Realism

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This short tutorial is meant as a guide to those who immediately think that they're going to go build a map of their house with exact dimensions the moment they open UnrealEd--it's just a simple note on creating "realism" in the Unreal Universe.

Unreal is aptly named.  For one thing, the proportions of the players are wrong.  For another, everyone is always running, and you can jump approximately 12 feet in the air.  For these reasons, it’s impossible to create a realistically sized virtual model of the Real World in UnrealEd.  However, this is not to say you should stray completely from realism.  The more real the world feels, the more the player will become involved, immersed in your world, and it will increase the value of the map.  If you should wish to create a realistic model, though, know that sixteen Unreal Units approximate to one foot in the X/Y directions, and some 10uu=1ft vertically.  And if you want a map like that just to walk through and look around, I suggest creating a physicsvolume (Chapter 3-h-i) and setting its TerminalVelocity to 96 or so to simulate walking speeds, as well as raising the Z velocity to about -120.  Download the NoWeapons Mutator from Angel Mapper, and use the console command (bring down the main console by hitting the tilde (~) key, or the mini-console by hitting Tab in-game) "togglescreenshotmode" without the quotes to get rid of the HUD and all weapons elements.  This could be useful for a demonstration.  Also, note that a player is unrealistically wide, and so more than likely your model will end up feeling either too thin or too tall without distortion of the map.

If you wish to have a map start with the NoWeapons mutator enabled, you must embed it into the map.  See the page http://wiki.beyondunreal.com/wiki/Embedding_Code for an explanation.  Toggling the HUD off will cause it to remain off the next time UT is started, but if you want a map to always get rid of the HUD, create a mutator which executes the line "Killall HUD" and embed it in your map as well.  If you use the togglescreenshotmode command instead of "killall HUD," it's possible that you might accidentally toggle the HUD back on when you begin the map.

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Home | UT2004 Tutorials | Key Terms | Multiplayer Design