- Keep ammo more in flow than out of it. Unlike weapons where you’d choose to go to a particular area of the map you’re unlikely to do so for ammo alone; thus pickup up ammo should only require small diversions and be low risk.
- Spread it evenly across the map, and in theory useful to particular weapon routes.
- Keep ammo numbers equal to avoid biasing one weapon.
Some counter points. I understand this is primarly coming from designing dm maps (and I disagree in part there, ammo can be used differently) but needs additional thought for showdown.
1) Alternatively you can force a player to spend more time obtaining ammo at the expense of not being able to do something else. Get armor, pressure enemy team, cover team mates, get other weapons etc.
Goes without saying this is during the early pickup phase of showdown. Scavenging ammo later is different and not what we are aiming for here – and not what is achieved with spread out ammo in “the flow”.
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Players must gamble on leaving ammo up and pushing for other weapons/pickups at the expense of another player potentially picking the ammo up. If ammo is always in the flow players will simply pick everything up they can as they travel from A to B. This is not to say ammo should be wildly out of the way but rather (for example) the ammo cache near the pad side mini lift on ASDF. It is out of the flow.
Given how the gametype works I disagree that players are “unlikely” to make diversions for ammo. Single pickups may not draw players the way larger pickups do early game but should not be given away for free* by placing them directly in player movement paths. Two ammo packs can make a larger contribution mid-late game compared to the very limited amp pickup early game. Maybe even one ammo pack.
* The currency is time and this is severely limited in showdown to player opening moves.
2) Grouping up ammo buffs the importance of 1), to the point of it possibly adding another weapon/powerup “importance” point that is neither a weapon or a powerup. If a player knows their opponent has shock they can potentially deny their ammo, or the majority of their additional ammo.
In the picture below when there are two single packs A there is only one route to take – if the “something important” was a jacket, belt, amp, boots this would be the next pickup after the first ammo pack “in” the flow. The alternative is dropping out the center top then going up the stairs for the weapon. Both provide the same pickups in different order. When the ammo is a double stack at B there are more choices and possible repercussions for the spawning player. There are three possibilities with enough travel time to make each different.
In this way weapons could be organised near, but not next to, their ammo and players then have a number of choices after obtaining a weapon –
a) Take their own ammo. Add to team resources.
b) Take their opposing nearby spawn ammo. Deny enemy resources.
c) Ignore ammo and go for the closer pickup (armor, amp, belt, etc) and risk losing the ammo.
Outside of weapons and pickups this is not a large consideration for showdown currently and adding an additional layer of “objectives” could only be considered a good thing for showdown since they are rather quickly exhausted with higher player counts in the current game. Extending the opening moves further is a benefit.
Further to this, if there is ammo somewhere else on the map a player or team may not opt to risk themselves for a single pack but two? Maybe more chance for this to happen.
On the flip side it could be interesting if ammo is not near weapons and players need to share weapons based on what ammo they have picked up. For example if player A spawns and receives two rocket packs but player B has the rocket launcher, they need to meet up and rocket player needs to drop weapon before using the last rocket in order to eek as much potential from the teams resources. For a “teamplay” based team this could be a huge boost to potential damage output.
If the flow is player movement between point A and point B players would leave if there was a reason to, a single ammo pack is not a reason but two may be. Finding the trigger to get players to change their ingrained behavior is interesting.
Ammo is slightly different in showdown due to the no-respawn aspect and showdown needs more player interaction drivers. It also come relatively freely in players minds compared to slapping down multiple belts, amps or additional weapons. Its only ammo right?
Both these points together also mean that if ammo is “in the flow” it must be near the weapon otherwise it will just be picked up.
This
Weapons
Power ups
Dual ammo caches
Single ammo
25 health
Vials?
3) There is something wrong with biasing one weapon? A map and areas on a map will favor one more than another. ut, especially dm maps feel very… samey. By and large most (except smaller “arena” style maps) have one of each weapon spawn. In general all very homogeneous.
Having pickups that are more desirable drives better player interaction. 1-2 weapons having more ammo makes these weapons more important without adding additional
This is not to say your points are not good, but the inverse also applies and can potentially make for interesting times as well!
