My stupidest mistake I made on the map (yet)

Well… After more than two months, I can finally make a post about something. I was quite busy and I didn’t want to force it, cause that negates the fun part of it for me.

As I mentioned in my previous WIP post, I wanted to talk about one of the biggest and stupidest mistake I ever done, while I was making the map.

If you wanna know what was it, click on read more.


I have to skip ahead for a bit, but don’t worry I will fill up the missing parts in future posts.

So… I had almost everything on the map, I wanted for an alpha version. It had the boulders, decent looking water, nice foliage, trees, some weapons, ammo and multiple random spawn points. I searched for a lot of things, and learned a lot, but for some reason, I didn’t looked up how to export the map to the game.

Yes… I’ve put dozens of work hours on the map without knowing will it work eventually. That’s pretty stupid. I didn’t test the export option at all, not even with a very basic small map. Although it turned out, the exporting (packaging from now on, cause it called like this in the editor) is very straight forward, only 2 clicks. I trusted the editor that it will handle fine, but my trust gone pretty fast, when I read in the log that some serious error occurred, and the packaging failed.

BTW, the packaging takes around 30 mins. Not that bad, but you have to keep an eye on the running log, to know what objects, materials, assets passes, and fails during the export. Can be a bit tiresome after the 5th try…

Eventually, it turned out that the cause of the problems was the two imported tree models that I used for the bushes. I won’t get into details, cause there will be a post about it soon, but it was a lot of work. Those 2 tree models was in a pack that was available for the standard Unreal Engine 4 editor, but not with the Unreal Tournament Editor. So I used the same technic, that I used for the water, and force import it. It worked, (kinda… details will be in the separate post) so I used them all over the map. So it’s not just a minor problem. Anyway, after the 6th failed attempt to pack the map, I deleted all of them, and finally the packaging was successful! But that was a bittersweet victory, cause without the bushes the map looked pretty barren and half-assed.

But I was happy, that finally I can test it in the real game. But wait! There is another problem again. When I start the game, this message pop up!

When I saw it first, I didn’t take it seriously. Yeah, yeah… I know there were some errors, but nothing critical, it will run for sure. Well, not… The map didn’t show up in the map list, when I wanted to create a LAN game. So, I have to take that message seriously I suppose, but it’s a sign, that the map trying to load, so I put to the correct directory. Now, what could be wrong? I was in panic, cause there was only 1 day left until Snoggletog, and I wanted to release at least the alpha version (originally, I wanted to release the final by then, but I didn’t had time to finish it.) So I wanted a fast solution.

There was someone who had a similar problem, and the problem was that he wanted to run a map that was packaged from an old editor. Because you can’t download a previous version of Unreal Tournament pre-alpha, he was basically screwed. Someone wrote him back and told that, if the creator of the map will package the map with a recent version of the editor it will show up. Sadly the conversation stopped there, and I was confused, that maybe the editor got obsolete when a patch came out to the game. I searched for hours numerous forums and comments to find out when they want to update the editor, but nothing. So I iced the project for a couple of months, waiting for that glorious update.

Didn’t really read the technical and deep topics of the matter, because there was no time for it, but after I didn’t found a solution I had to. Only by then, I found what caused the problem, and yes it’s a stupid mistake, but you can easily overlook it, if you didn’t made a unreal map before.

Unreal Tournament is a game that was part of my childhood. I loved the original ’99 version and played the crap out of it. If you played that game a lot too, you might remember the map list was kinda like this:

DM-Forgery

DM-Morpheus

CTF-Face

That prefix… I thought that it was just for help, to sort the different game modes, that the maps designed. Well NOT! In order to the game recognize your map, you HAVE TO PUT the prefix to your map or it won’t work!!!

After I renamed my map from HTTYD_Cove to DM-Cove, it get recognized and finally I was able to play it in the game!

Yeah... a little mistake can cause a lot of trouble and make all the difference. The good thing is, when I'll release the map officially, all you have to do is put a file in a directory. No need to mess around with config files or worry about some files aren’t compatible with another. (Unless you want to start a server, cause that’s a whole other story, but eventually we will get there sooner or later). Now, that I know these little quirks that have to be done, I have to say, the editor is quite helpful and really simple to use, while it's hugely complex under the hood. Really amazing stuff! I can't imagine the amount of work they had to put into this! Just blows my mind! 

Well, I hope this post was interesting and maybe you learnt something from it. I certainly did.

Next time, I'll have a special guest, but I'm sure you know him already quite well! ;) Will be a quite extensive and long post about him, and I CAN'T WAIT to finally post it!

Wanna guess, who could it be? (Write down in the comments if you have a tip).