Matinee Tool Task Reflection

After finally getting this task finished there are numerous issues I had with UnrealEd. While working on the map I came to the conclusion that UED is a lot better than my previous attempt last year, this time production was much smoother and more efficient. With that said I still prefer Steams Hammer editor, its superior in most aspects when compared to UED, the only feature that UED has against Hammer is the ability to scale models in my opinion.

Whilst working on the map I have gained a better understanding of the software’s limitations and what it’s capable of achieving. Even though the editor is fairly easy to use it feels as if it’s restricting my creativity because of little issues like crashes and brushes becoming transparent etc. With Steam the engine is much more flexible allowing me as a level designer to create a much more detailed and immersive environments without worrying about the editor crashing or any other technicalities.

Creating maps in UnrealEd can be so time consuming, simply due to the fact that you have to type in the dimensions of each brush that you want, a technique I found to speed this up was the vertex editor. With this tool I was able to edit the brush how I liked before I either subtracted it or added it, also another technique I found was too copy and paste existing bushes I already had in the map and just edit them. With both of these methods I was able to speed up the creation time and effectively halved the overall creation time since I didn’t need to type in the dimensions of every single brush.

Possibly the worst aspect of this task was the Matinee Tool simply because the slightest error would cause a crash, even expanding the sub actions property in the actions tab would cause a crash. That aside after about 2 hours worth of trial and error I finally got my head around the tool and since then I encountered no more errors.

Another aspect of UED that adds to the development time and the annoyances list is the texture / static mesh browser. Nothing is clearly labelled, I can honestly say I must have spent several hours just in the browser looking though packs to find the right mesh or texture that I need.

The map on the whole from my perspective was impressive, as mentioned previously compared to last year’s attempt this map is brilliant. I originally planned 6 rooms but due to time constraints and development time I had to cut from 6 to 4 simply because searching for materials and content for the 2 additional rooms would have required another couple of days. Instead I decided to focus on the 4 rooms I had left and give them their own individual themes.
I originally planned for 1 main hall and 5 themed rooms as follows: Sci-fi, War, Egyptian, Outdoors and Japanese, all these are possible to create since the content is readily available. The end result with just the 4 rooms is satisfactory, the map actually looks like a museum compared to a game map.

If I were to do this task again I would firstly plan all the content I need i.e. textures, meshes, emitters etc. I would then create an encyclopaedia for future reference akin to the one I found online which actually helped me quite a bit http://www.unrealplayground.com/forums/showthread.php?t=20562. Creating the actual level wouldn’t take long at all since the most time consuming part is trying to fill the space in a map with meshes.

References:

Mastering Unreal Technology - Jason Busby et al - (2004)
http://www.unrealplayground.com/forums/showthread.php?t=20562