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Urban Terror Blogs
Frankie V's blog
Making Casa UE4 eps 2
Note: This is a series of videos of Casa a, well known map for the game Urban Terror, showing work in progress as it's converted from idtech3 to Unreal Engine 4.
In this milestone video all of the cheats of photo sourced windows and doors have bee replaced with geometry as well as balconies added as map objects. A proper sky dome was also added to help improve over all lighting and shadows.
Some things of interest the facades of the buildings themselves were converted directly from brush to polygon by exporting them from the original .map file and the total face count for all of the buildings is less than 10k. By comparison HD weapons will be between 7-10k with player models between 15-20k, give or take based on the design, so the actual filling of a volume of space is highly efficient as compared to doing the same environment over again using brushes.
Also of interest is how much more efficient UE4 is when it comes to map objects in general and although there is a lot of windows and door casings they are all modified versions of a single window object that has been instanced copied so it's memory foot print is equal to the single object.
In all though if not for the less than ideal resolution of the texture images themselves a 1-1 conversion of a brush based .map map could easily be completed in a weekend and be considered done however the hard part creating a mesh based map is the need to have in place a proper source control as the map grows using progressive design ideals.
Source control for Casa was a “MUST” as what was extracted from the .map file was a massive amount of mesh and texture data that in it's raw state was total unmanageable lacking any kind of logical separation between supporting sub-components. A way to think of it is being lost in the forest when your job is to cut down the tree. What tree?
The first iteration of attempt to create a usable source control chain started during testing in UDK as to design pathways that best fits our needs as well as to have in hand a visual representation as to performance differences switching from idtech3 to UE4.
At the time we switched from UDK to UE4 it could be said that we had the working structure for HD done, with the exception of movement mechanics as we were able to run around in game using Casa with our weapons as well as our player models and it was clear as a bell the a game does not inherent engine characteristics but are added by design choices.
Back to the subject in hand in UDK the base work for source control was achieved to some degree by breaking things down into manageable blocks and each block given an identifier and exported relative to world origin 0 0 0. Doing so is not really ideal as to map objects in general but the result is each block would snap into place like a perfectly fitting Lego block.
Anyways to keep things short this is enough for now, with more to come, with a lot more divide and conquer in the mix as we have yet to disuse the pain of redoing the textures.
In this milestone video all of the cheats of photo sourced windows and doors have bee replaced with geometry as well as balconies added as map objects. A proper sky dome was also added to help improve over all lighting and shadows.
Some things of interest the facades of the buildings themselves were converted directly from brush to polygon by exporting them from the original .map file and the total face count for all of the buildings is less than 10k. By comparison HD weapons will be between 7-10k with player models between 15-20k, give or take based on the design, so the actual filling of a volume of space is highly efficient as compared to doing the same environment over again using brushes.
Also of interest is how much more efficient UE4 is when it comes to map objects in general and although there is a lot of windows and door casings they are all modified versions of a single window object that has been instanced copied so it's memory foot print is equal to the single object.
In all though if not for the less than ideal resolution of the texture images themselves a 1-1 conversion of a brush based .map map could easily be completed in a weekend and be considered done however the hard part creating a mesh based map is the need to have in place a proper source control as the map grows using progressive design ideals.
Source control for Casa was a “MUST” as what was extracted from the .map file was a massive amount of mesh and texture data that in it's raw state was total unmanageable lacking any kind of logical separation between supporting sub-components. A way to think of it is being lost in the forest when your job is to cut down the tree. What tree?
The first iteration of attempt to create a usable source control chain started during testing in UDK as to design pathways that best fits our needs as well as to have in hand a visual representation as to performance differences switching from idtech3 to UE4.
At the time we switched from UDK to UE4 it could be said that we had the working structure for HD done, with the exception of movement mechanics as we were able to run around in game using Casa with our weapons as well as our player models and it was clear as a bell the a game does not inherent engine characteristics but are added by design choices.
Back to the subject in hand in UDK the base work for source control was achieved to some degree by breaking things down into manageable blocks and each block given an identifier and exported relative to world origin 0 0 0. Doing so is not really ideal as to map objects in general but the result is each block would snap into place like a perfectly fitting Lego block.
Anyways to keep things short this is enough for now, with more to come, with a lot more divide and conquer in the mix as we have yet to disuse the pain of redoing the textures.
comments: Feel free to discuss this on our forums
Frankie V
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