Moving Decorations (Spaceships, Cars, etc.)

by: Eric Poggel
E_Poggel@Hotmail.com

If you"ve ever played one of my maps, then you probably already know what this tutorial is about. For those of you who haven"t, this will show you how to make an effect similar to the cars and spaceships in the UT cityintro map. In this tutorial, however, our ship will fly around a large circular path. Only part of the circumference of that circle will pass over our map. This will make it so the ship will fly over every thirty seconds to about every five minutes, depending on the ship speed and radius of the circle.
The first step is to decide where you want your ship to fly. Outdoor areas are good, obviously. Create a large subtracted cube above your level where the sky is. Create a skybox and set the edges of your cube to "Fake Backdrop." Make sure the lower edges of the cube can"t be seen, or else you ship will suddenly disappear whenever it reaches the edge of the cube. We want it to be concealed from view before it disappears into the area outside the level.
Now, set your red builder brush to "Cube" and move it someplace outside your level. In Ued 2.0, right click on the mover button and select "Attach Mover." An attach mover is just like a regular mover, except that you can set actors to be attached to the mover, and move with it as it moves or rotates. This attach mover will be the center of the circular path of which our ship flies.
Under the properties of your attach mover, expand "Movement" and set the "yaw" of the "Rotation Rate" to about 500. This will make our mover slowly spin like a merry-go-round. Expand "AttachMover" from the main tree and set "Attach Tag" to "Ship".
Now let"s add ourselves a spaceship. Expand decoration from the actor tree in the class viewer. Now expand "UT_Decoration" from that menu. about one fourth of the way down, you will see actors with the names of "fighter1" and "fighter2". These are the ships you commonly see in Unreal. Add one of these somewhere along where you want it to fly. The distance between your ship and the attachmover will be the radius of your circle. Under the ship properties, expand "Events" and set the tag to "Ship". This will attach our ship to the attachmover. and make it fly around the circumference as it rotates. I"ve always found that the defualt size of the ship is too small. Expand the display tree. Under this, set the drawscale to a number between 1.5 and 3. You can test your level now if you want. If the ship flies too slow or too fast, change the rotation rate of the attachmover or move it further or closer to the ship.
A ship flying through the sky is awful perdy, but lets add some more frills to our design. How about some engine flares or some smoke trails? Somewhere under "UT_Decoration", there is a class called "UT_Flare". Add one behind each of the ship"s two engines. Open "city.utx" in the texture browser. Select the texture called "carflare". In the display properties, beside "sprite" and "skin", click "use" to apply the carflare texture to your engine flares. Under the advanced properties make sure "bstatic" and "bnodelete" are set to false and "bmovable" is set to true. Set the tag of your flares to "ship".
Now for our smoketrail. Under efects, there is a class called smokegenerator. Create one behind each engine of your fighter. Set their event tags to ship and then expand the smokegenerator tree. Set the number of puffs to some really large number (so it doesn"t run out of smoke), and then set the basepuffsize to about four or so. Set the frequency to about 0.05. You can always experiment with these variables later. Once again, under advanced properties, make sure "bstatic" and "bnodelete" are set to false and "bmovable" is set to true. A smoke generator won"t work unless you trigger it. Add a timed trigger and set the time to 0.01 or something. Type in "ship" for event, and leave its tag blank. This should take care of everything, but if you have any questions please email me or icq me at 46242443.