DromEd/UnrealEd Notes

This is a document/addendum to the Thievery tutorials; herein I'll list most differences or similarities, etc, of DromEd versus UnrealEd, so as to facilitate people who have worked with DromEd but are unfamiliar with UnrealEd.   This tutorial assumes a working knowledge of basic UnrealEd functions, ie, that you've gone through the tutorials available.

Interface

To duplicate things, press Ctrl+W instead of Insert.  Sometimes UnrealEd will not create a duplicate, usually because the object being duplicated is too close to a wall or floor.  Move it and try again.  

As far as I know, there is no way to use the wasd keys to move around in the 3d view, only the mouse works.  It's more intuitive, anyway..

Area brushes - you can hide groups of actors and brushes easily by using the vis browser settings.

Similar in operation to WorldCraft.

Brushes

Terms - UnrealEd uses the same construction method as DromEd but it's terms are different.  Ergo..

(DromEd lingo = UnrealEd lingo)

fill air = subtractive brush

fill solid = additive brush

flow brush = This is would be a seperate Zone in UnrealEd, with a WaterZoneInfo class inside it.

2d brush = Sheet brush

Stair_serf = Any of the stair creation brushes.  The stair brushes are all fairly stable to work with.

Multi-brush = Prefab/Saved brush

Dimensions - 1 DromEd unit is equal to 16 UnrealEd units, which are both approximately 1 foot (well, about 10 inches..)

Missing Brushes - the wedge, corner-apex pyramid and dodochaedron brushes are not available in UnrealEd.  Use the 2d shape editor or 4 sided cones to acheive the same effects.

The Grid - the grid is different from DromEd in its absolution.  But it's a good idea to use the same rules as in DromEd - snap to the grid, and never go down to the low grid sizes.  In UnrealEd, I typically work at grid size 8, going to 4 only very occasionally.  If you're going to grid size 1, you're doing something wrong.  

Selecting brushes and faces - by default, when you click on a surface, it selects the face of the brush you clicked on, assuming you're not in wireframe mode.  To select the brush as well as the surface, use Shift+LMB.

Rebuilding

Rebuilding to compile your level for proper play is obviously important; it more or less corresponds to the general DromEd approach.  Again, the terms are different..

Portalise = Rebuild Geometry Only

Optimise = Rebuild BSP / Build All

Light = Rebuild Lighting Only

Compute Pathfinding Database = Rebuild AI paths (note that it is usual practice to place pathnodes manually beforehand)

Build Room Database = N/A

Build Room AI Db = N/A

The time it takes to rebuild your levels is about equal in both editors; and depends largely on the size of the level and the speed of your computer.  So very big levels may take half an hour - an hour and a half to rebuild, for example, but more typical values are a few seconds to a few minutes.

Optimising errors - UnrealEd doesn't give you a weird error when the BSP doesn't rebuild as it should.  Instead, you'll see "BSP Errors" when playing through your levels - basically, gaps in walls where there shouldn't be, and a nasty hall of mirrors effect.  

The causes are similar to DromEd's - not aligning brushes to the grid, too much object complexity, and so on.  Fixes are similar.. [insert link to bsp doc here]

Textures

Textures are aligned as you'd expect, but they can be squashed both horizontally and vertically.   The texture browser is far more advanced than DromEd, and is dockable with the master browser window, and has many view options.

To compress textures (DromEd console command is "compress family all"), you type "texture cull" into the UnrealEd console.  You have to restart UnrealEd and reload your level for the changes to take effect.

The Thievery texture families are contained within texture files which start with the prefix "Th" - eg ThCity, ThWoodFlr, etc, and their titles are relatively self-explanatory.  Try to use only the Thievery texture families, as only they have their footstep and hit sounds set - if you must use Unreal Tournament textures, make sure they're only active on walls and ceilings, and not where people can walk.  Otherwise they use the rock footsound by default.

If you want to import Thief textures (we don't advise it of course, as they are copyrighted by LGS/Evil Eidos), the textures are in fam.crf in your /Thief/crfs directory; importing them should be to the ones you need, and the best idea is not to create a seperate .utx texture package for them, but instead, associate them with your level as you would a screenshot; this avoids duplication, and means people will be more likely to auto-download your map without hassle.  Has the side effect of making your map file size slightly bigger.  To associate the footstep sounds, add the correct footstep noise from ThiefFootsteps.uax to the FootstepSound property of the texture.

Texture scale - as in DromEd, the smaller you scale them, the higher the shadow detail will be applied to them.  So if you want really sharp shadows, rescale the textures to 0.25, for example.  

Also, more important than the above is to set all surfaces to "High Shadow Detail" - this makes the shadow quality on the surfaces Thief quality.  The performance hit from this is generally negliable.

Bright corners - in Thief, lights by default tend to light closeby surfaces (like inset windows, or a fireplace) better than UnrealEd by default.  In UnrealEd, a surface can sometimes be dark despite being in close proximity to a light.  The solution is to apply to those surfaces the property "Bright Corners", which produces a much better result.

