Help:Introduction to UnrealEd
So you've just installed the Killing Floor SDK and now you're wondering "What can I do with this?". Well a lot actually, every time you start up a game and play, you are playing a map that someone has made in an editor made specifically for the game you are playing. This tutorial will give you a small introduction to what you can do with the editor supplied with Killing Floor so that you'll have it easier to create your own maps in just a short read.
It'll teach you how to move around, create a room, apply textures and lighting and will explain some terms mappers might use to explain things in later tutorials.
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[edit] Info
The SDK is the most important tool a mapper has to create his own fantasy worlds, without it, the mapper is nothing. You'll get to know the KF SDK quite well in the coming weeks as you browse trough the tutorials. Although the SDK is quite powerful on its own, it's not the only tool a mapper has to create maps, but it is the most essential one out of the bunch and it is what this entire page is dedicated to.
[edit] The interface
This isn't the most exciting stuff to read, but it is essential to know your way around the interface as it will be your toolkit to create a map, like a mechanic has a toolbox full of hammers, screws, etc... The editors interface will be your hammer.
The first time you start the Killing Floor SDK up, you'll be greeted with a screen similar to this one:
[edit] Camera movement
So now you are looking at an empty black nothingness with blue lines going trough it, so what can we do here? You can move. All the movement in the editor is controlled by your mouse, each button, or combination of buttons will decide how you move trough the world. If you want to move in a specified viewport (3d/top/left/front), you will need to click in them and hold the corresponding mouse button(s), what each mouse button does will be explained now.(note that the combinations explained below are for the 3d viewport)
[edit] Moving forward/backward
Pressing and holding the left mouse button will allow you to move forward or backward depending if you move your mouse forward or backward. Scrolling the mouse to the left/right will let you turn in the editor (while holding the left mouse button).
[edit] Looking left/right & up/down
Even though you can look left and right using the left mouse button, holding the right mouse button will do the same, with the addition of being able to look up and down. You are unable to move while holding the right mouse button, you can only look around.
[edit] Moving up/down & sliding to the left/right
Now if you hold down both left and right mouse button= and move your mouse forwards/backwards, you will move up and down in the editor; similarly if you slide the mouse left or right, you will strafe/slide in the editor.
[edit] Creating your first room
[edit] Subtracting your very first room
Now that you know how to move around in the editor, lets create our first room. In the left side panel there is a cube, left click on it.
Now you should see a red outline of a cube in the 3d viewport (and 2d viewports as well), if you don't, use your mouse to move around till you do.
This red box is called a "Red builder brush", there is only one red builder brush in your map, with this one builder brush all other primitives will be created.
If you want to adjust the settings of the box (width, height and length), you'll need to right click the cube in the left panel (the one you earlier left clicked). A new popup will appear titled "CubeBuilder". In the cube builder you can insert the values you want to assign to your primitive box. Try changing to height to "512" then press "build" and see what happens to your red builder brush.
Values like wall thickness don't matter as long as you are not creating an additive brush (later more on this).
So this is nice, now we have a red outline of a box, but in this stage you wont see it ingame. To see it ingame you'll need to perform a "CSG operation", sounds hard doesn't it, but the good thing is it isn't, it's just pressing a button. But before that, you should know the following:
Unreal Engine 2.5 works on the principle of a subtractive world, which means, even though the world in the editor looks empty, it is one huge box where you will carve smaller boxes, cylinders, cones, etc... out of. These are generally considered "primitives" as they are the most primitive way to shape your world. To do this we need to use "CSG" operations. CSG operations can carve (subtract) or add to the world. The 4 CSG operations are Add, Subtract, Intersect and Deintersect and can be found here:
but of those 4, in 99% of the cases you'll only be using 2 of those, Add or Subtract.
Seeing the world is one huge box, the first CSG operation you'll be doing will be a Subtract. you can find the subtract here:
After pressing the subtract button you will see a box with bubbles all over the place appearing where the red builder brush it's outline is similar to this:
So congratulations, you've created your very first room in Unreal Editor 3.0!
[edit] Moving the Red Builder Brush/creating a new room
So you just created a room, but how would you go about creating a second one?
To move the red builder brush, select it (it should suddenly start glowing red if it's selected). Go to a 2D viewport (f.e. top view) and hold down "ctrl" while moving the mouse, you should now see the brush moving. Note that you should never move any kind of brush in the 3D viewport as it might end up a bit sloppy and sloppy work ends up with a lot of headaches.
[edit] Increasing/Decreasing the grid size
As you've probably noticed, the red builder brush is snapped to a grid, to increase or decrease the grid size go to the bottom and click the following dropbox:
once there you can select what you want for gridsize. Advice: leave it at 16 while working on your map and try to not go any lower, I'm not saying you aren't allowed to, but it's a lot easier to get brushes that aren't straight anymore when you work on a smaller grid and odd shaped brushes might cause errors in the long run.
[edit] Texturing your first room
The bubble texture is the engines default texture, as long as you don't assign another texture it will stay this bubble texture. Note that you shouldn't release a map with this texture. So now we will assign some of our own textures to the room.
[edit] Selecting a wall and applying a texture to it
[edit] Selection methods
So before we can give a wall a texture, we need to specify which wall we want to edit the texture from. So move the mouse to the wall you wish to select and press the left mouse button (note that it might be a bit tricky selecting the wall at first due to the small grey crosshair, but you'll get used to it). If you have the wall selected it should get a blue tint like so:
If you want to select multiple walls, you need to hold the "ctrl" button and select the next wall you wish to add to the selection. If you wish to remove an already selected wall from the selection, you got to hover over it and select it while holding the "ctrl" button, if you did this correct the blue tint will disappear.
