UnrealEd ProTips Thread

[diamond]

There is a shortcut for adding lights:
hold P on the keyboard and click in the viewport (I click in 3D viewport, dunno if it works for 2D ones too).

[diamond]

And, this is a COMPULSORY READING FOR EVERY MAPPER:
http://wiki.beyondunreal.com/Legacy:UnrealEd_2_Console

Amongst all of them, there is one particularly useful:
MODE TEXTURELOCK=[1,0]
turns texture lock on or off (1 = On, 0 = Off) – If texture lock is on then textures will not be reset on brushes that are vetex manipulated

That command eliminates comments ending with '...but that will reset texture alignment'.

[editor Dave]

If not generally known:
While holding ctrl + alt and selecting brushes, you can press shift in order to select another bunch of brushes.
In 2D shape editor: Adding a new vertex ctrl + i (this especially important for UnrealED 1)

There are also some other ED limits but I can't tell numbers:
When there are too many movers within small space (or mover vertices in general) or if you approach the node limit (?), some movers disappear or flicker. I don't know when exactly this happens...

When a light enlightens too many surfaces, the map crashes (best possible solution => reduce the radius to 23 or lower).
When a surface is lit by too many lights, the map crashes (best possible solution => reduce the amount of lights or the radius to a minimum).
Both cases happened to me in different maps.

[diamond]

AFAIK, light crashes occur only for dynamic lights, like non-rebuilt lights. They are not crashes, but editor hangs, when it displays nothing but movers' wires.
You can work with large-radii lights in wireframe mode and rebuild lighting before switching to lit mode.

[Z-enzyme]

True.

[Buff Skeleton]

Oh boy, the console commands page is useful as hell and ESPECIALLY that texture lock command. God damn, why isn't that on by default?

Gonna reorganize some of the first post tomorrow and add a section for Further Reading with links to stuff instead of having just a handful of links in the main post.

[editor Dave]

AFAIK, light crashes occur only for dynamic lights, like non-rebuilt lights. They are not crashes, but editor hangs, when it displays nothing but movers' wires.
You can work with large-radii lights in wireframe mode and rebuild lighting before switching to lit mode.

True.

False.
UED 1 crashes, and freezing in UED 2 is like crashing.
It happened to me a while ago (First case in an unreleased map, second case in CTF-Dargrok). I did rebuild the lights and I couldn't switch to another mode than the Wireframe one. I suppose, one must really exaggerate the amount of details or lights to generate such a (near-)crash

[Z-enzyme]

This crash or hang happened to me only with dynamic or 'fresh' lights. I didn't ever had that problem when I rebuilt the lighting. So for me it's still true.

[diamond]

does game hang at the same places on the map?

try to reduce zone count at that place.

i had had that kind of problems when too many zones were in the view. Game froze with not all polygons being rendered. Removing unnecessary zones helped.

[editor Dave]

It has already been fixed before the release of CTF-Dargrok, or respectively, the other map won't be released

[Z-enzyme]

Anyway, I've got an odd question. Is there a limit in Unreal / Unreal 227 for Warp Zones?

[integration]

Yes, the maximal ZoneCount of 62 or 63.

[Doublez-Down]

Might want to add a tess cube terrain tutorial to the links on the first post, although a tutorial about things to do and not do when creating tess cube terrain would also be helpful.

[Buff Skeleton]

If you know of any tutorials, post them. I'll link stuff. But I don't have time at the moment to write full tutorials

[Doublez-Down]

Will do, I'll just have to translate it...more to follow