Hey there, here is the full honest answer:

I was totally motivated about 1 year ago, I recreated half of Myst Island, with some crude day-night shift and what-not. But the terrain really caused me some trouble. It was just too complex to re-create the whole myst island with tessellated boxes. To get rid off polygon errors and smooth build.

Later I tried to recreate channelwood, I laid out the whole basic level and built the stone island. But then the darn Unreal-Editor did it's job again and crashed and messed up my file.
After that I was pissed off and didn't care at all anymore.
Just like old times

But recently I started becoming more interested again.
The biggest trouble at the moment is the terrain is messing up polygons using heightmap-mesh and needs complete recreation using tessellated boxes. The terrain cause me too much work, but most of the buildings and objects are done.
Also the big tree-elevator which is working, you keep falling trough the tree, unless you're inside elevator.
There is some collision failure in the tree-evelator mesh I can't get rid off.

Thank you, I can upload map files if anyone likes to work with them.
I also got a real 1:1 Myst Island heightmap to work with.

You might try using U227 statics to create terrain. I can give you some hints on doing that. It is even possible to make a stable (VERY STABLE) BSP terrain with U227 static meshes and reimport it to older Unreal Editor.

Are you familiar with any 3D software? (Maya, 3DS Max, Blender, Softimage, Cinema 4D)

Yeah if you aren't going to work on it more I'd say release what you've got

I will not use 227. The basic idea was using only vanilla Unreal material.
While getting as close a possible.

The Terrain as is now is pretty close. It just needs re-traced with tesselated boxes. So it would run smooth and bsp-error free. That was the initial goal, but it takes some initial motivation to get started

Using the .obj importer in ued 2.1 to then convert to brush which uses "Unreal material" has no inherent difference than making it yourself, other than that you've used a program other than unrealed itself to design a brush.

Did you mean you only wanted to use vanilla unreal in it's entirety for the project? i.e. brush design, textures, mapping all done in UED1 without external modification? If so, then your point is valid. That's a pretty good challenge.

Otherwise, I see nothing but benefit from using a 3d software tool to create terrain.

I've been using an ordinary Unreal installation with the latest official patch since beginning of the project and nothing more. That's the way it's gonna stay.

The goal was simply getting as close to Myst as possible, while using Unreal stock and nothing more.

You.. you're using 226f?

Did you know that was a backport of the UT engine to unreal?

aside from the fact that it's absolutely fucking terrible it also breaks compatability with previous versions for mapping. I'd suggest to use 224v or 225f for mapping so no stupid errors happen so you don't have to run a tool to "fix" aka byte hack some crap to get it to work in older versions.

How do I actually check the Unreal version?
I actually don't know the exact version but it's somewhere between 224-226

Should be in Unreal.log



If it says 226, and you're not using unreal gold, then it's 226f.

*Edit* Sorry I got to correct a little something here:
I was and always been using version 226b for all of the Myst content creation.
I think it was one of the latest official patches. To maintain highest compability.

The whole content creation weights 140Mb spread over 42 maps

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