room with lights and you know how to place monsters/decorations etc. If not then I suggest you check out some of the Basic UnrealED tutorials that are available on the "net.

Roaming Monsters/Creatures

Make a nice large room with a high ceiling (important for later on) and put the lights in and texture it how you want. Now place your playerstart in a corner. Place a lovable NALI in the center of the room, right click and select his properties.
Go down to +Orders then put bFixedStart to FALSE, in the Orders box write in "Roaming" (without the quotes!!!) and thats it.
"Wandering" also works but I hav"nt found a difference between the two if there is one. Compile your level if needed and play, what you will now see is the NALI walking around without the need of patrolpoints. EVERY monster/creature can do this so it adds a great replay level to your maps.

Bigger Monsters/Creatures

When you"ve got over the exitement of seeing your NALI walking by himself, hit CTRL+W to duplicate him, then do this:
Open his properties and go to +Display, go down to where it says DrawScale. You will see it says 1.000000 - change that to 2.000000. What this does is makes the NALI 2x bigger, you can put any value you want, make him smaller or bigger (I made a Skaarj 20x bigger....now that is scary!!!) - but for now just put in 2.000000.
Now when you play the game you"ll see he is 2x bigger.....BUT.....he is still moving at the same speed as if he were the normal size, so go back into UED.
Open up his properties and go down to +Movement, in here you"ll find all the air/land/water speeds that need to be changed.
Now this is fairly simple, we made the NALI 2x bigger so therefore most of the things in +Movement need to be doubled -
here is a list of what needs to be changed and what it should be changed too: (you dont need to put in all the 0"s, just the digits before the . are good enough)
AccelRate from 900.000000 to 1800.000000
AirSpeed from 320.000000 to 640.000000
GroundSpeed from 300.000000 to 600.000000
MaxStepHeight from 25.000000 t0 50.000000
The other things may be needed but are not that important right now, more exploration with them will show you what they do.
Basically what we just did was to tell the NALI that he"s been made bigger so therefore he needs to walk like he"s bigger. For example the GroundSpeed keeps the animation of the NALI walking to match his overall size, so it does"nt look like he"s skating or walking dead slow for someone so big. You can of course make him smaller, say the DrawScale of 0.750000 - but then the AccelRate/GroundSpeed etc need to have 25% taken off so it keeps to the animation of the Nali properly. Otherwise you get a small NALI walking around dead fast!!!
Experiment with other creatures and see what you can do with them, a 40x bigger NaliRabbit is cool, or how about 3 smaller Krall all being lead by a Bigger Krall.
Other Stuff
In your selected monsters properties go to +Display and down to Fatness, this changes the overall fatness of the desiredmonster, i.e. Make NALI"s thinner and COW"s fatter.
If you make a Bigger/Smaller creature/monster then go down to +Pawn and make them Stronger/Weaker in the Health box, give them something to drop when killed, change their Field Of View so they can see behind themselves :)
Various monsters have different attributes you can change, for example:
With a Skaarj you can change the amount of damage he does by going to +Skaarj in his properties, from here you can also have him Fake Death and push buttons. In the above +Combat area you can change his RangedProjectile by doing this:
go to the Scripting window on the right side of UED, and expand the Projectiles area, select anything you want....say the
Arrow, then in RangedProjectile hit USE, now your Skaarj will attack with an Arrow when he"s firing from long range.
In Conclusion

I have only scratched the surface with the Monster/Creature properties, fiddle around with them yourselves and see what you can come up with.....and all of this without having to do ANY scripting. What this also adds is great replay value to Unreal single player levels. You may well play on level where Skaarj are twice as big, where Brutes fire BioGel instead of rockets, where every Monster roams the level from start up making the same level play differently every time you play it. The Decorations can also be made bigger/fatter - plus everything can give off sounds and lighting.....the best thing to do is experiment with UED and find all its hidden secrets.
If you have any questions or comments then feel free to write to me at the above address. Have Fun :)