General Principles
UnrealED2 Tutorials by EZkeel

Email :EZkeel

Viewscreen information
Pathnoding
Importing/Exporting and grouping
Intersecting and de-intersecting
BSP issues
Hiding actors and brushes

Viewscreen information

I found that there were quite a few useful functions available in the editor which would have made my building a lot easier and faster in previous maps. I’ll take you through the various screen functions and other tips that will hopefully help you too.

The 2D view screen

Right click on the menu bar where the small joystick is and a menu will appear.

Radii view is very useful. By choosing this option any selected actor or brush shown in that view will reveal its collision radius (or height depending on which 2D grid you do this on). Adjusting the collision dimensions in the properties of that item will show up on the view

Icon view can show you everything in your map. Somethings actually aren’t visible. For brushes this will show you their central point of origin

Hide actors view is also usefull when you want to manipulate your brushes unhindered.

The 3D view screen

The small icon that looks like a joystick can be useful and can be toggled on and off. Selecting this will allow you to view your map in a more animated way. You can hear ambient noises and see animated textures and dynamic light in operation.

There are 6 small cubes which change the particular view of your 3D screen:

1. Perspective: just shows you colourful outlines of your brushes. I've never found much use for that.

2. Texture Usage: Shows in plain colour the amount of different textures you're using. It can be useful to see at a glance where you may have applied the same ones.

3. BSP cuts: When you get severe HOM effects this view can be useful to see how the various brushes are being cut up.

4. Textured: Allows you to see all your map without the lighting. This make things a lot easier to see

5. Dynamic lighting: Shows the most realistic view of your map

6. Zone/Portal: This splits your map up into various different colours and highlights how the level has been split up into different zones.

Grid sizing: Right clicking can enable you to change the size of your grid. The smaller your grid the more accurate you can be when you line up your brushes.

Pathnoding

If you have a big map, pathnoding can be extremely boring. Unfortunately it’s a very necessary feature if you want your map to be any sort of challenge with bots.

Pathnoding is used to tell bots about the geometry of your map. Unlike a human player, bots are essentially blind and don’t see brushes that you place in your map. So, to tell bots where to go you must leave little apple trails for them to follow. Pathnoding has to be balanced carefully. Too many nodes can confuse bots, but not enough of them can leave them stranded. If you place them in awkward poitions they may also get trapped.
Here is a small picture which shows you the kind of thinking you need to have when placing pathnodes.

Notice how the nodes are placed at intersections in the corridors so that navigation is easier for them.
Its also important to note that any inventory item or any other kind of navigation point you place in your map will act as a pathnode too. Ammo, weaponry and health is particularly useful to coax bots into particular areas.

To actually place pathnodes, try not to do this in any of the 2d views. You need to do this in the 3d view for two good reasons.

1) You can move the camera through the 3d view as if you are the bot running through the map. This gives you an indication of where you should be placing them.
2) Pathnodes will not work if the bot cannot fit into the place you put it. Using the 3d view to place your pathnodes will ensure that this won’t happen. If you try to add a pathnode to an area that is to small it simply won’t appear there when you try to add it.

To place them in your map, choose navigation points from the “actorclassbrowser” and amongst those you should see the “Pathnode” actor. Click on it to highlight it, then in the 3d view right click on the floor and choose “add pathnode”. Then move forward several paces in the direction you think the bot should head and place another one. Keep doing this until you have the whole map covered.

Once you've added your pathnodes you'll need to tell the editor to link them up. This is done during the rebuild, but you can do it separately if you like by clicking on the "build paths" button from the top menu bar.

If you want to see what your path network looks like, right click in the grey part of the menu of any of the viewport windows and choose "View" and then pick "show paths". You should then see a network of paths in your map.

Here are one or two tips for pathnoding:

If you have a water zone, don’t place pathnodes directly above it to coax them out. The bots will continually keep jumping in the air to try and reach it. Instead place the pathnode on the ground a little way off but still in sight if they were to bob above the water.

If you have an important part of the map that you'd like a bot to go to, try adding something well worth getting like a U-Damage or shield belt.

Importing/Exporting and grouping

When you’re dealing with very large and complex maps this is a good technique you can use to avoid some confusion. Really big maps can take up to 45 minutes to rebuild on my PC, and if this is the case for you, then you need a way to make minor geometry adjustments to certain parts of your level without waiting for an eternity for it to do its stuff! This technique is really only put to good use when you have to continually make new adjustmenst to a small area. If you only need to rebuild once or twice then its probably not worth doing.

1) Select just the parts of the area of the map you want to work on. Do this by pressing down Ctrl and Alt at the same time and then left clicking and dragging the mouse around the area you want to select In any of the 2D views.

2) With all of that selected, access the properties (F4). Open out the “object” section and in the field called “group” type a unique name e.g. “export”

3) Save the map.

4) Then save the map with a different name (e.g. Export.unr)

5) Now, click on the “invert selection” icon and everything else in the map will be selected instead. Now just delete all of it! Only leave your self with the particular room or area you want to adjust.

6) Rebuild and save it again.

7) Make whatever adjustments you like to this area and enjoy the fast rebuild time.