If you want to select an entire room, you will need to select on wall of that room and press "shift + b", if you did this correct, the entire room should get the blue tint.
[edit] Applying a texture
So now you've got the entire room selected, now we will go to the texture browser. You can find the texture browser at the top. It's on the 3rd bar down from the top.
When you press it, the texture browser should pop up and should look like this:
Now we need to open a texture package. To do this we press File -> Open in the Texture browser. Lets open KillingFloorOfficeTextures. With that open, we only see 2 very weird and unusable textures, not exactly what we wanted. The reason for this is that we ended up in the very first group tab of the texture package. Larger texture packages are divided into groups for ease of use. Now that's all fine and all, but how do we change this? The group dropdown box can be found here:
Let's select the "OfficeCommon" group. Note that next to the group dropbox there is a button named "All", if you press this, all groups will be shown at once, this comes in handy if you want to see the content of the entire package at once.
Now that we are in the OfficeCommon group we want to filter to see only the wall textures, to filter the textures in that group we go to the bottom of the Texture browser where there is a textbox. In that textbox we enter "Wall". Now we can see 4 wall textures.
(Note that filter only filters on the name of the texture, not for what you can use it, so if someone names a texture "frenchfries3" and it's supposed to be a wall texture, filtering for "Wall" will not make it show, but if you enter "frenchfries" into the filter it will show.)
If you click the texture you want, in this case I'll chose the last texture which is named "Wall_W_Base", the surfaces/walls you selected earlier should get the texture you just clicked. This or something similar should be viewable in your 3d viewport:
[edit] Rescaling textures
Not entirely what we wanted, as you can see the texture is quite big (it's only showing a portion, the rest is getting cut off). So in order to fix that, we right click one surface (with all the other surfaces still selected) and select "Surface Properties" (shortcut F5, remember that one)
a new popup named Surface properties should now be viewable:
The Flags tab is currently of no interest to us, so go to the Pan/Rot/Scale tab.
once there go to "Scaling", press the dropdown box and select 0.25 and the press "Apply". 0.25 is the most common scale for any texture in Killing Floor; there are cases in which you'll have to apply a different scale, but in 95% of the cases the textures will be 0.25 in scale.
Aside from Scaling, you have Rotation, Panning and Lightmap resolition. Rotation you can rotate the texture 45/90 degrees or flip it horizontal or vertical. In panning you can slide the surface its texture vertical or horizontal with the values 1, 4, 16 or 64. The Light Map is by default 32, the lower this is, the better your shadows look (and crispier), but the longer you will be compiling. i think 16 is a good default for all visible textures. you should never go below 4, it's just not worth the extra compile time.
Once you are finished here this should be the end result;
(note that i deselected the surfaces after i applied the scaling, so now they don't have that blue tint anymore).
[edit] Adding a light to your first room
[edit] Adding a light
This one is pretty simple, to add a light to a location you just need to right click and select "Add light here" and you should see a light bulb appear. You can move lights similarly like you move the red builder brush (holding ctrl and moving them in the 2d viewports while they are selected), this also applies to anything else like static meshes, actors, etc... . Position your light where you want it and press the "Build All" button at the top:
Once it's finished compiling you should have this or a similar result:
[edit] Changing a light's colour and brightness
Now we will change some setting of that light, to do so right click the light and select "Light Properties" or press the shortcut "F4". Now you should see a new window with a large list of tabs. There are only 2 tabs that matter to us at this moment: LightColor and Lighting; open them both. You should see this:
Now we will change the light colour, go the to LightColor tab and press anything in it, now next to lightcolor there should be 2 buttons, the first is pick, the second is "Color", press it. Now you can choose your color like you would in paint or photoshop. I'm going to go for a light yellow, once you're satisfied press "ok". Now this can be an irritating process as usually it will take a color near the one you selected and/or will increase/decrease the brightness dramatically. So the first option from LightColor there is "Brightness" adjust it to something you think is correct.
After that, again press the build all option to finalize the lighting (before you bake a lighting trough the compiler, it will try to guess the outcome of the light)
[edit] Adding a player spawn
To add a player spawn simply right click where you want one and press "Add player start here", a weird icon with an arrow should appear where you selected it. The arrow points to where the player will look when he spawns there.
next to the build all button, there is a "play map now" button, but before you press that, you should read the sidenote below.
[edit] Sidenote
If you press "play map" now, it will freeze for several minutes/seconds before you can play the map, to stop this from happening you need to add one item spawn, we'll add an kfammobox actor which will spawn ammo for us. To the top there is a chess piece, if you click that you'll open the Actor class browser:
Now open the following tabs: first "*pickup" and then "*ammo". There you should see KFAmmoPickup, do not open the group, just highlight it like so:
When it is highlighted go back to your 3d viewport and right click where you want to add the selected ammospawner and then select "Add KFAmmoPickup Here"
If all went well this should be the outcome:
When you have that, press Build All. Now if you press "Play map" in the top corner it shouldn't freeze up for several seconds/minutes when loading the map.
[edit] Finishing up
[edit] Saving the map
To save the map press file -> save and enter whatever name you wish to give to your map.
[edit] Making it viewable ingame in the map browser
Now if you go ingame, and you didn't give your map the name "kf-mapname" it will not be viewable in the multiplayer or solo map browser, to make it so you can see it, it needs to have the "kf-" prefix.
