Working Title: Hero Quest

[Kenzey]

Shaderupdate

Here we go with a small update for the Game...

I´am very new to the UDK and i have to learn from the ground up.
So this is the first wallshader for the game.
Tell me what u think.

[axelzellalex]

i love the look of what your aiming for
and its shaping up really well!

[McTavish]

Nice work man

[DELTATHUND3R]

nice wall matey..Keep it up .

[LordsWarrior]

And something new after a few days...a new test with a basic xml level content structure...

The floortile is a custom mesh now, same mesh, same material on every plate, but each looks slightly different (thx to my artist for that thing)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQ6eXIH3ItM

Hiya

This XML thing is interesting.

Im looking for somehting simlar. For example if we have a librayr of peice made (wallls,floor etc) then in another program like maya we can lay out a level, save as xml and it auto load in UDK on startup.

Is that what you are doing?

-LW

[BlackHornet80]

actually the xml is created manually, not created by a different program...

our goal is an ingame-level editor, which create the xml for us. there are many things we currently experiment with. a modular staticmesh layout...works in theory, need some work in modelling and code to be practical ^^

[LordsWarrior]

actually the xml is created manually, not created by a different program...

our goal is an ingame-level editor, which create the xml for us. there are many things we currently experiment with. a modular staticmesh layout...works in theory, need some work in modelling and code to be practical ^^

Yeah ,

After seeign this Im thinking of a way to generate the XML via a maya mel script.

Say you had level components in the UDK, and the same components in maya.
As long as you have a consistent naming scheme it shouldnt be hard to build a level in maya, out of the pieces, and generate an xml to use in UDK to rebuild that level.

I'd be keen to research this if you are interested

I dont thign I need a load on runtime thing (tho it could be useful I guess), but would like to be able to block out a level fast in maya. and import into the editor.

Infact..fo rin the editor you can actually cut n paste , so all I need to work out is what commands to cut and past into the editor , and generate them in maya.

-LW

[mordentral]

Wouldn't it be better to align your flooring to a world coordinate offset that matches its tile size and then just use a calculated grid for movement instead of each square section being its own mesh?

Like say you have 64 Width x 64 Height (2D dims) squares and you place the first one at offset 0,0

Then you could just figure out the grid location by tracing to the location and if it hits a static mesh (a valid floor location) you divide the hit location by the tile size (64) to get the tile #, and draw the decal at the hit location adjusted for offset (hit location - the remainder of the devision) of that location. Moving the character to the tiles starting location + w/e amount to center it in the space.

Seems overly complicated for the level designer to have the multiple tiles and such.

[BlackHornet80]

Don't know who you are referring to

We do it like you are explaining, or what you wanna say?

[mordentral]

I did it with a simple Trace...

Each floor tile is a single static mesh, so i trace the static meshes and position a decal above its location, this is handled by the HUD in the PostRender() function.

I'm sorry if I misunderstood that, but it appears as if you are having a seperate mesh for each tile. When you could avoid having to do that all together.

Um for clarification, assuming you start your level at 0,0,0 or at least a value divisible by your tile size.

Decal starting position:

X = TraceX - (TraceX % TileWidth)
Y = TraceY - (TraceY % TileHeight)

[BlackHornet80]

ah ok, thanks....yes, then you are right, each square is its own mesh...in fact the level editor will make it easy to build a level, without having to place each tile by yourself (later)...

Currently we are going this way, because you can add traps (below a mesh), or use mesh variants for a single square...

[emove]

I'm not sure how player movement works in the original game, but I imagine it's something like "you can move X tiles per turn".

I'd recommend doing a bit of reading on search algorithms, like the A* search algorithm. Something like this might be better then using the MoveTo approach as it'll let you make sure players actually move from tile to tile to reach a goal, as opposed to just taking the line of sight path there, which might violate your game rules.

It'll mean you'll want to have your map's tiles in an nice usable memory format (2D array or something), but I suspect you'll have something like that already if you're doing XML saving/loading.

Good luck, looks like a sweet project!

[BlackHornet80]

AI Pathfinding will be something for later currently we are working on the modular wall mesh structure, and making it easier to create levels...

In fact we currently have a unreal map 66kb big, and the whole geometry will be created after game starts...