UEd2.1 Help:Getting Started Tutorial

This tutorial will teach you how to create your first basic map, with a few rooms, some monsters, a couple of weapons and some interactive elements. This should get you started with map making and help you understand all the basics discusses in other topics.

1. Conception

First things first

Before creating a map, especially a multiplayer map, the usual piece of advice given to designers is to have a clear idea of what you want to come up with. It wouldn't do to start a medieval castle before suddenly deciding that a Sci-Fi spacecraft would actually be more appropriate. Some make complete blueprints, with the shape and size of each room, on paper, and then proceed to create what they have planned. Some simply get a general idea of what they want and build on this idea until they are satisfied.

In multiplayer maps, the importance of balancing the map and creating interesting situations with enough options for each players more or less forces the designer to have a good idea of the floorplan of the map before even starting. In singleplayer gameplay, it is easier to just go with the flow and add zones as you go, but it will more than often lead to linear and unsurprising gameplay, with rooms coming one after the other. A good singleplayer map lets you come back to some places but in a different way. For example, you could enter a valley and explore a village under a huge rocky arch, and latter come back to this place walking on the huge arch to go to a temple at the top of the mountains.

For our first, basic and singleplayer map, we will limit ourselves to a few medieval rooms with a couple of monsters and a nali priest whose role will be to show us a hidden weapon.

Because a singleplayer map needs to have an atmosphere and feeling, it's often best to use realistic dispositions and settings, while you can create a real maze for a multiplayer map, as the gameplay is much more important than look. Our singleplayer map needs something to make it interesting, realistic and unique.

Here is our general guideline: the player starts locked in an underground dungeon. A Nali Priest sets him free him by opening the cell. Picking up a weak Dispersion pistol, the player shoots at a wall and triggers a secret door hiding another, more powerful weapon, but also warning two kralls.

General Architecture

Ask yourself what you see when thinking "Medieval Prison"? Stones, iron, dirty grounds and a decent dose of bloodthirsty guards all spring in my imagination. This is the feeling we want to create. Now, what about architecture? We will surely have some archs on the celing, walls of wood and stone and some mettalic elements here and there. The general feeling must be damp and dark. These are the elements we will use when decorating our rooms.

First, let's create a big room. All the cells will have a large opening on this room with iron doors and bars. Create a room with a height of 256, a width of 384 and a breadth of 640, then hit the subtract button :

Now, let's create the cells. Create a 256*256 cube (128 units high), and subtract it several times intuil you have this (the grid is set on 16).

Now, to create the doorways between each cells and the main room, use the Vertex Editing tool to modify the Active brush so that it is 64 units less lon than a cell and only 32 units width. Once this is done, subtract it between the main room and each cell.Remembet that 3d units equals two squares if the grid is set on 16.

Once this is done for each cell, add a light (RMB=>Add a light here) and rebuild all.

Texturing

The default texture, with its silly bubbles, is rather dull and isn't helpful in trying to imagine the final look of the map. Open the Texture Browser and open the NaliCast package. Select a texture for the ground.

Holding CTRL down, click on each floor surface successively. This will allow you to select multiple surfaces instead of dealing with only one at the time. Once you have all the floors selected, right-click on any of them and select "Apply texture xxx".

As you can see, teaxtures are not properly aligned. You can see the limite of each individual surface as there is a break there. To correct this on horizontal surfaces, select all yours surfaces by cliking on one and pressing SHIFT+F (select all adjacent floors and ceilings). Right-click on any of them and select "open texture properties". In the Alignement tab, click on Align to Floor. This will realign all horizontal textures automatically.

Select appropriate textues for the walls and ceilings and apply them to the proper surfaces.

