Renault on 7/12/2021 at 15:26
Quote Posted by Gray
I would like something that allows me the freedom of DromEd/ShockEd, but more modern and not quite as terrible. I don't care too much about graphics, more about what level of freedom I have to create stuff.
Not sure exactly how out of touch you are, but Thief and System Shock had a patch released about 10 years ago called New Dark that greatly expanded to limits of the game in general and also the editing capabilities. You can make much larger levels now, and there's more in-depth scripting available. If you want create game levels (and puzzles) that can be downloaded and played by others, Thief isn't a bad way to go. Especially if you don't care that much about visuals.
Admittedly, Dromed can be a pain, but there's a new editor in the works by some folks in the community that should be a huge improvement (ETA unknown at this point).
ZylonBane on 7/12/2021 at 19:09
Quote Posted by Brethren
You can make much larger levels now, and there's more in-depth scripting available.
More relevant to this thread, it's now easier to use, and it crashes much less.
demagogue on 8/12/2021 at 00:45
Quote Posted by Nameless Voice
Unreal Engine does have a BSP editor. It's not great, being as it's really old and probably a leftover from Unreal Engine 1, but it's actually still better than DromEd's. At least it allows vertex manipulation. There's a BSP plugin for Unity. Also not meant to be great, from what I've heard, but usable enough for lower-fidelity games.
We have Unreal Engine 5 now. You can already download the alpha build to start building with it. The BSP editor would be for simple walls or floors. The thing to know about Unreal is that, like the massive giveaway on the Epic store, Epic is just throwing out free assets like there's no tomorrow. Most of what you're going to be building with is pre-made models that Epic is giving away. You're not really building with BSP.
Probably the best asset dump are the megascan / Quixel assets. You get like 90 points a month of free stuff you can download, and every month or two they release another biome/category. Like last month was swamps. In a year or two they'll have free assets for every environment you could imagine. And they look like real life. The first set they released in whole was the desert biome they used in the (
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qC5KtatMcUw) famous demo. This is something you can build right now. And the other biomes are just as jaw dropping. They come with models, textures, and materials. It's possible you could make an entire game with them.
Then you also get a free account with metaHumans, so (
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FAe1VgVzYpw) this is the kind of AI you can already get now for free out of the box. You make them like an RPG character creator, so no hardcore modeling.
Oh the other big selling point, well there's the lighting engine is crazy good without a performance hit, but above all there's Nanite, which is basically auto-LOD. It just means you can populate your level with 100s of 1-million+ poly models with miles-long lines of sight and it's not much problem for the engine, since it auto-LODs all the distant stuff. It's really amazing to see an entire city with 1000s of buildings stretching out to the horizon, where you can walk up to any of them and they'll be in full detail. And you can make it in 10 minutes just dropping the buildings in. What it means is the main limitation with building isn't lines of sight anymore but file size. (That's not 100% true. You do still have to think about performance. But there's so much outrageous detail you can have before you start feeling the limits that it's very freeing. It is for me coming from dromed & Darkmod, anyway.)
Sounds ... I don't know too much about yet. (Not to that stage yet.) The prefabs come with some basic sounds. But that's something I don't think would be too hard. But I have a feeling Epic is going to have some dump for that too. They're really big into this shtick with just giving things away for free to get a massive userbase for their products. NV's criticism that you have to do everything yourself I don't think is such a big barrier as it sounds like. You basically can get all the assets you could want for free at this point. And for gameplay, there should be a tutorial for everything. I don't want to dismiss that it's still a good amount of work, but it's something I think an individual can do.
Edit: I guess I can show this. This is something I threw together for Unreal 5 just playing around with it. I got the city straight off G*ogle maps, although I couldn't release it because of the IP. But it shows you what the engine can do at least.
[video=youtube;8UTC7Pj_vAA]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8UTC7Pj_vAA[/video]
Gray on 8/12/2021 at 01:49
Thank you all for your input, you've given me a lot to consider. After going through the various suggestions, perhaps Dark Mod is the closest to what I'm looking for now, but a lot of other suggestions also seemed exciting, and I might try them out. It never even occurred to me that you could get an editor for an engine, and not have to buy a game for it first.
