UnrealED: Praise indeed

Righty I've been idly playing around with the UnrealED toolset that comes with Gears of War and UT3 for aroun d two weeks so i'd thought I'd post my findings and musings on the whole thing,

The Same Subtractive blockworld editing is still present here but you can now choose to build a map using additive brushes, for previous versions this would have been madness it was hard enough getting a correctly dimensioned room without having to create it from 6 brushes, but the new geometry mode pulls up a 'mini-max' style interface that allows you to select the verts, poly and edges of a brush allowing you to quickly resize and shape it, there are even options for modifiers and soft selections and because ALL objects now clip to the same grid you don't spend time carefully snapping them all to the same grid scale

Another nod towards Max is the inclusion of a massive directional widget, this can be toggled for scale and rotation and is a nice change over selecting a brushes tiny verts, holding down shift to move and have it shoot off into the void because your fingers had slipped. These can be scaled in uniform or non-uniform directions

Building upon previous versions is the new asset browser through this dialog window you can view absolutely everything in the engine from animation to UT map music all of which fire up there respective viewers, its really nice to be able to load up a custom model and be able to look at it ingame without compiling (im looking at YOU source engine) then dump it into your map. Being able to view all of the assets that would make up a map in one place quickly and easly is a huge boon to the speed you work. It also displays the various entities in a map logically sorted in a folder tree allowing you to quickly alter a large number at a time

Additionally importing stuff into the engine couldn't be easier models can imported from .ase or .obj with all of the smoothing groups and other details normally lost still intact, additionally theres no hardlimit on the amount of polygons you can import so models in there millions are doable although why you would want to im not sure. Accepted texture formats are even broader the expected .tga and .bmp extensions are there but being able to import raw .psd files is a huge time saver.

But the best thing has to be the material editior, by simply plugging in some rough textures and connecting up some boxs you can quickly make some really nice looking shaders and all without any shader programming knowledge. Stuff like water, oil spills, blobs of jelly anything that would require knowledge writing complex shaders can be created in the material editior. Im pretty sure this is the tool that will make a good map stunning

I've not even mentioned the kismet scripting engine or any of the sound stuff but yeah colour me impressed

Im gonna post up some of the problems I've found with it later on, although to be honest there not many