UnrealEd Quick Reference

Tim Sweeney
Epic MegaGames, Inc.
http://www.epicgames.com/

Audience: Level Designers
UnrealEd undergoes rapid changes so this document may not be up-to-date.
Last Updated: 06/30/99

Having problems starting UnrealEd?

If you're having problems starting UnrealEd, please install the UnrealEd Fix 4 -- this eliminates the "Runtime Error 50003" messages and some other frequently-reported problems starting UnrealEd.   Try it!

Particle Systems

  1. Here's how to create particle systems in Unreal.
  2. Create and animate a mesh. The process for creating particle system meshes is identical to that for regular creature/weapon meshes (create triangle meshes, make sure they're scaled properly, import them into Unreal using the normal procedure). Texture coordinates and textures don't matter, however. When Unreal renders a particle system, it will draw a scaled sprite at each VERTEX in your animated mesh. So, the mesh triangles don't matter at all for rendering, just the vertices. Since particles are based on mesh vertices, particles cannot be created or destroyed during an animation.
  3. Assign the mesh to an actor class. Set the following default properties:

See the DispersionAmmo.uc script and its corresponding little particle effect Spark3.uc for an example of a cool particle system. It's the projectile for Unreal's default weapon. Note how Spark3t uses STY_Translucent, and then fades the particles from full brightness down to nothingness by modifying ScaleGlow and AmbientGlow in the Tick() function.

Suggestions for making maps run faster

Here are some fairly straightforward tricks that can be implemented in existing maps.   These are worthwhile enough that I recommend going back and applying them to existing maps, in the worst-performance areas where you need a speed boost.  The areas that are noticeably slow are the large outdoor areas where you see buildings from the outside, and areas which use a lot of dynamic light.

Stupid UnrealEd Tricks

These are things people needed but I didn't have time to create proper user interfaces for:

To align textures as floors (like for the ground in Pancho's hubs) AND scale them up, do this:

1. Select the polygons.
2. Do the normal "align as floor" thing.
3. In the log window, type: POLY TEXSCALE RELATIVE UU=2.0 VV=2.0

The above command scales them up by a factor of 2.0. You can scale them up or down by different amounts by plugging in different numbers, for example: POLY TEXSCALE RELATIVE U=0.5 V=0.5

If you have a super-huge outdoor area and you want even lower shadow detail than normal, you can check both the "Low Shadow Detail" and the "High Shadow Detail" options. UnrealEd recognizes this as a special combination that means "Superduperultralow shadow detail".

Special mouse clicking combinations

Shortcut keys

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