I'm in college for physics. I really like programming.

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Long time gone.

peterpanties Blog

I have been gone from this site for quite some time. Things never really took off with me for UT2k3. It was a great engine but I got sidetracked and pulled into other projects. I did a little coding in warcraft 3 and made a few maps. Now I'm here again after finding a lack of good PC games on the market. I've been looking into blender and python and am going to try and see what I can whip up with those two tools. I hope to have some good stuff in the future.

First Tutorial

peterpanties Blog

I posted my first tutorial today. Wow, it took me a little longer than I expected. For now consider it a rough draft. It's nothing overly complicated which is why I set the tutorial picture to peterpan's baby. (baby implies easy) So, check it out and let me know what you think. link should be along top there, says tutorials. my next tutorial will be on how to use the fonts in a UIscene.

UI UI UI UI UI

peterpanties Blog

It's so hard to find a good tutorial covering the UT3 UI editor and UI programming. What little information I found was very vague. So, with this I plan to release a few tutorials of my own covering UI programming. If anyone has any suggestions or topics they'd like to hear about please let me know! (or if you're really good at UIs and want to help me write the tutorials hah)

 

Udn.epicgames.com

 

Dmedia.dprogramming.com

sane sites so self-help seems sensible

peterpanties Blog

Today after running through ambershee's Blindness and Gametype tutorial. I've come up with a few ideas that seem good practice to try and implement.

  • An extension upon the blindness tutorial that adds the blind effect when shot. For some amount of time. (I don't know how to do timers nor apply effects when player is hit by a weapon)
  • A paintball mod. (could be easy if you just retextures the bullet holes but i'd like to change the wall hitting effect completely)
  • A crouch regen mod. Player crouches and gets HP back slowly. (No idea how that would be implemented in code)
  • A spin jump mod. I know it would be crazy for the player, but maybe make the characters spin crazily while jumping or flying through the air. (or maybe just the bots) Might be a laugh to watch the bots do it. this would involve states and give an introduction to rotators. both of which i'm not very familiar with.
  • The third person camera. Everyone wants this so much that I kind of want to write a tutorial on it. once I know how to do it that is.

I think these are pretty simple, assuming you know the code and heirarchy of everything.

Anyway, that's all I have to say about that. My journies in coding today have been rather uneventful. Just trying to understand ModifyPlayer() better, as well as some of the base objects, Actor, Pawn, Playercontroller, etc.

Some sites I found today...

Udn.epicgames.com
this site has some cool info on various ut3 topics, i must have missed it because i've looked through the udn a number of times lol

Max-realms.com
i am not going to learn how to model so free 3d models = good

Utforums.epicgames.com
posts made by a guy called geodav on UT3 forums. Has a lot of good character/model tutorials information

Ut40k.planetunreal.gamespy.com
some tutorials this guy wrote can be found on the riht side of his site

 

 

some spotlight simulations stink

peterpanties Blog

Still having trouble with that spotlight. Gar. I broke down and posted on the forums asking for help. Hopefully someone wise comes along? Anyway, I thought I would try to make my first decent mod. A modification to the double jumping/straffing that would allow the player to kill whoever he touches (enemy) during his performance of this manouever. Sort of like a body check. I know, it sounds unreasonable. I thought about also maybe disarming the opponent, knocking them backwards, etc. But I'll start off simple and just kill them because, I don't even know how to do that. I really wish I could get that spotlight thing figured out though. I hate to leave a problem unanswered.

Some questions I have for this week:

What are components and why do we attach them to things? What do we need to attach something to in order for it to be seen visually? What different parts of the character are there for us to attach things too? Also, what different sockets are there for weapons?

What events are caused during normal gameplay? Do all actors run the PostBeginPlay() once the game has begun? How does this work?

Lastly, what are states? How can I use them? It probably wouldn't hurt to learn what all these variabletype(variablename) things are either. Gah..

Anyway, I think a simple tutorial about the basic code would be good. Perhaps just performed all through logs. Just to test the different use of variables, functions, vectors, rotators, etc. I still don't have much experience with those.

And one last thing I'd like to know. I can create mutators but how does one create entire mods? What exactly are we making when we make our Folder with class structure? What do we have the ability to overwrite? What don't we? So much to learn!

 

 

 

 

 

Learning UScript

peterpanties Blog

Today I played around with light components. following ambershee's tutorial. I expanded on it a lot though. Hopefully this could be used as a torch effect in the final game. Right now the weapon is called spotlight since that just seemed a good idea at the time. But if I had a torch model it could be kinda cool to see what could be made.

 Anyway, after I feel satisfied with this I'll start manipulating the camera of the player. I think a 3rd person camera will be best for this game. It will save on modelling of the first person views as well.

Some links I found helpful while learning unrealscript

peterpanties Blog

 

As you know unrealscript is the code used in the unreal engine. If you're new to coding then this all may be overwhelming to you at first. If you're not then you should pick up the basics fairly quickly. At the time of writing this I'm just starting to learn Uscript (Unrealscript) myself.

To start things off I'm going to post some links to other important articles, to give you the good tools you need to start with unrealscript. I know you're probably like me and want to immediately start scripting your awesome mod day 1, but there are some fundamentals we need first. I hope they help.

Preperation:


There are two programming tools that I heard about when I was beginning. WOTgreal and Notepad++. When I was on the unreal wiki though, I heard about a third called crimsoneditor. [NEED TO FINISH THIS]

Wotgreal.com
Notepad-plus.sourceforge.net

You will want one of these as it's much better than normal notepad.

Links to learn:


Orangesmoothie.org
This is a tutorial on object oriented programming. If you do not know what that means, you might want to take a look at it.

Moddb.com
A set of a tutorials on unrealscript done by Ambershee. Good stuff. I would recommend reading tutorial #3 first, if you're looking to learn about the code. I will expand upon these things in our first script.

Moddb.com
Just incase you didn't you didn't pick this up on Ambershee's tutorial #3. You might want to use this if you're new to unrealscript.

Links of reference:


Wiki.beyondunreal.com
I love wikis. This one is good, however you may not find a lot of up to date info for UT3 as of today. Still, it's good for reference if something is completely confusing you.