Please ask your basic (newbie) questions in here.

imperialreign on 20/8/2007 at 22:46

simple question - is there anyway possible to make a brush an actor?

let me gues . . . no?

<edit> nevermind, I figure out something that works for what I want to do; it's a little hack&slash, but gets the job done :D

Now then, is there anyway to make the attached doorhandle mesh on a door block the player like a fully solid object?

Beleg Cúthalion on 5/9/2007 at 11:35

Well, finally I have my first real newbie question...or...rather a couple of, I already did a search but I found nothing helpful.

1. I'm doing Komag's tut, at the moment I am making the City section more "beautiful". A lot of things are a little unclean, next time I'm trying to stick to those 64-128-512 (and so on) values so that everything fits together quite well. But now I have a skybox (i.e. some background walls have that feature) which seems to shine trough a lot of surfaces which are not only flanking the sky walls but should in fact be in front of them. But it's not always the case, sometimes it works in some areas.
Additionally, I played a little with adding BSPs, instead of subtracting them as usual, and noticed that my columns, which are supposed to support the static mesh arches I did, are somehow accessable so that you can walk through one side and fall down into the sky. They are overlapping the ground a little, but in fact no one should be able to get inside of them, or look inside, which comes along with the problem.

Here we have one cylinder in a colonnade which should have the amount of usual not-carved-out block behind it before another subtract brush comes:
(http://s4.directupload.net/file/d/1176/3z7XQM5u_jpg.htm)

Inline Image:

http://s4.directupload.net/images/070905/temp/3z7XQM5u.jpg

And here's a timbered house which has a gap on its left side plus a thin line of light in front of it where no brush overlap should be:
(http://s4.directupload.net/file/d/1176/FOB3nHa3_jpg.htm)

Inline Image:

http://s4.directupload.net/images/070905/temp/FOB3nHa3.jpg (http://s4.directupload.net/file/d/1176/Djm4UZx9_jpg.htm)

Inline Image:

http://s4.directupload.net/images/070905/temp/Djm4UZx9.jpg (http://s4.directupload.net/file/d/1176/PpU8jVwC_jpg.htm)

Inline Image:

http://s4.directupload.net/images/070905/temp/PpU8jVwC.jpg

From some angles even the whole front vanishes, in return this time the columns (you can see them in the 4th picture beneath the arcades) worked. :confused: Any idea? I just don't know what to do with the usual "move the brushes around a little bit", that seems unsatisfying.

2. Is there really no way to resize a brush without vertex editing or using the builder brush again? I'm slowly fed up with all those sloping brushes that sometimes even occur although the vertex snap is on. By the way, whose fault is it when some brushes, meshes etc. even stick out of the 1-UU grid?

3. It took me a while to recognize that meshes don't "snap to grid" with their borders but with their central point, which makes the alignment a little more complicated (especially with the beams for a timbered house, although it's not the hardest work after all). Do you have any tips for that? I wanted to create my houses from plan (the one above is my first try), but it's getting difficult if you don't know where to put the center of a static mesh to.

4. Is there a quicker method than cut-and-paste to change the "priority" of added/subtracted brushes? After changing the subtracted brush in front of the house I had to re-create the stairs.

Please forgive me if I ignored some menus (and of course threads in this forum); I tried some of them but they either did not work or did something wrong.

When I'm through with the tut I'll ask you about the actability of my plans for a huge City map. :sly: By the way, is there no way to open FM maps? My T3Ed always crashes when I try to load a *.gmp (which is however suggested by Komag) and there are no *.unr files in the FM zips.

Ziemanskye on 5/9/2007 at 17:45

The holes in the world are probably because you've either accidentally got BF textured faces in places, or it's the lack of snapped to grid vertices/brushes that is going to cause it with BSP errors. It could mean a lot of work to sort out.

BSP you can walk through, well, um... Wrong texture or alignment again, I'd guess, unless you didn't full compile the map, and/or the brush order is wrong. Not really sure on that though, it's never something I've had where I didn't want it.

Reordering brushes: rightclick>order> Whatever you want to do with it.

Snap to grid (brushes) rightclick on a vertex when the brush is selected, and *that vertex* will snap to the grid, taking the rest of the brush with it (so a cube stays a cube, just with that one corner on the grid because you told it to be, the rest as on/not as their positions relavative to that corner and the grid size dictate)

Resizing a brush: use vertex editing and marquee-select (ctrl+alt+left-mouse0button to drag a box around the ones you want, I think: the keys are something like that anyway). It's quick and easy, and you can snap those vertices to grid like above (the selected group to grid relative to whichever you rightclicked).

Meshes don't snap on their centre point, but on their origin. It's not quite the same thing. That useless bit of information aside, you can select *anything* and rightclick somewhere away from it and select Pivot>Apply Pivot here (or whatever it's called) to give you a temporary point for moving things by. Oh, and don't forget, things don't usually snap to higher grid sizes; they keep their original "relative" point in comparison to the grid size, which can be hugely useful when cloning things (ctrl+w) about the place.

No, you can't open .gmp files in the editor, as far as I know, so you in general can't disassemble the FMs people have made, though you could try PMing people and asking for the .unr files.