The stupid ideas I have in my head are not necessarily something somebody else might want to play. I have an unhealthy obsession with creating hidden doors, secret places, things that look normal but in fact are cleverly disguised triggers, switches, keys, secrets. A bit System Shock, a bit Poirot.
As you might guess from my signature, I played rather a lot of SS2 back in the day. I've only recently got back to it, and I've spent the last three months in ShockEd, but I haven't quite yet figured out how New Dark has changed things, except that ShockEd doesn't crash nearly as often now. When I'm out walking now, I see all these old Victorian houses, and I want to create Thief missions. I never did try Thief DromEd, perhaps I should.
I hear there is a new remake of System Shock 1 coming out near christmas, but will it have an editor?
I have not yet tested Minecraft, only seen my 12-year-old step-granddaughter play it. I assumed it was not for me, but I could be wrong.
demagogue on 8/12/2021 at 03:36
If you want to start up with Darkmod, get an account on our (
https://forums.thedarkmod.com/) forums, (
https://www.thedarkmod.com/downloads/) download the mod, play some FMs to get a feel for it, & start with the (
https://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php/A_-_Z_Beginner_Full_Guide_Start_Here!) A to Z tutorial.
A couple of us were working on a cyberpunk / scifi branch for the mod, but it's a lot of work... Even that wasn't the issue so much as the people participating had different visions. I hope that happens some day (I'm not optimistic now), because nothing would make me happier than making a SS2 like level with TDM. If that's what you want to do, or a present-day FM, I think you could also just gather enough assets by yourself and pull it off though.
Edit: Minecraft gives you a ready-made world, you can build in-game, it's just blocks so it's easy to make big ambitious levels relatively quickly. And people have made some really cool adventure games with puzzles and the like. But they do tend to be a bit childish, the authors, the levels, and the target audience. So that's why I didn't get too far into it.
twisty on 11/12/2021 at 11:40
That's amazing demagogue. It doesn't quite capture the surrounding mountains, but the buildings are super close to what it looks like in real life. How much effort was required to transform the map from Google maps into UE5?
demagogue on 11/12/2021 at 13:23
I need to replace the Google modeled trees with real-looking trees and the foresty part will look a lot better. Well also the resolution falls-off with distance from one's scene grab. But you can replace distant geometry, like the mountains, with a new & closer screenshot to fix that up. The only catch there is the higher the resolution the bigger the file size, and it's at a clean 1GB right now which is good enough, great even considering that view.
As for how much effort, once you know (
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_XsmoZJmG8&t=42s) what you're doing, it takes less than 5 minutes to get it set up to get geometry from Google maps into Blender, and then you can grab as much as you want one click & scroll after another. Then in Blender you can export it into fbx files, and drag and drop those directly into Unreal to import them. It's probably best to break it into pieces for the import. You can basically drag and drop it into the level & in a minute or so it will appear in-editor, and in another minute the textures will come in and it will look spot on. Each block can take several minutes for Unreal to create the material files though, which doesn't really change how anything looks or with moving it around in-editor, but it has to be done before you can save it. (In this example, I used four blocks going to the horizon, maybe 10x10 miles a piece, and one piece would take like 40 minutes for the import, but each piece could easily be 100s to 1000s of buildings. But you don't have to do anything; it does it in the background while you're doing other things.)
On paper Google Maps is strict with its IP, so I don't know if a person could make a game out of this & be able to distribute it. But there are tons of people that are using this method for screen art & videos that have been up for years, and none of them have been taken down. So for purposes like that, this is a really great method. And of course nobody is going to check what you're doing locally and it's a lot of fun to cruise around literally anywhere on the planet within minutes. I think you might be able to wedge some bit of it into a releaseable game if it's not anything Google could find or would care about, but I'll let someone else test that.
