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Level Design UnrealEd Tips and Tricks

Consult the wiki.

Years of unreal experience dating all the way back from UT99. Seek answers in the wiki. Even the out of date stuff is still useless with some creative thinking and common sense.

Save, Save, Save, SAVE.
Save versions, make backups, save everytime you press rebuild. Come up with a naming structure, (RO-mymap01, RO-mymap02). Everytime you do something major (new terrain, new buildings, lighting, pathing, scripting) save a new version. If you change something and it doesn't work, you can always go back to an old version. UnrealEd Hates doing anything except completely destroying your map. Save save save savity save.

STAY ON THE GRID.
Static meshes are designed to use the grid, BSP will explode into a mess of crap if you start going off the grid. It makes your level run like grabage, look like grabage and turn into garbage. I would recommend you do map planning at 1024, Large buildings at 256, interior planning at 128, fine turning at 64, details at 32 and stairs, trims and fansy stuff at 16. I would only ever go to size 8 to finely place a static mesh. Anything lower then that (4, 2 and 1) are just there for reference of distance and to tempt newbies to use then and suffer horrible headaches.
 
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Yes, save in an orderly fashion as much as you can.
I use a date_number format so i can keep track of what day i've been working on the map and easily see the latest version of it. Once a week I go over the backups and see which ones can be deleted. (Make sure your current version has everything working properly, and back up 1 working version of each day minimum to a backup device so you ALWAYS have somthing to copy stuff from in case you mess something up later on in development. It's better to have multiple organized versions of your map taking HD space then have unsafe sex with Miss ROEd.

In case of an emergency, you can always check what ROEd saved in the auto.rom files (auto0.rom; auto1.rom etc) located in the maps directory.

If all is working properly, ROEd backs up the map you have open in your editor automatically every now and then. When it reaches auto9.rom, the next version will be saved as auto0.rom again. Checking out the file date/time will tell you which version of the auto files is the last one saved.

And yes, please, stay on the grid, NEVER EVER TURN IT OFF!!!
 
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another couple tips i found usefull: When testing your level using the Play button through the editor, you probably won't see any bots—the default setting. To test your level with bots, call up the console by pressing tilde (~) key on your keyboard and type in addbots n, where n is the number of bots you want to test your level with. also typing stat fps will bring up yer frames per second readings. if they are displayed in green they are acceptable. while yellow is pushing it, and red blows goats.:eek:
 
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Divinehammer said:
I dont really know where to put this but could someone please explain this concept: As posted by wickedpenguin.
* Optimization: I've added in some underground BSP and some anti-portals to help with network traffic.

How and why do they need to be underground?

BSP occludes players while terrain/anti-portals do not so a good technique is to place a simple shape (rectangle usually) of BSP under terrain or in large static meshes to help cut down on the number of other players you will have to render. Anti-portals pretty much occlude anything else so you usually want to have them in the same place as your BSP blocks.

If you place BSP blocks above ground players will run into them like walls and if you place anti-portals out in the open you will still be able to see through them but static meshes on the other side will be invisible.

See this website for more details and a better explanation of optimization.

http://www.angelmapper.com/tutorials/optimization1.htm
 
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Hyperion2010 said:
One of the quirks of UEd (which I discovered last night) is that it doesnt get along with AA. So make sure to turn off AA before using UEd or none of your right click context sensative dropdown menus will show up.

ARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!

NO FRICKIN WONDER!!!!

Same goes for Catalyst AI, at least with my setup. Jeebus, that was driving me crazy. I couldn't select anything or right-click. Thought I was a total retard trying to follow the tutorials and not getting anywhere.


Glad I finally found this. Thanks a million for the tip!
 
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StardogChampion said:
If a model looks too bright, go to Properties > Display > ScaleGlow.

By default it's at 1.0000, so lowering the number to something like 0.1 to 0.9 you can lower the brightness that lights shine on it.

It depends on things like what the AmbientBrightness of the zone is, and how bright your sun it.

Should I Make this change on Static meshes like I have some Snowtrenches that are glowing. so lower the scale glow then?
 
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This is more of a trick than a tip

You can build fairly detailed static meshes in UED using sheets, they are just as optimized as creating the polys in a modleing program like max but if you are not very good at or have no interest in modeling this can be a very easy to create custom static meshes, i will post a tut on how to do this later but the more advanced level designers can figure it our pretty quickly
 
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Hyperion2010 said:
One of the quirks of UEd (which I discovered last night) is that it doesnt get along with AA. So make sure to turn off AA before using UEd or none of your right click context sensative dropdown menus will show up.

omfg

THANKYOU for this - i'm not exactly computer illeterate - but i could not figure out why RO:OEd was doing this - My first thought was that I had to *somehow* put it to OpenGL *shudder*

T H A N K Y O U !!
 
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