And as for Huge city areas... I'm working on one: you'll see if/how it works if/when I get it done. In general though, it's going to be messy and very time consuming, but is certainly sort of possible, though you may be better of with the DarkMod for that kind of behaviour. From my experience so far though, you are going to need to have and know how to use 3DSMax5 for new staticmeshes to keep the object counts down: a zillion windows is technically cheaper as staticmeshes, but it's still a zillion windows, so that's going to hurt, as a (poor) example.

Ziemanskye on 5/9/2007 at 17:52

Oh, didn't see the older posts:

Codec - you can change alignments with scripts as far as I remember, but it may be a little beyond the newbie questions thread. Broad strokes of it would be have him start neutral (AIFactionModel property to something friendly/neutral), and have a volume on the outside of the cell with a script "When volume breached, make guy overthere (by link) adopt this (faction model) property".

Imperialreign - I'm not sure why you'd want a door handle to block movement, but you can change the properties in the staticmesh browser for the collision model, and on the actor properties Movement>Physics>PHYS_Havok if it needs that too (note, this works in reverse too: Movement>Physics>PHYS_None if you want to pass through things, which can be useful with rescaled smeshes)

Tazonne on 5/9/2007 at 17:54

First question: It really looks like a bsp error. They usually occur due to bad aligment of brushes. Do not overlap anything, everything should be smooth.Errors can occur due to vertex editing in low grid sizes. You generally don't notice that the wall is straight anymore. Sometimes you can get away with a little thing here and there, but they'll usually cause errors when the level grows.
edit. didn't notice Ziemanskye's posts. :tsktsk:

Beleg Cúthalion on 5/9/2007 at 20:22

Thank you very much. I always told myself that I would be more exact with my own mission, let's hope I can keep that. Anyway, thanks for all the little hints.

But that 3DSMax thing worries me. Well, it's still some time. We'll see. :)

PS: But I'd judge from your posts that it is not a problem in general to use added brushes. Komag "told" me that it would be best to subtract piece by piece but I think that could turn out difficult when trying to carve out all the roofs...although they're usually static meshes. .....I'll come back for sure.

Ziemanskye on 5/9/2007 at 20:52

There's no real problem with adding brushes, as long as everything is on the grid properly and all neat. If you find it causing holes in the world though, you can rightclick, find the thing and change it to semi-solid geometry.

TDS doesn't fully support it, so it can still rip holes in the level, but it does it a lot less, basically by forcing the "semi-solid" additive brushes to the bottom of the BSP queue so they don't break anything else up. You can't subtract back out of a semi-solid brush though: if you find you need to do that, make it normal solid additive again, subtract what you need, then put the builder brush around it and hit "intersect" to shrink-wrap a single brush version of the now subracted shape - delete the "source" brushes, add builder brush, change to semi-solid: tada - new more complex but stilll semi-solid shape.

As for subtracting roofs, I'm not doing it that way, but I think there's some talented guys over in TMAed-land who do do them that way, so they might be able to help you think about how to do it. (I couldn't get my head around it, I can handle subtractive space for inside things, outdoors though kind of bakes my brain)

Beleg Cúthalion on 6/9/2007 at 08:25

OK; thank you again. One more thing: I've noticed that some of my static meshes change their skin back to default after copying or even build all. I hope this time it's not due to unclean brush alignment. :erm:

Ziemanskye on 6/9/2007 at 17:03

Nope, that shouldn't be anything to do with the brushes: you just need to make sure it's a real "skin" for the smesh and to compile/save the level before you copy them around the place.

I've forgotten that a few times and ended up with having to twiddle the smeshes back how I want on a couple of occasions; just another inconvenient TDS thing, I guess. :p

Beleg Cúthalion on 10/9/2007 at 20:51

I just had a look at my little City (quarter) sketch and concluded that it would be app. 16,000 x 9,600 UU; divided in parts and places/plazas not greater than 400ft x 200ft (I'm assuming that one metre is four feet, so that I can keep the (over) size given by the door size and so on). The zones in between would be shiftet so that one cannot look from one big section into another....God willing. I also have planned a Hammerite church and being reminded of old City drawings I'd like the towers to be seen from far away...if that's possible (horizontal zones or something...but I doubt it). I'd give you the sketch but at the moment I'm at some kind of Downwinder villa and I'm glad they have a W-LAN at all. :erg:

It might be hard to judge, but – imagine every zone is filled with houses at it's borders and cobblestones in the middle – I fear it's almost too great for the Unreal engine even if there were not many lights due to daytime...besides other things like accessing (almost all) houses, climbables etc... What do you think of it (apart from "Go back to your brush alignment." :p )?

[SPOILER]PS: Hehe, I already had an image of it on the notebook. Attention, SPOILERS:
(http://s4.directupload.net/file/d/1181/CXh6XSCJ_jpg.htm)

Inline Image:

http://s4.directupload.net/images/070910/temp/CXh6XSCJ.jpg

It's a rough sketch. The coloured things are the planned zones, the writings just indicate the meanings of all the places (basically untill now it's all about big plazas). It was just the idea after knowing that I would need those zones to calm the UE down.[/SPOILER]