What is Cooking?

[NightEye]

I always see people refer to cooking their map. I see the build options, but what exactly is cooking?

[nomadicus]

You create your map in the folder "Unreal Tournament 3\UTGame\Unpublished\CookedPC\CustomMaps\".
Cooking prepares the map for game play by its optimizing load time and probably more things (maybe someone can comment on that).
The cooked version is placed in the folder "Unreal Tournament 3\UTGame\Published\CookedPC\CustomMaps\". In this folder will go the .ut3 file, the LOC file and the .ini file.

[D-Hunter]

Cooking also enables it to work on consoles I believe.

[Bonehed316]

The technical details of cooking involve duplicating all classes (code), meshes, sounds, and the low level mips of all textures that a map uses, and storing these in the map's file, to make loading the map seek free (ie, it doesnt have to seek to the location of each file and then load it in order to load the map). This makes loading much faster, but results in content duplication, and disk size increases.

[Bonehed316]

..cooking for consoles (like PS3) does all the format conversion for sounds, textures, etc. to the formats used/required by the platform you're cooking for. Additionally, cooking removes all of the source materials (except for code) which are normally stored in the package, like for example the source data for textures and meshes are stored in the package so you can recompress in different formats without losing quality, or changes to the format of a static mesh can be made, and the mesh can be "rebuilt" without having to be re-imported. This results in a lot of disk overhead, and cooking removes these. Generally, the removal of source material tends to outweigh the added overhead of duplicated content, but mileage may vary.

[NightEye]

So then, where is the option to "Cook" files in the editor?

[nomadicus]

To the right of the "play" icon. It looks like an orange flame with an arrow pointing to the right.

[T@F]

To the right of the "play" icon. It looks like an orange flame with an arrow pointing to the right.

Hmm i don`t seem to have that on my ed??
Can someone post a screen shot,as the only play in my ed is in the build options.

[Ace08]

Some eggs, bacon, ham, pork and that's just about it. lol

[T@F]

Some eggs, bacon, ham, pork and that's just about it. lol

Wtf??

Anyway i have my screen in 1024 so how do i get to the cooking part without having to up my screen rez?

[NightEye]

Hmm i don`t seem to have that on my ed??
Can someone post a screen shot,as the only play in my ed is in the build options.

I don't seem to see that either.

[T@F]

I don't seem to see that either.

Its there you just need to up the rez to say 1280 or something then you will see it.
But my prob is i run in 1024,so how the hell do we use that icon,without having to put my screen rez to 1280.

[ShadeMistress]

Its there you just need to up the rez to say 1280 or something then you will see it.
But my prob is i run in 1024,so how the hell do we use that icon,without having to put my screen rez to 1280.

you can't. At least I couldn't find a way to... Same with the auto-save icon on the lower right. You can't turn it off unless you can get to the icon, which sucks cuz I can't get the rez any higher on my other 'puter (the monitor suxxx)...