Ironblayde
Greetings everyone. I just got into playing Unreal Tournament online in October 2003, and didn't discover the Wiki until February 2004, so I guess I'm kind of late to the party, but I've decided to try my hand in tinkering with the game we all love. I was surprised to find that there are still so many active players given that the game is something like five years old now!
My Background
I've been into game development since 1993 or so, when I started playing with AppleSoft BASIC on our then-amazing Apple IIgs. I made the switch over to the PC world in 1995 or so, and learned what I could of game programming in DOS for the next four years. I still have 20-25 games written in QBasic sitting on my hard drive that I dust off and revisit once in awhile. I started working on the Win32 platform in 1999, using C, C++, and DirectX. I used to be a regular visitor to [GameDev.net] and wrote a number of tutorials for them, so it's possible that someone here might recognize me from there.
Since I've been programming for so long, modding UT is what originally caught my interest here, but I didn't have any ideas for what I'd like to change about the game, so I fired up UnrealEd one day to poke around a bit, and now I'm addicted to it. I might try some UnrealScript in the future, but for now I'm happily exploring the world of mapping.
Latest News
19 February 2006: Wow, it's been an eternity since I visited this place. But I just fired up UnrealEd again on a whim not long ago, and whipped up a new map, CTF-Axia. You can download it from NaliCity [here].
13 July 2004: CTF-Susurrous has been sitting idle on my hard drive for about three months now, but I finally got around to finishing it. The overall layout is the same as it was before, but I mixed up the architecture quite a bit, added trim everywhere it was missing, and replaced all the textures with new ones that I took from UT2004 and edited to fit my needs. It's nothing brilliant, but I think it came out fairly well.
26 April 2004: I'm now the newest member of the review team over at [NaliCity]! I suppose it would be in bad taste to review all my own maps and give them perfect scores, but you'll be seeing my analyses of other people's efforts pretty regularly now. There's quite an impressive backlog of reviews that need to be written, so I'm sure it'll keep me busy.
18 April 2004: CTF-Stax, a small CTF map originally designed by CH3Z and fixed up with my help, is now available on NaliCity [here]. If anyone cares to offer a brief review, we'd both appreciate it! Work on Susurrous Outpost is still progressing; I got a ton of useful feedback from Hourences on how to improve it, which has set the release back quite a bit, but the map should be much better for the added effort.
03 April 2004: I've reorganized this page so that my mapping and design info will be located on separate pages. My first map, CTF-Susurrous is in working order as of about 2:00 this morning. There are some kinks that need to be worked out, and I'd love to optimize things a bit, but it's fully playable. Check the Susurrous Outpost page for details and a screenshot or four.
Content
Here you can take a look at all the maps I'm working on or have worked on for Unreal Tournament, and hopefully UT2004 if I ever get around to learning how to model static meshes.
Unreal Tournament maps
- Ironblayde/CTF-Axia - Simple and straightforward, created in four days after an 18-month hiatus.
- Ironblayde/CTF-Stax - A small CTF map created with my buddy CH3Z.
- Ironblayde/CTF-Susurrous - My first real effort, a large CTF map for about 16 players.
EntropicLqd:Hi, Welcome to the Wiki. Enjoy your stay here.
Tarquin: Hello, welcome. Great post on the trig rant page!!!
CH3Z: Ahhh there he is! Welcome, buddy! Map is looking great!
CH3Z: (20April-o4) Iron, I was just thinking about how intense the environment must be getting as you develop CTF-Susurrous and I had an idea. I could have emailed you this but what the heck, someone might pop in here and bennefit from it. It must take quite awhile to build it. Here's what I was thinking. If you select all the actors in the section of the map you are working on and edit/copy them to clipboard, then go file/new and past that section in, you could develop it seperately and build more often quicker. Then when you get that area right, select all actors and copy and past it back into the rest of the map for only one rebuild of the whole thing. Hope it helps.
Ironblayde: Thanks for the suggestion Ch3z, but there's actually an easier way to do that. When I want to work on one section of the map in particular, I select the actors that make up that region of the map and create a new group for them (so I can select them all simultaneously anytime in the future). Then with those things selected, I hit Show Selected Actors Only, and make sure the Only Rebuild Visible Actors box is checked on the Build Options dialog box. That way, whenever I hit the Build button, only the region of the map I've specified gets built, with no cumbersome copy/paste operations to worry about.