Your UnrealEd Wishlist

[MonsOlympus]

+ a lattice deformer, I can imagine that would be very very handy for getting some variation in stuff like vegetation and such

Yeah thats a good one, I thought you meant the lattice modifier for a second but yeah FFD's would be kewl. Slice plane would be another handy one for trimming some excess polys you may not see if meshes go through other stuff.

6. Align mesh by vertices in 2d, 2.5d, 3d.
7. Modifiers could be applied to groups or even whole layers for quickly making symmetrical CTF maps for eg. There is a tiny issue of having to allow different texture sets for that though.

[Naklajat]

1. Modifiers like in 3dsmax for modifying meshes, Taper, Symmetry stuff like that.

+ a lattice deformer, I can imagine that would be very very handy for getting some variation in stuff like vegetation and such

[Kronos]

-Dynamical Skyzone (or whatever it will be in UE3)
when you move throught the map from one end to another, actor in skyzone also follow your direction (in very limited range) This would made illusion that objects on background not following you whn you move (anyone seen Skyscrapper built in ocean when you move too far in Morpheus3? )

UE3 doesnt use skyboxes. So this pretty much solves your problem I'm guessing.

[Sivak]

What I'd like to see is better support for liquids. Water to swim in and what not.

[ne_skaju]

-Dynamical Skyzone (or whatever it will be in UE3)
when you move throught the map from one end to another, actor in skyzone also follow your direction (in very limited range) This would made illusion that objects on background not following you whn you move (anyone seen Skyscrapper built in ocean when you move too far in Morpheus3? )


-More hotkeys, some of them even configurable.
-New render style for terrain: show lines at fixed heights (line in real maps) for example, every 256/512/1024 UUs (should be configurable)
(if you dont know what about im talking, see picture:

http://narrow.parovoz.com/maps/Lomov-map.jpg )

[whirabomber]

An updated phoenix would rock. Planes are faster than helio's. But I'd be happy if the "tilting" that the assualt craft (raptor) was togglable...

[GrimmBigBadWolf]

At anyrate, roboblitz editor which runs on UE3 happens to have the ability to import mov and wmv files as materials or textures.

that is awesome... so that could mean it does have this..

*starts designing a movie theater map*

[Ikaros]

This isn't going to happen but I wish UnrealEd would allow you to create complex static meshes while in UnrealEd instead of using external 3D modeling programs. I mean it should always have the ability to import meshes from these programs, but I hate that you have to be a 3D modeler program genius or have money to afford a good one other than the shareware version of Maya. Maya is good but seems very complicated to use. I loved the original Unreal and Unreal Tournament when most people made everything totally with UnrealEd. I wish UnleadEd was a full quality self-contained 3D modeler itself if you know what I mean!

[N1ghtmare]

Wasn't their another video that proved it was ingame?

[Kronos]

1. Video importing.. so you can import videos with or without audio played or projected on a 3d mesh surface.. (since watching the trailer.. I think it might be possible.. but I am not sure if the trailer was all made in UED.)

I cant garentee anything but considering I've never seen epic create a non ingame cinematic I'm about 90 percent sure they most likely used Unreal ED for every single scene in that trailer. Besides the fact that it looked like unreal 3, there happen to be a flickering static mesh in the background which only happens when overflapping it evenly with another staticmesh, I'm pretty sure if that were some 3d application like Maya 6 or 3dsmax it surely wouldnt of done that, and if it were built by some 3d application it would of looked 30 times better.
At anyrate, roboblitz editor which runs on UE3 happens to have the ability to import mov and wmv files as materials or textures.

-A more comprehensive list of the packages of the stock textures and static meshes, so we don't have to browse a gazillion of these named EVILSTATIC* before we find what we want.

-The possibility to mirror terrain within the Editor, allowing the user to make symmetrical terrain (for Onslaught/Warfare, or mainly terrain-based CTF (puts on bullet-proof vest).

[MonsOlympus]

Well it didnt specify a version number so yeah, I was thinking the next one I guess

[SafeFire]

As much as I agree with quite a few of these requests, there is one factor missed.

I'm afraid it's a little too late to put up a wishlist for the editor, since it's about already finished, and has been for a while.
Roboblitz's shipping with the editor proved this, along with the fact that a bunch of other games based on the Unreal 3.0 engine (even though they didn't ship the editor with the retail game).

Anyhow, not to be an a party pooper or anything, but I just thought I'd let you know

No hard feelings

[Dario D.]

Here's a re-post of my wish-list from a couple years ago:

http://www.deefrag.com/images/ut/misc/uednew_sm.jpg
This is a photoshop of "my perfect Ued".

(If you view it with Internet Explorer, disable Auto Resize, or hover over the pic, and click the box that appears in the bottom right.)

Ok, this time I'll describe my perfect Unreal Editor (of course I would redo the whole thing to truly be my perfect editor)... so here's what I would like:

Starting with the top-left, reading the image like a book.

