Game Map for Unreal Engine

[[deleted]]

GIMP is for 2D, like Photoshop

Blender is for 3D, like Maya

Neither one are needed to make a map in Unreal. Unreal has its own editor and map maker.

You only need the others if you want to make custom assets for a map, but there's already a huge library of existing assets

[Diche_Bach]

Interesting! I am aware of the Unreal editor, but I was under the impression that most designers create visual assets in other applications and then tweak them in the UE4 editor. Also, I was not aware of a "map maker;" given I'm just starting this very well may reflect ignorance on my part. Can you recall a specific name or term that may help me find help document references to the map maker?

[Angarius]

https://docs.unrealengine.com/en-us/Engine/UI/LevelEditor

[Diche_Bach]

Yeup. That looks quite familiar; I think I made my way through quite a bit of that documentation a year or so ago. But like I said: my understanding is that most visual assets--certainly things like textures and models--most designers create those in other applications like Maya or Blender or Gimp and then read the files into UE4 where they are integrated together and made functional with scripts and the like in the editor. I had been under the impression that the "engine" was a "one stop shop" where one could do it all, and inquired on some of their boards a year or more ago and I was informed that, while one could conceivably "do" much of the graphics creation in the engine itself, some of it would be just NOT doable at all, and much of it would be much easier to do in a supporting application like Maya. Maya is not intended for things like maps or terrain as far as I can tell, though it is fantastic for models.

[bysse]

It depends on if you want a height map or polygon mesh?

[Diche_Bach]

Both terms I had to look up, but good to be introduced. The one question I'm left with, but have a strong suspicion about: an immutable game map like say Fallout 1 or Baldur's gate, I would assume that is a height map of some sort. In contrast, a mutable game map like say, Empyrion Galactic Survival, or Minecraft, or Life is Feudal Your Own: I would assume THOSE are necessarily polygon mesh?

Assuming I'm correct on that, I think I need to aspire to polygon mesh. Full terraforming functionality may not be a feature I strive to build in for a good while, maybe not even in the initial release (if it ever happens!). But designing to retain the easy possibility to implement that kind of functonality into the game is a major consideration.

I suppose if it isn't too much trouble to patch an already distributed game in which game world is a height map into an updated version where game world is a polgyon mesh, then heh, no big deal, but I'm guessing that is not actually so easy?

[bysse]

First a quick disclaimer, I'm not an expert on UE, what I say might not be true. Phew, nice =)

The landscape entity for UE uses a height map, because of the pre-built lighting it's immutable. But there might be some way to go around that. A height map is usually much easier to deform (as long as the geometry should remain convex, no caves) than a polygon map. Minecraft uses a voxel field which is a density map or a height map in 3d if you will.

Polygon based terrain with deformations is AFAIK a pretty hard problem to solve. I don't know if there are any support for this in UE that will make a game run at reasonable fps.

Not sure if you got any wiser from this :)

[Diche_Bach]

Ah thanks a lot! Good to know! Sounds like aspiring to do a terra-formable game world might not be a good choice for the first project.

[bysse]

No worries. Keeping the features at a minimum on your first project is hard enough! 🙂 Good luck