Okie dokie. It's Saturday the 18th at the moment with this assignment due on the 24th. Plenty of time right? Well, after a bit of a lazy year last time out, it's catch-up time and that means working real hard real early. I went into town this morning for two reasons; 1) I decided to buy a sketch pad and 2) I was told there was a fundamentalist evangelical preacher in the high street who I could have a good argue with. Alas, the preacher had gone by the time I got there so I had to settle for the pad on its own.
Still, it only cost a couple of quid for 30 sheets of A3 from WH Smith (who, by the way, never called me for an interview! Slimy rats) so no complaints there. When I got back I forsaked...forsook? What is the past tense of that? Anyways, I kept LittleBigPlanet firmly in its box seeing as I blasted through the story yesterday anyhows and opened up my pad, where I spent 2-3 hours designing a floor plan and coming up with some concept art for a couple of key areas for my museum.
On a roll, I opened up UnrealEd. I was eager to start early seeing as the deathmatch level last year took something like a month, and having Level Design in semester 1 that time around I am pretty rusty with the tools. Still, I took to the basics again easily enough and set about carving a basic shape to match my floor plan. It was a bit hit and miss and I had a million textures to sort out etc, but a couple of quick light bulbs saw the thing ready for a test play!
And that, children, is how I learned to test levels more regularly! I built the thing to realise it was hideously small! It was less of a museum and more of a shed, and I must admit I was struggling to figure out where my elaborate staircases were going to go. So, lesson learned and I've just started over, this time working from the courtyard out (as I did in my floor plan) and testing it after every geometry change. I only have the courtyard done so far (done refers to geometry only!) but it is the right size now, and the rest of today and tomorrow will be spent sizing up the rest of the level, before I nag Brian on Monday to remind me how you do bloody sky boxes.
PART 2
It's 8:45 on Friday morning. Assignment is due in at 3. After working for hours each day on this cursed thing I finally finished it at 3AM this morning. I'm not 100% happy with the result, let's be clear. If I had another couple of days on it I would have done a voice over on the audio, for example, and my lighting could be improved a bit, and one of my rooms is a little empty. But overall I'm pleased with the result. One of the biggest difficulties I had to overcome was scale, as although I was testing regularly, my Museum was still far too big, so I had to scale everything accordingly so as not to be left with too much empty space. I also couldn't a good way of doing tables and chairs, which put my plans of a museum shop and café somewhere in the bin, so i changed that area into an "under construction" zone.
Lighting properly was horrible as well. On my Sphinx mesh I wanted an effect where 4 spotlights were shining on it, each from a different angle. And it's hard to tell when you're rotating a lightbuld, and there's no arrow to indicate where the light is gonna be when you rebuild. Although it has just occured to me as I type this up that that is what the "Lock to Selected Actor" button is for. Damn!! Ah well, live and learn.
The matinee tool also is, whilst simple in theory, a real bitch. There's no point locking the camera to an actor for a duration of 4 seconds, because it will keep looking at the actor indefinitely until a contradicting command comes in. Which is a system I hate. As a result, my sub actions are horribly convoluted affairs as I tell things to look at a certain actor, then to look at the path as the camera repositions, THEN no orientation... and for the record, the sideways tracking shot I have was by far the most difficult shot. I spent over an hour on that one alone trying to get the camera to look in the right direction and even then I couldn't get it 100% right!
In the end, I was just glad to get it finished and put some audio in. Which was pretty simple actually, although I would have liked the music to start when the movie begins, rather than as soon as the player spawns, as this throws the timing off slightly.
~ Fox.