This is the basic shape of our prison. Now, we will also need somewhere to put the hidden weapon. In the right end of the room, subtract a small 96*96*96 cube and give it the same textures as the rest of the big room :

Now, at the left end of the room, we want a curved corridor. This is where the Kralls will come from. Because we want it curved, we will use the 2D Shape editor, but a simple square shape will be enough. Open the 2DShape Editor and create a 256*192 shape, with its pivot 128 units away on its right. 192 is equal to one and a half large square in the editor if the grid is set to 16, and 128 to one full square. Once this is done, hit the "revolve" button. We would like the corridor to be a 90° angle. Put 16 in "per 360", and in "Used", put one fourth of this number :

Back to UnrealEd, the Active brush should be at a bad angle :

In the "Side" Viewport, hold CTRL down, and, with the Active brush selected, right-click and move the mouse until the brush is in the desired position. Once this is done, subtract it at the left hand of the room :

We now have the basic geometry of the level. We will now try to make it look a little nicer (though still gritty enough) by adding decorations.

2. Decoration

Apart from the stony textures, the map doesn't look like a jail at all for now. To create a good atmosphere, we need to add architecture gimmicks which will tell the player that he is in a medieval prison. The next stage will be lighting, and then adding the events, scripts and NPCs of the level to make it lively.

First, we need to decorate the great room. Adding a few cubes in the middle of it, I created a solid pillar 64 units wide at its top :

This breaks the perspective and thus cancels the feeling of emptiness. But to have a better effect, we should add thigs to the ceiling.

Most of the time, ceilings will be the largest flat surfaces of your map, as you don't need stairs and items on it. Flat ceilings are really boring to look at, and a good architecture always uses these large volumes were you don't have to worry about gameplay for artistic shows. Here, we wills imply add a few arches. Arches are a very nice touch and, if done well, can easily make your map pretty.

In the NaliCast package is an "Arch" group. It containes a few arches. Let's take this one for instance :

Select it and in the 2D Shape Editor, create a brush for the upper part of the texture. Then, extrude it as a 64 wide brush. In UnrealEd, it should come out out of proportions with the rest of the map.

to adjust it, rotate it until it lies in the good position. It should go much too far :

To adjust it, we are going to use the Snapped Brush Scaling tool. First, right-click on one of the extreme vertices of the brush. This will move the pivot of the shape to this place, something important for us since scaling tools in UnrealEd always use the pivot as the point of reference for the whole brush. With the Snapped Brush Scaling Tool selected, hold CTRL and the RMB down and move the mouse until the brush fits perfectly into the room :

Add it. You will notice the texturinf of the brush is absolutely awful and doesn't fit at all. Select all the faces on one side of the arch and hit RMB=> Align Selected=> Align to wall around X axis. Repeat for the other side. Now, each side of the arch being constituted of several coplanar faces, we would like to blend them all in one face. To do this, once all the textures one both sides have been aligned, in a 2D Viewport, select the brush and hit RMB=> Polygons=> Merge. Rebuild geometry and select one of the surfaces :

In my case, the textures are still horribly wrong: first, they are too large for the brush. Moreover, they are upside down. The second point can be easily canceled in the surface properties, in the alignment tab, by hitting Rotation=> 90 twice. Scaling is a little bit more complicated. It seems the height of the texture is good, but that its width is greater than the brush. To correct this, in the Scaling bow of the Surface Properties, we will set values for each of the two axes:

In my case, the texture has the good V size (horizontal), but its vertical (U) size is almost twice two large, so I set 0.6. The result is good. Select the arch and hit CTRL+W (duplicate), and move the copy on the other side. In my case, the texture on the pillar was not adapted to the archs, so I changed it a bit :

This is a good starting point. It's starting to look good. Now let's move to the prison themselves. We want some iron bars and an iron door. First, let's add the bars. Create a 128 units high, 96 units wide and 32 units broad brush. Be cause we modified the porportions of the Active brush for the arch, the same deformation is applied to the current shape, so right-click on the active brush and hit Reset=> All. Now, add the block in the doorway of one of the cells. It will serve as a placeholder for the real door.

The bars themselves can be done easily around it :

Once this is done, select all the brushes by pressing AltGr and drawing a selection frame around the brushes with the mouse. Duplicate them (CTRL+W). Move on to each cell.

Let's call it a day and move to part 3, where you will learn how to create real doors and movers.