About Importing textures

Most of the textures used on the map were from the original map, some of them are from another maps and UT2003 generic textures, but when I needed specific textures like for the Tea boxes and bags I used the same files specification, an 8-bit BMP file in powers of 64 (64x64, 128x128, 512x256) I never fooled around with other kind of file/texture specification, for example creating transparent textures.

The programs I used:
MS Paint, I learned how to work with it and I use it for most of my works, doing pixels color restoration or for saving images with certains specifications. I've done so many good images with this simple program that I like to say to people that you don't have to spend 200 dollars in state of the art designing software when MS Paint can fulfill all your normal user necesities.


80% of this image was made with MS Paint.

Following Q/A map evaluation and advises I came up with a new version.

I changed the skymap to a round starry night and removed the sunlight actor so now we don't have shadows present.

I added more lights to the deck of the ship, because everything was dark but the hull. Im planing to do some fire torches with Chris Woo meshes.

Fog is added to the ZoneInfo actor, so the elements that are far away from the character will be hidden because of the fog and wont be rendered by the video card, that should fix the Terrain rendering problem.

Found and fixed the BSP errors problems (Invisible surfaces) thanks to people from the ATARI FORUM

I want to solve the puzzle of the Tea Box, so I ran a couple of tests with the editor and the results were totally different as I espected, so I couldn't come with an answer to the puzzle, but I want to share my notes with the class and maybe someone more inteligent than me can figure it out where the problem is and solve it for the our good sake.

1st TEST

I change the name of the map to BR-xxx with the purpose of been able to run the game as Bombing Run and having a weapon. I saw a nice effect (long time ago) that when you shoot at the anchor it react to the enviroment, if it was in the water, it floats it start to sink very slowly, and once in the ground you can shoot at it and it reacts to the fire and start to move in the same direction that you are shooting. Same thing happens when it is in the ground. It reacts pretty well with the surface and it doesn't go half way down.

I went to the properties of the anchor and it is an KActor (dunno what that means and what kind it is), then I went to Display/StaticMesh and
change the anchor mesh with the Tea box static mesh. In theory (at least in mine) it should react the same way, because it's keeping the
same anchors properties, the only diference is the displaying object.

The result: It doesn't react the same way!... I shoot at the Anchor-now-Tea-Box and it didn't react at all!!!...

I started to make copies of the anchor and chaged the displays to diferents static meshes. Originals UT meshes reacts like the anchor, they fall to the ground and reacts as it should react with the terrain, but customs meshes (Tea box and the gun made by ourselves) didn't even want to move at all.

Conclusion 1st Test: there should be some properties when importing models that we don't know about, so we should do some research about properties when importing meshes from Maya or any 3D modeleer. cuz the properties of the tea box and the anchor meshes are the same on the static mesh window.

2nd TEST

Knowing all this, I changed the map again to BTP-xxx so that way I can pick up the boxes, changed the boxes to different UT meshes and custom meshes to see if the react different.

Result: All of them react the same way, you can pick up any object, throw it and the will go down half way as the tea box do.

Conclusion 2nd Test: The problem doesn't relay in the meshes as I though after the 1st test, they relay in the Kactor code but I can't
really imagine in what way... there must be something in that .U actor code that is interacting with some collision properties of the meshes.


My advise: The software team should check the Kactor code of the anchor and look for something that has to be do with the collision
properties of the displaying meshes or something that reacts with the meshes properties, while the Content team should research on importing 3D objects and meshes properties and why custom meshes reacts in a different way as UT meshes do.

I was looking for advise with the Unreal Community about transfering the textures and SM out of the myLevel package.

After the v18 map was released, I took it and fix those objects linked to the original Cutlass map, also changed the old boxes with new ones with the .u code released this week by the soft team.

Also, I have been working looking ways to expand the cutlass ship adding a new floor and another set of flags as you can see on this screenshot.



but still is a time consuming work.

After that, I want to focus on the urban buildings, but I need some references of Boston bay in that time

What im on to:

I been working mostly with the UnrealEd, still learning it's capabilities.
I found that Textures have a lot of diffents ways you can work with, and it's still a huge mistery for me to solve.

I was able to do some pretty nice water textures, reflecting textures, cubics textures (sound's odd but it's something like that) and mix em all up in to one texture.

I think I mastered the terrain properties very well and mixing textures, same with skylights, skyboxes and fluid surfaces.

Working with the Cutlass map was a very good excersise, when I was deleting pieces from the original map, I found very interesting things that are not mentioned on any tutorial that I have done so far.

Static meshes can make your life easier (if you already have them)

Visit my Webpage www2.bc.edu/~mendozaa/