8) When you’re finished, choose “File” and “export level”. Give it a unique name and then OK that. This will have saved the map in a t3d format ready for import into another map.

9) Open up your original map and select one of the brushes you know is part of your “export” group. Then right click and choose “select all”. This should have selected that one area you wanted to change.

10) Once you’ve seleted that “group” delete them all.

11) Next choose “File” and “import level”. From the browser choose the t3d file you created earlier and hit OK. A window will ask if you want to import it as new or add it to the current map. Choose “Add to current map” and click OK.

12) Your newly adjusted area should appear in your map in exactly the right place.

13) Now rebuild and save and that’s it.

Intersecting and de-intersecting

Building maps isn’t restricted to just using cubes and cylinders, and intersecting brushes isn’t only useful to create movers.

Intersect and de-intersect can be a very useful way of forcing complex brushes to conform to other awkward shapes in your maps and can be used to create shapes that aren’t so easy to make using the 2D editor. To give you just one easy example, I’m going to demonstrate making a staircase like the one in the picture below. Ordinarily its not a brush you can create in the usual ways.

1) Create an ordinary room and place a large cylinder in the centre as in the screenshot. Rebuild the map.

2) Then create a staircase brush and position it so that it overlaps the cylinder (as below)

3) Now, here’s where the de-intersect or intersect icon comes in to play. Whether you click on intersect or de-intersect is dependent on where the pivot point (the vertex shaped like a small star) is positioned. If its positioned outside the solid cylinder, you need to cick “de-intersect”. If its positioned inside the cylinder, you need to click on “intersect”. You should see your brush look like the one in the picture below. If you made a mistake simply build the original staircase brush and choose the other icon instead.

4) Now add this brush to your world (obvioulsy you need to select a texture)

5) Next remove the large cylinder that was there in the first place and rebuild. You should now have your special staircase.

Intersecting is a useful tool to take a complex set of brushes and change them into just one brush. This will often improve performance as less polygons will have to be drawn (even though the same amount of nodes will actually be visible).

BSP issues

Probably one of the most soul destroying aspects of designing a level is creating a map and then finding a whopping great BSP hole in there. If you’re not sure what I’m talking about then sooner or later you will. You’ll test your map and suddenly find an area that gives off a weird “Hall of Mirrors” (or HOM) effect. This can be caused by a variety of different things.

I have a few tips here which may help.

1) This sort of problem can occur if one of your brushes has a vertex that’s been moved too far out or in an unusual place. Sometimes this can happen by accident, and if this is the case you’d do well to give your maps a once over to see if you can see anything obvious.

2) The bigger and more complex your map, the more likely this will happen. You could try taking some of the complex areas and consolidating them by intersecting them to make just one brush.

3) Solids/semi-solids and non-solids. Careful use of these different types of brushes can also solve BSP problems:

There are 4 different form of brush that are used in Unreal level design. These are:

a) Solids: These brushes are the ones most mainly used and include added and subtracted brushes. You’ll see these as blue outlines for added brushes and brown outlines for subtracted brushes.

b) Semi-solids: This is deceptively named as the brush itself still feels solid within the level. However, these are often a key to better performance and less BSP difficulties. Although this is a brush it isn’t built into the level in the same way and doesn’t cut into the BSP like a normal brush. The disadvantage with these brushes is that you cannot and must not subtract brushes from these. If you do then you will see HOM effects like you wouldn’t believe! However, this is one of the best ways to reduce BSP problems within a map but it does require some care that no subtracted brushes cut through them. These appear as pink outlines within the map.

c) Non-solids: The main usage of these are for sheets and appear as green outlines.

d) Movers: These are purple outlines within the map.

Ordering of brushes:

Once you’ve been madly converting solid brushes into semi-solids to try and improve your situation, there’s one other related thing that you should do which may also solve one or two other issues along the way. If you’ve ever had a map with absolutely loads of moving brushes you may find that a common problem is that they can tend to flicker or disappear entirely even though the player can still bump into it.

This tip with “ordering” brushes could well help out with that too.

Make sure you do the following steps in this order:

1) Right click on any brush and from the drop down menu choose “select brushes” and then "Subtracts"
2) Right click on any one of the subtracted brushes (make sure all of the subtracted brushes are still selected) and then choose “Order” from the drop down list and pick “order to last” from the options.
3) Follow steps 1 and 2 but choose Semi-solids (pink outlines) instead of Subtracted brushes
4) Do the same again but this time with the non solids (green outlines)
5) Lastly, do this with all the movers (purple outline)

Hiding actors and brushes

On a large sized map it can be very crowded and trying to find individual items can be difficult and annoying. Fortunately there are functions in the editor that can help you. In a 2D view use Ctrl-Alt and left click and drag the mouse around a section you’re not currently interested in and when you let go of the mouse button you should see everything inside is now highlighted. Click on the “hide selected actors” icon that looks like a shut eye and you will see everything you highlighted disappear. This makes it easier to work on what you need to work on. When you want everything back again just click on the “show all actors” icon and everything returns.

That's it for now .....
EZkeel
(Simon West-Bulford)