Blog

The UT3 City "mod" is available to download here. View the original report here. If you download it, please let me know, and tell me what you think in the comments.

No longer available to download - sorry.


It is a cross between a map and a mod, and could serve to become the base of a game with some tweaking. It is a basic city environment with options for global events such as weather and time of day, and is full configurable. A gameplay element could easily be added on top to form part of a mod and retain all the options.

A GUI is included from which to alter the settings, and was made with Windows Forms/C++ so requires all the required elements for that to run. Alternatively, the .txt file that it creates can be edited manually, and the commands can be found below.

Installation
For installation, copy the CTF-City.ut3 and CTF-City.ini files into the folder


and copy City.upk into


I haven't tested the file location for a Steam installation of the game, but the structure should be fairly similar.

For the external application to have any effect, the event.txt file that the .exe creates needs to go into where the game is installed:


The CityConfig.exe should ideally be in this same place as the .txt file that is created goes into the same location as the .exe for now, so perhaps a shortcut made to the .exe would be worthwhile.

Loading the mod
Load UT3, select instant action then capture the flag. "City" should appear at the bottom of the list. Select it, click next, and set the bots slider to 0 (this will be overridden by game elements so having more than 0 will produce different results) and then start the game.

Console commands
To execute a console command, open up the console and type "causeevent" followed by one of the commands below. The variables are self explanatory so I won't go into any detail except where necessary. Some of these commands can also be manually put into the event.txt file if you don't have the correct framework installed to run the GUI.

Related posts

 

    RegisterLogin

Post a comment

This was a project on my postgraduate degree, and tested my problem solving skills. The end result is a city that can be used as the base of a game or a mod, and has controllable events such as weather and time of day. These events can be set to automatic, so the weather and time of day change appropriately, or manually set to be permanently raining and at night, for example.

The environment and effects themselves were created in 3D Studio Max and imported into the Unreal Editor. This meant learning how the engine and its editor worked, and to research methods of improving performance so that it didn't need to be run by an unaffordable computer. A large performance increase was by using texture effects, particularly with lighting, so that lots of calculations weren't required by adding a large number of lights. Normal mapping was heavily used to simulate detail to limit the number of polygons being rendered on screen. Transparent textures were also put to good use, particularly in areas where players wouldn't be able to move through, such as wire mesh fences - which meant only having a basic plane with a transparent texture map applied, rather than modelling each individual strand of the fence.





An external program in Windows Forms using C++ was created to control these events, which output the user's selections to a text file from which the game reads from on startup to pass through the relevant information. Custom console commands were created to receive the variables and perform the necessary actions depending upon the selections made in the external application.





The main options available are the time of day and weather, with rain, snow, fog and clear weather effects created. The rain and snow effects are done in a similar way to in the Unreal game, with billboarded textures displaying a panning texture. To control their visibility, a multiplier is added to the texture flow (with anything above zero being visible), and this is animated in a maintee event, with a slider from 0 to 1 set to play over a few seconds, so the rain or snow slowly fades in or out when needed rather simply appearing and disappearing. A ground fog also appears at the same time so the rain and snow droplets don't vanish into the ground. The main fog is controlled in a similar manner.





For time of day, it can be set to dawn, dusk, midday and night, or leave it on its default setting, which is to have a dynamic time of day. The day length in this instance is possible to be altered, from 10 seconds (which was a setting mainly for me to use to demonstrate the passage of time in my videos) to 30 minutes. In this setting, the lights on the buildings will turn on at appropriate times, a sun moves across the sky displaying dynamic shadows, and the sky texture changes – the main difference being day and night, but the colour tints also change at dawn and dusk, and during weather transitions. The sky texture also has layers, so clouds can be moving independently to the main day/night effects.





A further option available is to enable pedestrians. They use a modified version of the Unreal bot AI, and randomly roam around the city, constrained to the pavements to allow vehicles to be implemented at a later date. As an additional option, these pedestrians can be made to be armed in the external application I created, in order to create a simple game, with the player needing to eliminate them before being targeted himself.

The files can be made available to download on request.

Related posts

 

    RegisterLogin

Comments [2]