- First of all, the topmost bar of buttons... they're pretty useful, and I guess it would take some doing to find a prettier place for them, so I left them there.

--- New Toolbar ---
This toolbar dynamically switches to the *most used properties only* of whatever type of actor you have selected. For things like lights it would show more than what you see there; it might also show a bCorona checkbox, a skin button for choosing a corona skin, and some other useful things off to the right.

First things first...
Light Properties:

Click and drag names to move sliders. Instead of punching in numbers manually, just cick and drag on the names of each bar to adjust the light in real-time. Stop dragging when the light looks exactly how you want it in the 3d view.

To the right of each bar is a tooltip or helper. The Radius helper says 100ft, so you know how many Feet the Radius is exactly. Very useful when making maps with good player-world scaling, and you would like precise measurements.

LightType has 2 buttons that decide what type of light it is:
PerPixel (dynamic shadow lighting, updated in realtime - very CPU expensive)
Static+Radiosity (traditional UT2004-style lighting, but with radiosity for more realistic bouncing light.)
When I was working on my HL2 map, I saw this beautiful example of Radiosity. Note there are only 2 relevant lights in the scene; the sun being the important one. Notice what happens when the sun hit the orange wall.
- Another great example of the power of static lighting with radiosity. Lights in scene: 1.
I would like Ued to allow the mixing of PerPixel and Static Lighting, for the sake of faster Framerate, larger levels, more light-sources, and radiosity.


---Brushes ---

Brush types:

Solid - your typical solid brush.

Air - a subtraction brush.

Soft - a special type of brush I found in Hammer that does NOT subdivide BSP, nor occlude. Most excellent for scene details, hence in Hammer this brush is called a func_detail. Keeps scene polycount at a minimum.

Ghost - Another non-subdividing brush that can fade out of view at a distance, and has the capacity to not block light (windows). Flags would allow this brush to be noclip.

Clip - a blocking volume. Blocks everything unless you right-click the "clip" button and select a sub-category of clip, like, PlayerClip, NonPlayerClip (everything but players. bots are also players)

AI Clip - stops AI from pathfinding through this brush, but doesn't physically block them (example, Fire).
Water - floods everything within the brush with water. Doesn't affect Solids. Useful for flooding entire level sections without needing to carefully water-zone it.

Area - Area brushes are the old Thief editor's brilliant way of cleaning up the wireframe views by removing anything not inside this brush. Empties the wireframe views, letting you focus on a certain Area, and only compiles whatever's inside the Area brush, for way faster compiling and ingame testing. The old Thief editor also lets you jump ingame at the exact spot of the 3d View camera if you want. The combination is genius.

Flags - this button lowers a list of flags to set for the selected brushes.


Manual Controls:
Adjust any selected Actor's XYZ position in the world, it's HPB rotation, and it's Depth/Width/Height. I took these manual controls directly from the Thief editor. I have used them extensively, and they are just great.

Order:
Another feature taken from the Thief editor... this lets you quickly and easily adjust the exact order of the selected BSP brush, to decide which brushes overwrite others. Absolutely crucial for complex scenes where airs and solids are misbehaving and canceling each other out; it's necessary to change the build order of the brushes to resolve their conflicts.

Group/Ungroup:
These buttons instantly group and ungroup any selected Actors.
Hold shift+Group if you want to name the group.

---Surface Tools---
These are pretty self explanatory, and taken from Hammer, where the Surface Editing is 2nd to none. The most important features are the abilities to align a texture to the Top or Bottom (or left or right) of a face... and of course, my all-time favorite feature, the ability copy a texture and texture coordinates from one face over to another just by selecting a face and right-clicking all the others to copy it over exactly. You can do this to an entire building in seconds, and everything will be aligned. No breaks in the alignment from one brush to another, regardless of shape or position.

---Modeler / Photoshop Syncing---
Ued would come with a 3dsMax/Maya plugin that allows Ued to sync with those two programs. When pressing the Modeler button, the selected brush or mesh would instantly be dumped into 3dsMax/Maya, then brought back every time you hit save in either of those two programs. While the plugin is active, hitting Save in Max/Maya re-insert the asset into the package it came from. The same would be possible by syncing textures with Photoshop via "right-click > Send To Photoshop". Every time you save, the texture would be re-imported into its package.

--- ---Sidebar Buttons --- ---
Camera Mode
BSP Mode
Terrain mode
Object Mode
Vertex Editing Mode
Surface Editing Mode

With any of these selected, the boxed area underneath them displays more sub-buttons and sub-options of the button mode you're in.

In the screenshot you can see that the Camera is in Free-Fly mode, which is the regular UEd camera-flying mode. The other mode is Rotation Mode, where the camera rotates around the selected Actors 3dsmax-style.

