UnrealEd ProTips Thread

[TheIronKnuckle]

I'll also be posting a tutorial on texture and brush alignment shortly - it contains pretty much my greatest UEd secrets.

Judging by your maps these secrets are highly valuable

[Buff Skeleton]

If you select an actor and choose Make Current at the bottom of the right-click context menu, that actor class becomes the "Add <whatever> Here" actor. How... how am I just now figuring this out

[ividyon]

Apparently UEd2 permits for basic arithmetic functions instead of manually calculating sizes in the brushbuilder.

Entering values with an equal sign in front (Example: =2048*8+1024) will place the result of the function as new value.
I've been missing this feature from UnrealEd 1 (where the = wasn't needed), and I never knew UEd2 had it all along! Awesome.

Source

[Frieza]

Heh.. funny when people discover functions you've known for years and never bothered to mention because you thought it was common knowledge

[Legendslayer222]

Apparently UEd2 permits for basic arithmetic functions instead of manually calculating sizes in the brushbuilder.

Entering values with an equal sign in front (Example: =2048*8+1024) will place the result of the function as new value.
I've been missing this feature from UnrealEd 1 (where the = wasn't needed), and I never knew UEd2 had it all along! Awesome.

Source

Whhaaaaa??
This changes mapping forever.

Except for those who already knew about this.

[Buff Skeleton]

Want to make an elevator with doors that automatically open when the elevator is at a certain position without a ton of bullshit? Easy! Attach a knife to the elevator, then add triggers with Trigger Type set to ClassProximity, and specify Knife as the class. Then add these triggers to different positions where doors should open. Set the doors to TriggerControl and boom, you have doors that open when your elevator stops somewhere. Adjust collision on the knives and triggers for enhanced precision.

You can do similar things with this method, like attaching a knife to a train for each set of the wheels, then add triggers to parts of the tracks where there should be bumps. Have the bump hit triggers trip a special event to play a sound, and now you can hear when your train is banging against shit on the rails. Add a very low magnitude earthquake for added effect if you are feelin' saucy.


Invisible collision hulls being a pain in the ass with BSP holes? Don't use cubes. Use a square shape from the 2d shape editor extruded to a point, forming a pyramid. Why? It's fewer nodes (less ways to fuck up and fewer cuts), there's only one square face (triangles are virtually impossible to break by vertex editing), and it makes the borders of the brush come to points instead of sides. You can fit these into very tight spaces and only have five vertices to edit instead of eight, which is way easier to do by hand. You can flatten the thing down to 1 unit wide by compressing the point, and it's as good as a 1-unit-wide cube without the drama. Don't forget to merge the polys on the flat side, though!

Also: make them semisolid if you need them to penetrate geometry but don't want to see holes in the world. I.e. if you're trying to cover areas where ordinarily you'd have to make a lot of smaller ICHs in order to fill gaps, like X-beams supporting a masked grate texture. Make one big one, cover all the gaps, and make it semisolid. When you rebuild, you won't see the brush penetrating the solid geo like you would with a solid ICH.

[ividyon]

For people under Windows 7 or Windows 8.1 whose UnrealEd crashes on start-up, here's a list of possible remedies:

• Right-click the UnrealEd.exe file, go to Properties, there to the "Compatibility" tab, and toggle on "Run as administrator" and set the Compatibility mode to Windows 98.
• Press Windows key + R, type in "sysdm.cpl" to open the System Properties window. There, go to "Advanced" -> "Performance" -> "Settings...", in the following window go to "Data Execution Prevention", and add your UnrealEd.exe file to the list of exceptions.

[youtube]g_WVptzH7Jo[/youtube]