The room...

Generic Rooms. What can i say? Generic rooms are boring. theres no room to develope your skills with any kind of editing programme, in this case UED. It was a simple task, create some filler rooms for a 3d visual recreation of Derby's Westfield Centre. one that could have been done in ten minutes, copied and pasted a hundred times, and been called done.

No. Wrong. Fail.

Our real Task was to get used to the unreal editor, use this opportunity to get some mapping knowledge, learn something new.

And so i did.

It was mentioned during tutorials that a Dead Rising style reimagining of the westfield centre would be a fun thing to do. and this did take over my minds view of what i should do for this task. A room of horrors, a room ON FIRE!

Below is my generic room (singular, i really didnt want to just make generic rooms). As you can see, its pretty basic. almost all of this room is made up of the same object copied a few times, nothing major, some basic lighting but i really only did this as a starting point.







It's not high quality, but i think you will agree that the one thing it IS is generic. In other words, Boring.





However, taking this room, adding items on the shelves, some falling off, some not exactly what you expect to see in a shop (including a new floor texture), adding a little lighting, and some special emitters gives you something entirely different.





It was no simple thing, mind you. up until this point i had not paid much thaught to how fire works in unreal. i had assumed it was an emitter (and i was right, miraculously), but i had no idea of how they worked, what they could "emit" or if they would produce their own light (in hindsight the lights i did use were a bit bright, but they illuminate the room better like this). But, as i had already set my mind to getting fire to work, i set about trying to teach myself.

That was a bad idea, while i could have figured it out on my own eventually, and i do mean eventually, there really wasn't time for that, and so i saught out my peers advice, which after much umming and utterances of the phrase "you...what?" i garnered the advice that i should look at the "Big Red Book", or Mastering Unreal: the art of level design, a book, that in my idocy i had left at home that day. while i did do more work in uni that day, i'll avoid leaping around map making topics, and stick to this right now. Mastering unreal (hence forth refferred to as the big red book, or "the brb" for short) is a truly wondrous resource, and within its finely example pages, i found what i was looking for, a tutorial on using emmitters.

Emitters can be used for many things, but for this instance (the creation of FIRE) i needed only one type of emitter, a sprite emitter. sprite emitters, simple speaking, create a sprite, or series thereof, that have their own velocity, acceleration (along a set of axis defined coordinates), lifespan, and multitude of other variables, though the ones above are what i am going to focus on. the llifespan is simple enough, its how long a given sprite that pops out of an emitter lasts, make the value lower, and the sprite will dissappear more swiftly, make the value higher, and you will have a big line of sprites which will drop your framerate...a lot. these sprites are essentially intangible, they will go through anything, which is useful (i placed my emitters inside of an object, causing a flame sprouting from an object rather than a flame floating a little bit above an object looking abjectly silly) but it can be a hindrance, at times my flames did rise through the cielling, or shelves, or at one point when i changed the values for acceleration incorrectly, through the whole room and out the door. Speaking of acceleration, it is important to not that acceleration is NOT the speed at which the sprite moves away from its origin, this is the velocity, acceleration is the direction in which the sprite accelerates.

once set up correctly, i have a fire, that moves with liquid pace directly upwards. An object on fire, yay. but theres no smoke, boo. It turns out, that each emitter actor can actually play host to any number of actual emitters, allowing a single emitter to produce both smoke and flame from the same starting point. the thory of producing smoke is generally the same as making fire, it just has to rise higher.

And there we have it, a brand new tool for use in level design learned, now what?

"How about a tank?"


Hmm...how about a tank indeed.

a subject for my next post.