--- --- Viewports --- ---
First of all, notice they are almost black. Aw yeah.
Nothing's easier on the eyes, and better for viewing dark levels in the 3d view. It's also so much easier to see where brushes are in wireframe.

3d Viewport Buttons:
Let's start from the right;
Rotate Camera Mode
Free-Fly Camera Mode
Add Red-Team Bot - click this button and drag it down onto a point in the level. It drops a bot on that spot and he's ready for live in-editor gaming.
Add NoTeam Bot - drag this onto a spot to add a neutral bot that kills all.
Add BlueTeam Bot - drags a Blue-Team bot into the map.

Pause and Play - this button fires up the bots and activates Real-Time Preview mode to bring the map to life. Pause button keeps the map in RTP mode, but the bots freeze. The button changes from Pause to Play, back and forth, as you press it.
Movers and such become active when bots are present. Right-clicking a bot button removes all bots of that type.

Fast-Forward - each time this button is pressed it speeds up the game, up to 10x the normal speed. Right-clicking decreases the speed, down to 0.1x slomo for careful observation. On-screen number displays in the 3d View show you exactly what speed you're at while clicking.

Way on the left, next to the RTP button is a new one called Ingame Preview. This button actually drops you into the map as a player with a gun, from the exact spot the 3d camera sits. Extremely useful for previewing your level with bots and weapons, without loading the game. This mode replaces all your keybinds with your ingame ones. Hitting F1 goes into fullscreen (at your current resolution and color depth, so the monitor doesn't flicker at all), and hitting escape goes back into editor mode, leaving the camera exactly where you have it, incase you've just found something to fix.

--- Other Features --
See that texture browser at the far right? The browsers can auto-hide into the right side there. The browser only shows up if you click on the furthest-right pixels of the screen. It's not a hover-activated auto-hide.

New icons: the Light icon now has a center marker for careful alignment in tight spaces. The lights in 2d views are yellow crosshairs, like in the Thief editor, and that's how I like them best. Easy to select, they don't cover up anything, and super-accurate when lining them up in tight spaces.

DrawScale now added to bottom toolbar. I rarely, rarely use DrawScale 3d, and ALWAYS use DrawScale. So much quicker and cleaner.

Draw Scale can be adjusted on the fly by hitting + - to increase and decrease by one. To increase and decrease by .1, hold Shift.

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--- Network Mapping --

When you network with people to work on a map, both sides save incremental copies of the map automatically (incase something gets messed up) and the maps are listed in the same way Photoshop's History works, with the ability to reference old sections of level from older maps incase you want to undo/redo a portion of the map.

...you know... just incase someone messes up something No problem; just load a previous version over the messed up section.

Using the Area Brush in conjunction with the Map History states, you can restore an entire Area (defined by Area Brush) to a previous state, or Update an entire area if someone makes a NEWER version in another map file. Of course the engine won't import duplicates of what's already there, if the coords and asset name match perfectly.

Additionally, every brush can have a time-stamp to determine when it was created. If programmed well, a map-file can also embed a Timezone flag for more accurate timestamps. It will compensate each Actor's time with the local time zone, but you have to input your time zone in Options. Useful for overseas collaboration.

--- Working with Network Mapping ---

When networking with someone, every time your buddy makes a change or a new brush, two things can happen:

1: a kind of "Soft" brush can appear so you can see what he's doing without having to Rebuild. It's a Boolean brush that cuts itself up on the fly quickly without interrupting your workflow.

2: Whenever your buddy adds a brush or actor, a "?" will appear at that location, and will NOT load until you hit Refresh. At that time, all your buddie's changes will load. Simple Actors are always visible, as well as BSP which is represented by a Soft brush until you compile your end.

This is most useful for not having to load complex meshes and making your side stutter while you're trying to work, but I would still perfer seeing everything loaded live, so that we can work "live" with vo-ip communication, and no interruptions in workflow. It has to be as if you have a team of people in the same map, at the same time. I want to see what they're doing while they talk.

---

You can chat with your buddy down at the bottom, and voice-chat, or even (if possible) make one of your viewports into a Webcam.

You can always see his camera flying around live, as well as the cameras of Spectators (who cannot make changes to the level, but can play with you and watch).
You can even hop into the game with him (playing within the editor of course) and commence construction even as a player in the game, with bots, done in the 3d view, which can be maximized with a hotkey.

---

Spectators can connect to servers (that are spectator-enabled). Password protected servers can also allow spectators...

---

Up to (tons) of people can work on one map at once.

With good coordination and planning, this can make multiplayer and especially single-player game creation EXTREMELY convenient and fast.

--

I might be forgetting stuff, but that's good enough for now...

[MonsOlympus]

Oh I was thinking more of a merge operation for packages kinda like joining 2 sound packs or materials packs together to form a bigger one containing the things from both. I spose it doesnt have to be limited to sound and textures but I thought those would be most relevant.

I wonder what scene manager is, possibly like I was saying with a hierarchy perhaps?