Lighting

Hue and saturation - The hue and saturation are on a standard 0-255 scale.  Experiment, and beware that the lighting in editor in software mode can look different in game.  (There will be more saturation in editor/software mode).

Brightness/Light radius - these don't translate well from one editor to the other, so guesswork comes into play.  The UnrealEd light radius is by default at 64, but this is a high value.  A radius value of 1 is about 1-2 feet of light radius in UnrealEd, assuming the light is bright.   Typical DromEd-ish values are 8-32.

Ambient light - The Thievery lightgem ignores the ambient light setting of zones.  However, a high ambient value can make the level look very washed out. A good value is around 10.

More shadows - UT's shadows and shadow detail are almost exactly the same as DromEd, but improves on them by softening their edges, so they don't appear blocky.  

More lights - An excellent, must read guide to the lighting system of UT is available here:

http://www.simpletown.com/mapcenter/Tutorials/Lighting/LightingTutorial.zip

Spotlights - these do not light objects/meshes in it's visible cone, but rather in a spherical fashion.  So, what happens is that objects/players may appear to be lighted near it, while obviously outside the light radius.  

So, the answer is to either use "natural" spotlights by using architecture to create a pool of light, or being careful with your radius settings for the spotlight.

Quick Lighting/Raycast/Objcast have no meaning in UnrealEd.  The nearest thing to them is the shadow detail setting on the surface properties.  Making all the of the surfaces's properties to low shadow detail will make lighting rebuild much more quickly than if all the surfaces were set to high shadow detail.  

Sounds/Sound Propagation

TBW

Performance

What slows down the framerate in levels in DromEd generally slows down the framerate in UnrealEd.  There's one important exception however..

In DromEd (and it's more of an issue in DromEd 1 than DromEd 2), setting the textures to a smaller scale creates more polygons for the game to deal with.  In UnrealEd, the texture scale is irrelevant.  Each surface is counted as one polygon.  Of course, UnrealEd has a smaller polygon limit as a result - about 150 should be the average scene, with 250 the accepted maximum.  

Other things that slow the framerate are:

Sloppy level building.  Not aligning things to the grid, using many added brushes where a few subtracted brushes would do, not using semi-solids etc.

Lots of dynamic lights in one scene - having lots of flickery effects may look nice, but they can really chop the framerate down to size.

Lights that can be turned on/off/put out/relit - unfortunately there is a nasty bug in UT at the moment which affects lights that can be triggered/put out - ie, lights which have their Advanced>bStatic property set to "False".   In some situations, typically where there are multiple lightmaps in close proximity or lights casting on complex architecture, the framerate detiorates rapidly to about 5-10fps as the bug fills up UT's cache.  The only workaround is to bulid your levels carefully, and have less triggerable lights.  :-(

Using fog too extensively - Unreal's volumetric fog is very expensive computationally, so avoid extensive use of it.

Too many objects on screen - having lots of meshes and objects viewable in a scene, will, like DromEd, lead to slowdown and lag.

Cells/Portals/Etc - by typing "Stat fps" in your UnrealEd or UT console, a set of statistics will be shown in your 3d view.  They're more or less the same as the "show_stats" command in DromEd.   They display the polygon count, and importantly, the node count, which is more important than the polygon count in many ways.  Your node count is generated by analysing the complexity of the 3d scene - eg, how many brushes are used, solidity, what is cutting up the bsp, etc; and a good guideline is to keep the node count under double the polygon count.

I strongly advise that if you have the official DromEd documentation from LGS (available from www.thief-thecircle.com), you read the file BuildingPrinciples.doc - it has very good advice, most of which is as applicable to UnrealEd as it is to DromEd.

Doors/Furniture

Doors are not objects/meshes, as in DromEd, but are real "mover" brushes, and require slightly more work to get them working.  As in DromEd, they form miniature portals, so closed doors don't allow the engine to see through them; ergo, faster framerate.  

They function as a normal mover would, but be sure to select their type as "ThDoor" mover instead of a normal mover.  Read doors.doc for a full explanation on thier use.

Furniture in Thievery is not available from the object heirarchy/actor browser either - they exist as geometry prefabs, which should be installed to your unrealtournament/thievery/thprefabs directory after you installed the mod.  Their names are relatively self-explanatory, and correspond to a range of Thief/Thief 2 furniture types.  As they're real brushes, they have the advantages of casting perfect shadows and correct collision.  However, they have the slight disadvantage of upping the polygon and node count, but this can be reduced by making sure they are all added as semi-solid brushes.

Actor Browser/Objects

The actor browser is UnrealEd's equivalent of the Object Hierarchy in DromEd.  It has a similar object-orientated, classed structure - so for example, to find the AI, you go to Pawn>PlayerPawn>ThBot, for decorative objects, >Decoration>ThieveryObjects, and so on.  

Because Thievery subclasses most of its code from UT, the new Thievery classes are not immediately obvious amongst all the UT ones.  So..

Objects (meshes) do not cast shadows.

AI's

Read Joel's AI docs for complete info on AI behaviour and settings.

Triggers

TBW

Misc.

TBW

-oRGy

[unfinished version 0.2, 20 Jun 2001]