Outdoor Environments and SkyBoxes
SniperBoB@planetdeusex.com

Ah, the great out doors. Kind of sad that so few maps ever have truly amazing out door environments. The last game I can recall that wowed me with its outdoor environments was... UNREAL! And what do you know, Deus Ex also had some really sweet environments! I love this engine!

Pop open a new map, Then open up the cube properties diolog box.

Now heres a cool thing about UnrealEd, you can enter Visual Basic style equations into these boxes. Like this:

(Yes, strangley enough UnrealEd was made entirely in Visual Basic)

Acceptable commands are addition ( + ), subtraction ( - ), multimpication ( * ) and division ( / ). It also allows you to use paratheses.

Now why do we need this you may ask? Simple! When creating any environment we want to be as nice as we posibly can be to our compiler. and to do this we need to use binary numbers (I think that's what they are called). So numbers like 16, 32, and 128 are prefered over numbers like 11 and 47. These numbers will still work, but can create more compile errors. Notice how 256 is a multiple of 128? and 32? AND 16? If you haven't figured it out already 256*15, like I entered above will be an acceptable number!

 

Now that you have your little UnrealEd tip of the day we can get constructing this environment.

Enter some values into those boxes. They probably don't need to be as large as mine, but it's you map. (Infact mine are rediculusly large, and I have actualy used smaller numbers in the map I have created) You also need to remember that in an outdoor environment, such as a city street, you don't need to worry about any excess space because the sky box (which will be discussed below tutorial) gives the illision of an infinite out door environment. Some extra space out side is always good!

Subtract that brush from the world and texture the ground something nice, but texture the "walls" and "ceiling" the same texture that you will never use (pick a nice bright ugly one). This texture will become our Fake Backdrop. Just like a photographer has a backdrop he places you in front of that looks real on camera, Unreal Ed has backdrops. We call these backdrops Sky Boxes.

A sky box is a user created backdrop that is not your usually sixsided environment bitmap. It is a dynamic camera! It's really cool, but we will have to get back to that.

First of as some of you may have noticed already, it is a real pain to light such a large environment. So were going to need some help. This is where ZoneInfo comes in handy!

Pop that baby into the map somewhere, try not to get it confused with the DeusExLevelInfo, and open up it's properties.

Under zone light you will need to change the AmbientBrightness, AmbientHue, and AmbientSaturation properties to get the color and brightness you want. The key to picking the best values here is to adjust and rebuild them (watch the dynamic lighting view) until the entire environment is the level of brigtness of the darkest object you want. Confusing? I know. Just remember that no object that is in that zone can be darker than that setting. Only lit birghter by light objects, so for a night scene keep that brightness value low. And for a day scene you can raise it just a little bit. I set mine at 15 for a night scene. (I also use a zone info in many large indoor areas, it makes life easier and your maps look better)

 

IF YOU HAVE ANY PROBLEMS WITH THE ZONE LIGHT YOU SHOULD SEE THE ZONE TUTORIAL OR E-MAIL ME

 

Next up is some stuff in our environment. I am going to add a little shop. To do this you need to first use addition brushes to create the general shape of the stucture. Then you fine tune and do the inside of it with subtraction brushes.

Study this image closely. You will notice how I created a simple square building, then hollowed it and a door way out. (The doors are not movers, just brushes) That is best way to go about creating an out door environment. You can keep adding and subtracting as much as you like.

Now you take over! Make a little city street and fill it up. Create some buildings and an ally and whatever else you want. This is what I came up with:

(WARNING! NOTE! ATTENTION! This is a little pile of crap I threw togething in about 30 seconds, as can be seen by the big blue block on the right side. It is no indication of talents or artisitic initition. In fact it makes me sick to look at this crappy little environment I just made and If given the energy I would go back and scrap this whole damn map and do it again!) Sorry about the image, my capture program doesn't always like the skinny lines UnrealEd draws, THEY REALLY ARE THERE! I SWEAR!

In your map you really should close off an open ends to prevent the player from wandering into a empty little spot where the city just...... ends.............

NOW FOR A SKY BOX!!

Go create a seperate room way off to the side of the map. Don't go crazy, just make it far enough so that it does not over lap with the rest of the map in any of the views and will allow for expansion. (to get the camera there you may need to switch to texture view, and look for a while)

It doesn't have to be a box, it can be some sort of deformed trapazoid or an oblate shperoid, or whatever you want. I like to keep it to a simple six sided brush.

Now the fun part, we need to create a little imaginary world for our player to see where ever we tell the engine to show the fake back drop.

First we need our camera, a.k.a. our SkyBoxInfo!

Place that near the bottem in the middle and begin lighting (you can use it's zone light property like we did above as well as normal lighting) and texturing this room like a sky should look... (I used sheets for the buildings, remeber it's just a backdrop) also, be careful, because DeusEx players have a compas, a friend of mine got mad at me because the sunset was the wrong way :-)

(insert a in game picture of that nice sky box I made here, unless unrealed desides to crash and oh... SCREW IT ALLl!! UGH!!)

There you go! Now return to those surfaces you textered all the same bright ugly color and select them. Right click and click surface properties. Check "FakeBackDrop"

Important to remember is the fact that at any given location the player will always see as if they were standing with their eyes at the SkyBoxInfo.

All that's left is to rebuild and run!

 

 

Sky boxes have some limits: each map can only have 1 sky box, and if over complicated, can lag the game down. Other than those and a few others, you can just run wild! Take for example some of the sky boxes used in other unreal engine maps. Some Unreal Tournament maps had shooting stars, and others had flying cars. Others had lightning effects worked into them that could be triggered on demand. Some really cool stuff. Crazy shit I have come up with:

 

The Night Of The Amazon Women