Finally there have been posts about maps like asdf not being suitable for 4v4. Why not? There are sufficient weapons and pickups. If you screw up and get nothing.. that ss player fault. You now need to play accordingly with your enforcer and play near your team mates more than you might otherwise have to. This makes a weapon drop important and perhaps your team mates will oblige killing someone for you. 4v4 tdm on ASDF would be horrible, but I am not convinced showdown would not work.
TLDR; You can open epic WIP shell maps and look at how they work as well as copy/paste sections of them.
Download example shell here.
After receiving quite a few queries on “how do lighting” there is evidently a need for a tutorial geared towards newer map makers setting out to create a shell. This article is intended to allow new mappers to quickly push a shell out by doing the heavy lifting for materials/lighting using epics shell setups.
Arguments could be made for learning lighting from shell up and thus building a better foundation of the underlying principles. At the same time some mappers want to make a shell that looks okish and get their ideas played and critiqued. Hopefully this provides a middle ground, giving new mappers a basic understanding of the entities they need to include to get lighting setup, but stealing the base settings from epics shells.
Hopefully this will also serve to improve the base level look on shells, taking that “this is my first map” aesthetics away from some authors first map. Lighting levels are less likely to be a problem using an established baseline (map is too dark/bright), however some fixes for dark areas will be included. This is a side aspect but imo worth looking at as a map textured using the default grid material and lit with a single superbright skylight looks less interesting than something like asdf or the original outside shell.
Firstly use materials from your selected shell on your map. They can be found in \UnrealTournamentEditor\UnrealTournament\Content\RestrictedAssets\Environments\ShellResources\Materials. Glossing over this aspect but may return at some point in the future. Make sure to encase the playing area of your map inside a lightmass importance volume.
These are the entities you are looking for.
On some maps these ents are handily grouped up for selection, on others you will have to hunt around for them. You can use the world outliner to search for each. To make copying pasting all at once easier you could also move them to the same location. Don’t save the map after changing things.
Directional Light – Used for the sun/sky light. Epic says : The Directional Light simulates light that is being emitted from a source that is infinitely far away. This means that all shadows cast by this light will be parallel, making this the ideal choice for simulating sunlight. The Directional Light when placed can be set to one of three Mobility settings… Keep reading
Postprocess Volume – This does all sorts of things, most of them irrelevant outside of copying the actor to get the same look/lighting as the epic shell. Epic says : Unreal Engine provides Post Process Effects to allow artists and designers to tweak the overall look and feel of the scene. Examples of elements and effects include bloom (HDR blooming effect on bright objects), ambient occlusion, and tone mapping… Keep reading
Sidenote : The fortnite double pump shotgun trick is fun.
Sky – This is a light rather than a sky sphere. Epic says : The Sky Light captures the distant parts of your level (everything further than SkyDistanceThreshold) and applies that to the scene as a light. That means the sky’s appearance and its lighting / reflections will match, even if your sky is coming from atmosphere, or layered clouds on top of a skybox, or distant mountains…
Atmospheric Fog – Gives us a sky and sun. Sort of. You can add a sky sphere in addition to this, but imo on a shell for gameplay testing purposes it adds little. Epic says : gives an approximation of light scattering through a planetary atmosphere. This can give your outdoor levels a much more realistic look. This total effect includes the following… Keep reading
Copy all of these from whichever shell you are using, open your map and paste. For this example dm-asdf is used. The shells can be found in UnrealTournament\Content\RestrictedAssets\Maps\WIP
What does this do?
After rebuilding lighting we have a lit map. The epic shells rely fairly heavily on the skylight, and for good reason. It looks good and is quite easy to use. So far the only lighting you have is a skylight.
These screenshots are lit using the single DirectionalLight with the settings from dm-asdf. The only entities that have been added are the four listed above. The floor in our sample map uses a material from the Castle ShellResources set. One thing to note is that the lighting setup is tailored to the different shell materials. Taking the ASDF settings and using them with other materials, such as Castle may not have desired results, especially if the material is fairly bright, like the castle flagstones.
Changing this to the same material as the ASDF floor brings the contrast down to a more reasonable level. Take note of the Rotation on the DirectionalLight.
