Gingerbread Man on 1/11/2004 at 21:02
Herein one finds a collection of the most basic things people will want to know straight away, and which might frustrate them to hell and back otherwise (well, okay, it will frustrate ME to hell and back to have to keep reading identical threads called CAN'T FIND THE PLAYER START HELP and HOW DO I CHANGE THE LIGHT COLOUR?????)
* You can reskin concrete objects by going to Render > ObjectMesh, hitting ... to pop open the static mesh browser, finding the skin you want in the left hand panel, and then hitting Use under ObjectMesh in the properties window. You can also change the entire mesh this way ... for instance, if you have placed two GeniFURNkitchenshelf1 next to each other and meant to have a GENiFURNkitchenshelf1 next to a GENiFurnkitchenshelf2. This is not a great way to do things, but doesn't matter if the meshes are variations on each other. Only the shape will change, so don't go turning chairs into what you hope will be a readable book, because none of the properties will be different.
* Basic light radius stuff is in the Lighting / LightShape property, Lighting / LightColor will give you brightness / hue / saturation options. Neither of these come standard on a light actor, so it is easier to duplicate an already placed light to make new ones... at least that way you only have to change the settings instead of re-add them and then change them.
* Rescaling static meshes is done by adding Render > DrawScale property. For some reason this defaults to 0, so don't freak out when the mesh suddenly vanishes. As far as I can tell at this point, there is no per-axis scaling.
* The PlayerStart is located in the Actor browser under Marker > KeyPoint > NavigationPoint > PlayerStart
* If an object doesn't cast a shadow and you'd like it to (or vice versa) the property Render > CastShadows will fix that for you. Turning Shadowcasting on all over the place can cause a bit of a nasty performance hit in the Editor though, so I suggest you just do it to see how the shadows fall, then turn it off to continue building. You can always select and re-enable Shadowcasting during polish phases... You could also right-click a mesh, choose Select > Select All StaticMesh Actor, and then Shadowcast them all all once... but I can only imagine the kind of framerate hit that will cause. It's probably best to leave Shadowcasting as an icing effect, used dramatically and sparingly, and only when really required.
David on 1/11/2004 at 21:16
<ul><li>You can fly round the map by pressing G while ingame. In first person mode you'll end up with a headless Garrett - awesome :D</li><li>The way Ion Storm killed AI: (taken from Keeper Orland in the Gamall section). Keep the AI Alive and add the following trigger scripts, after removing the existing ones<ul><li>AiSpillsBloodFromDeath</li><li>AiSpillsBloodWhileDead</li><li>KillAiAtStartup</li></ul> I've not as yet been able to work out why this method was used rather than Heath > HealthState > HealthState_Dead. Maybe it is the blood spilling, or maybe to allow knockout animations to play first to get a less bizarre ragdolling?</li></ul>
Ulukai on 1/11/2004 at 22:51
* Even after reading GBMs post about above, I was still OMG HOW DO I CHANGE THE LIGHT COLOR?! for a while there. As someone who uses other versions of UnrealEd extensively, but never DromeD, adding properties to existing stuff in this way is unfamiliar, but now I see what's happening. Might be worth us having a 'If you've never used DromEd before, read this' kind of thing.
Gingerbread Man on 2/11/2004 at 00:09
Get ready for a crash course in DromEd, then... Once you get away from the very basic brush manipulation and such, most of this is DromEd Extreme. Especially all the Actor Linking and scripts and such.
It's taken me since Friday to pound it into my head that it only LOOKS like UEd, and that I have to get my DromEd hat out of its three-year storage.
On the other hand, it's still very intuitive once you learn the vocabulary. Not like, say, the sodding Max Payne editor.
Ulukai on 8/11/2004 at 22:32
* Unregister .MAT files if MS Office has them associated with Microsoft Access. If you're making custom static meshes, you don't want 3dsmax material libraries accidently opening in Access, and I also encountered a weird problem whereby XP wouldn't show me the extension because it thinks they're shortcuts (so I couldn't rename them) even though I have "Show extensions for known file types" checked. (...and googling shows that other people have this problem too).
Gingerbread Man on 26/2/2005 at 20:26
Whoops. Forgot this one.
Dark Arrow on 27/2/2005 at 16:33
* The line no_endgame that is used in dromed is now god player and should be typed in the command window. Can it be used so that you don't have to type it every time...?
* Full-screen to windowed: Press Alt+Enter. Sound seems to play only in the windowed mode.
Mortal Monkey on 27/2/2005 at 18:54
* Rebuild before intersecting deleted terrain to avoid having the video driver die on you.
null on 28/2/2005 at 05:37
DrawScale does *not* scale the object's physics hull accordingly.
If you use it in the gameplay area (i.e. if you expect Garrett to be able to touch your scaled object), be prepared to hack a physics hull with invisible BSP or something. :)
