Mapcore's UE4 Whitebox Challenge

I keep doing the same thing haha!!!

Seriously, I'm having at least one crash per 30 mins using undo. Guess I'm gonna stop using it entirely like you said Chris.

Undo is incredibly fickle. I press it and BRACE FOR IMPACT.

Yeah holy shit it's bad, I refrain from doing it at all and now sometimes I do it on 'instinct' and of course it crashes 50% of the times.

Also, speaking of undo. Saving the map purges the undo history, that really sucks -.-'

Quote from Sjonsson

Yeah holy shit it's bad, I refrain from doing it at all and now sometimes I do it on 'instinct' and of course it crashes 50% of the times.

Also, speaking of undo. Saving the map purges the undo history, that really sucks -.-'

Shit just got Unreal

I should share a kind of legendary quote from Crytek internally, ages ago, when the undo was crashing all the time, the programmer responsible simple said "don't make mistakes" Every time it crashes from undo people say that quote haha. Seriously though, it's very hard to make an undo work well in a real time editor - even more so when you have lightmaps. I do hope they improve it though, it's just about the only thing that is really negative from my week or so using it.

I suppose another down side is - after you compiled lighting on the BSP, if you edit a single shape the entire scenes lighting resets and looks weird, this is kind of a shame too. Ofcourse, for prototyping I should probably be using dynamic lighting only, which would solve the problem

Interesting that you guys have been crashing a lot, I've been working with Unreal for months now and I've had 1 crash. My guess is it's the BSP stuff that's broken at the moment; I'm not using any BSP, entirely models, and mine is pretty stable.

Quote from 2d-chris

I should share a kind of legendary quote from Crytek internally, ages ago, when the undo was crashing all the time, the programmer responsible simple said "don't make mistakes" Every time it crashes from undo people say that quote haha. Seriously though, it's very hard to make an undo work well in a real time editor - even more so when you have lightmaps. I do hope they improve it though, it's just about the only thing that is really negative from my week or so using it.

And more usually, there's the "It perfectly works on my PC"

Quote from PogoP

Interesting that you guys have been crashing a lot, I've been working with Unreal for months now and I've had 1 crash. My guess is it's the BSP stuff that's broken at the moment; I'm not using any BSP, entirely models, and mine is pretty stable.

Me neither, not a single crash in three weeks, but moving a BSp takes me about 2 seconds ahah

Quote from 2d-chris

I should share a kind of legendary quote from Crytek internally, ages ago, when the undo was crashing all the time, the programmer responsible simple said "don't make mistakes" Every time it crashes from undo people say that quote haha. Seriously though, it's very hard to make an undo work well in a real time editor - even more so when you have lightmaps. I do hope they improve it though, it's just about the only thing that is really negative from my week or so using it.

I suppose another down side is - after you compiled lighting on the BSP, if you edit a single shape the entire scenes lighting resets and looks weird, this is kind of a shame too. Ofcourse, for prototyping I should probably be using dynamic lighting only, which would solve the problem

Hahaha! But then why would you ever want to have an Undo function? D:

Yeah that's the problem with static light, I talked to a 17 year programmer vet about static lighting and I asked him: 'When will the static lighting go away?! I hate it!'

To my dissapointment he answered that most probably not anytime soon since it is so cheap in comparison to dynamic lighting and the results are really good if used properly. Before next-gen (read UE4) spec was announced proper I was hoping for never baking a static lightmap again but well fuck me and my opinions right? *cries*

If they won't make the BSP undo more stable than it is right now I'm just gonna use BSPs for REALLY big chunks like floors, ceilings and huge walls.

My conspiracy theory is that programmers secretly are sadists who hate artists and designers who prevent them from making their (actually) good for nothing masterwork systems.

Quote from PogoP

Interesting that you guys have been crashing a lot, I've been working with Unreal for months now and I've had 1 crash. My guess is it's the BSP stuff that's broken at the moment; I'm not using any BSP, entirely models, and mine is pretty stable.

What version are you using? Did you build with a lot of BSPs? How complex shapes does your BSPs have?

A big update from me, man It's fun to see how far things have come

Here is a vid me me randomly jumping around like an idiot.

Some pics ...

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Awesome Chris, nice work! Love the really clean art style you've got going on, great greyboxing

Chris that's looking amazing even compared to the maps epic is putting together!

hehe thx, I'll see what I can do about getting this uploaded - so others can snoop if they want to - or use the assets I made.

PS: you guys used the vertex snapping, tis uber useful - most of my trims are positioned that way.

Fu chris.

Quote from 2d-chris

hehe thx, I'll see what I can do about getting this uploaded - so others can snoop if they want to - or use the assets I made.

PS: you guys used the vertex snapping, tis uber useful - most of my trims are positioned that way.

What kinds of assets have you made so far? One of the things I am wondering about is if I should just go ahead and build static meshes for my level or hold back on that and do more brush work exactly like epic is doing. I am kind of torn at the moment because Epic seems to be doing fairly heavy brush work but in my opinion it makes more sense to block things out with models. With that in mind though its hard to know exactly what the models for this engine are going to really be like due to the fact that it is a next gen platform and thus too cutting edge to really know how things will pan out. I have started to make meshes and place them into the environment so far though.

I haven't tried the vertex snapping yet. Ill have to take a look.

well, I've built the trim meshes, door shapes, textures and mtl's, light props and a few other bits. In my opinion, it doesn't matter how you want to flesh out your geometry so long as you can iterate without too much pain. The core of the map I built is still BSP, I have added a few polishing elements mostly to learn the workflow of getting meshes into the engine - figure out the basics of lighting and the materials.

I come from the age where if your map looked prettier you would get more people willing to test it, honestly at this point I've not even looked into getting this play tested, but I'm confident changes are not a problem because everything is built with modules and simple BSP.

Maps will be built almost exactly the same as the previous UT, without doubt. It will still end up being tiled modular assets with the usual dimensions and technical constraints of current gen hardware. I suppose working at Crytek I've had a bit of a head start with PBR and the likes, but nothing has changed in terms of how a level is put together.

In the case of UT4, they are actually looking for people from the community to set the examples - so any work upfront in terms of making tiling assets should make it easier for an artist to come on board and really kick ass. At least that's the hope with my map.

This also brings up the point of game metrics, which are changing from build to build. I heard on the stream that they want to get them locked down, as much as possible, soon, so level designers are a little more confident in their work. Nevertheless, it's never too early to start figuring out how to build final levels in terms of workflow.

Absolutely amazing Chris! I want to deathmatch in that thing, right now!

Some work with meshes and triplanar materials. Goal is to fill out the entire level with stuff like this.

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Quote from Sjonsson

Yeah I guess I'm just gonna take my time and make it right and learn how to built it right the first time

Super annoying, but well, all in all the bsp tools are a lot better than before!

Edit: I have the latest version and keep on getting very weird crashes, all when navigating camera and working with bsps. It's probably just me though, it usually is.

Edit 2: SRSLY WTF! I'm just getting random crashes doing nothing special, like changing the length of steps in a stair etc. I have no clue of what's going on.

This has been happening to me too, since I started using the editor a few months ago. Mostly when working with BSP it crashes very frequently. Hopefully they get on it soon