From here the main values we can tweak is the Intensity and the Rotation of the DirectionalLight. Starting with Rotation is good as the light is setup for ASDF and its geometry and may not work well with our sample map. In the screenshot above we can see the floor of the room is quite dark, mainly due to the lights Rotation. Changing to a less aggressive angle can put more light onto the floor. Aiming the light straight down looks unnatural but is an ok starting point for tweaking. Using the rotate widget allows us to give the light a more vertical orientation. 15 degrees is enough. The amount of rotation in the screenshots may not be ideal but it is a starting point for adding additional lighting lower down in the atriums – at least there is now sunlight on the floor of both rooms.
For geometry in the sample map the light could also have been rotated on its Z axis (blue) to be coming from the opposite side of the level. The amount of rotation in the screenshots may not be ideal but it is a starting point for adding additional lighting lower down in the atriums.
The Intensity is acceptable and for now this need not be changed. This is judged by the areas the light is hitting directly – they are sufficiently bright. If the Intensity is raised further these areas will become too bright/overexposed*. However the “dark” sections are quite dark and contrasty, especially next to the brighter sections. Changing the DirectionalLights Indirect Lighting Intensity is one way to brighten up these areas. Setting this value to 15 lightens up the darker areas a little. This value caps out at 6 if you use the slider but you can manually type in a higher number. Raising this too high can cause odd lighting effects and for very high values a lower intensity needs to be used.
*unsure sure if this is the correct term
Changing this variable is an interesting way to add subtle fill lighting. The image below is a lower corridor on the sample map (dark with the value of 6 from ASDF) showing how a high Indirect Lighting Intensity on the DirectionalLight effects the scene. Note the subtle shadowing on the floor at the corner on higher values. Hawt.
Basic lighting theory
If you allow the skylight to do the heavy lifting it should be adjusted to a level that gives decent coverage over most of the map from the beginning. It should be the first light you dial in. After this we can add additional lights – in corridors and areas that are closed – as well as fill lights to smooth the lighting in and brighten up darker areas. Tweaking the skylight first is important as adding other lights then tweaking the sky may require you to go back and re-tweak the additional lights. And there may be many.
Stick to lighting with the sky first then adding extras to support it.
Extra Lights
At this point we are done with the initially copied entities.
Open dm-asdf and grab some of the lights from the shell. Take quite a few and cull down later if you double up. You can change the name of the entity to keep track of which one is which. Adding a string you can search for later to bring up all the lights you want to copy is also handy at this point.
Copy them all and paste them back into the example map.
Example 1 – Lower keg area
Taking the lights from the metal corrugation walls on ASDF (eg near helmet) 1) minimal light from the sky penetrates here, what@light leak. 2) one light is added to each corner . This looks ok, the area is lit. 3) Adding two additional lights the same near the mini and one near the keg brighten up the area further. 4) Finally two of the large fill lights from above the belt area on ASDF are added to bring up the dark sections between the corrugation lights. Imagine using a small point light style fixture low to the ground here.
Example 2 – Shard hallway
The map we are lighting is a rough remake of ZTN. I put it together when I first got back into the editor to “relearn” the tools. The shard hallway and upper sections of the map are lit with large flat ceiling lights. We will use the yellowish lights from the lifts on ASDF. One on each ceiling “light”. Done. Looks ok and no additional brightness is needed at this point.
The lights used in the lower keg area have a smaller Attenuation Radius and need additional support from the large, lower intensity fill lights we placed. Because the second set of lights is larger we can skip this step.
Example 3 – Sunlight fill
We will now step away from the ASDF copied lights to add some fill for the sunlit areas.
To do this we will create large lights with low falloff, allowing them to light large areas with around the same intensity. Because they require no detail they are set to static.
Create a new PointLight and change the following values.
Intensity – 2
Attenuation Radius – 1500
Inverse Square Fall Off – disable
Color : F9DFC600 (same as the sky DirectionalLight)
Light Falloff Exponent : 2
The Intensity is low due to inverse square falloff being disabled. Epic docs on Inverse Square Falloff
Place these on the map where the sun is hitting the ground. They are large, soft, low intensity lights that slightly brighten up and reduce contrast between sun and shade. They are large and no need to be super precise with them. If you get red crosses make sure you changed the new lights to “static”.
