Unreal Editor/Script

Over the past few months I've been dinking with this game dev environment, and in the past couple of weeks really am starting to get somewhere...I'm pretty sure I've got a strong grip on the building environment, texturing, and some initial scripting. I actually modeled my SL house in Unreal, and run around it shooting monsters. Man finding BSD holes and fixing them can be tough, it's amazing how much of the complexity of building SL hides. Textures and measurements that work fine in SL need extensive revision for the finicky and subtractive nature of Unreal.

Unreal Editor is a powerful tool, and gets you a lot closer to the reality of game design and mechanics, but it's quirky. Any interest in starting discussion about this tool and Unreal Script would be welcome (by me anyway), especially with the release of Unreal 2k4.

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Yes about the BSD holes, but you're assuming that all the interior design and landscape is done with static meshes imported from Maya or some such. BSD based terrain objects, which you can draw a brush for and "add" into the subtracted space then manipulate the vertices on, as well as using primitives to "add" features like a square for a computer console, a corner building in your big rectangle, can cause BSD holes, hall of mirrors, and so on. You can easily get these errors if you play around with your grid too much. Static meshes don't suffer from many of these issues and render faster, but I'm still pushing the capability of the tool itself. I got a copy of Maya Personal to try and work with the static meshes, but PLE 5.0 doesn't support the plug in that let you export to Unreal.

One of the great things about the editor is you can actually create these errors. I used to look at Anarchy Online, and wonder why looking through a door often created the hall of mirrors effect, but as I can now create that effect in the editor, I know the technical reason. Then I reverse the steps to fix it.