About This File
Background:
I built this completely from scratch to learn UE4 since I haven't had time to map much these days so I thought I would take on something small. Although I have meshes in it, I consider it really pre-alpha since every single thing might change. Materials, lighting, gameplay, skybox etc need a ton of work. Mostly I'm just playing around having a blast in the editor but I thought I'd get it playable so people could start having fun with it.
Scale:
To get a feel for scaling on my own, I used the Malcolm/Taye method of measurement (i.e. Malcolm mesh in UT3/Taye in UT4) and measured certain distances in my DM-MCC-SpaceNoxx for UT3 to the same number of Taye's and came up with 2.2 which is a number I've seen others use. From there I built the BSP and lo and behold, it felt terrible. The main thing I think is the eye height in UT4 made me feel Liliputian at that scale. So, I dropped Rattlesnakes' awesome MapScaler in and started playing with different scalings until it felt just right (for me anyway). It turns out that about a 25% reduction from the 2.2 scale felt best. Once I had the scale correct, I realigned all of the brushes to the grid the best I could (still a bit messy).
The other big thing of course is that the mix between no double jump and the desirable level of gravity change up things in UT4 quite a bit. The key distance is being able to jump across the center pit area and grab the amp at just the right height with only a single jump. I don't like the gravity too floaty so I may change it a little still but it's getting close. I really haven't added in any UT4 specific movement stuff and I'm not sure if I will so it's kinda old school anyway. Without the pipe meshes on the towers you could wall run on them but it kinda flings you out into space so its not really useful there. I've considered some DM-RGB style rings around the play area but I'm not sure I'll go there for this one.
Bots:
I still have a lot to learn about the nav mesh and might have to break it up into pieces as others have done. I feel like I'm missing some of the easy controls on the old pathnodes. I can't get the bots to go for the amp yet and they are doing weird things everywhere. If there's a "force path" equivalent, I'd like to know what it is.
Ladders:
Okay I know Clawfist joked about this but just for laughs, I added a real ladder on the back of some of the towers. I know people liked getting to the upper ring like that in UT99 but I didn't have that available in my UT3 version. The only way I could currently get it to work is by using a physics volume with the "water" box checked. The problem with it is that if you jump when you're in it, you'll hear a water splash. I tried all of the different physics related volumes and couldn't getting around that yet. If I uncheck "water", it doesn't work as intended. Alternatively I could massively change the slope of the the backsides of the towers.
Weapons/Powerups:
I intend to add the secret areas at some point with some blueprints. Not sure what I will put in there yet. Nothing more fun than getting an elevator launch and dropping the deemer on everyone tho lol! I'm playing around with the belt down a ramp on the back. Not sure if I'll keep that. Currently the ramp is too steep for bots to want to come back up unless you entice them.
Misc:
Dialing in the sunrise over the planet was an interesting challenge. Essentially I used the sun position from the directional light/atmospheric fog to get the light position dialed then disabled the built in sun. I then placed 3 planet meshes in, one to be the sun, one to be the planet atmosphere, and one to be the planet of course. I then created material instances of all 3 that I could modify. On the main planet, I had to figure out how to move the fake sun/shadow positlion and also on the atmosphere glow, I had to adjust that just right. I then modified the intensity and color of the fresnel settings on all 3 meshes/materials to get it dialed in. Tedious but fun.
