MeshMaker 1.0 released

MeshMaker 1.0 is out for your mapping enjoyment.

• Visit the MeshMaker site for details and downloads.

Until now, mappers basically had a simple choice to make when designing maps: Make them fast, or make them detailed. Intricate detail brushes created in UnrealEd easily push up the poly count into heights the engine can barely handle, and they are frequently the source of mappers' most dreaded nightmares, BSP holes and hall-of-mirror effects.

On the other hand, decorations are simple to place, simple to use, rendered vastly faster than brushes with a comparable amount of detail and never cause any sort of compilation error---only, alas, their creation requires thorough knowledge of modelling, skinning and UnrealScript coding.

• 

Enter MeshMaker. MeshMaker is a Windows-based Unreal and Unreal Tournament editing tool that automatically converts UnrealEd detail brushes to decorations, keeping their original size, orientation, texturing and surface properties as closely as possible. MeshMaker's easy-to-use user interface makes this entire process from the raw prefab to the finished package file a matter of of seconds and three mouse clicks.

One of MeshMaker's beta testers was so intrigued that he actually at once started to replace the basic cube-shaped lamps in his upcoming maps by richly detailed industrial-style custom floodlights that, if added as regular detail brushes, would have brought any computer to a stuttering all-time framerate minimum, provided the map would have compiled at all.

MeshMaker is free for noncommercial use. For more information, download links and a quick MeshMaker walkthrough, visit the official MeshMaker site.

If you want to know how everything started, check this BeyondUnreal forum thread.

Only slightly later than I had anticipated.

Originally posted by Mychaeel
I'll release version 1.0 on Friday or Saturday, depending on when I get the docs done.

Click to expand...

MeshMaker automatically searches .u and .utx packages in your Maps and Textures subdirectories (respectively). If the textures used by your prefab aren't in any of those packages, MeshMaker won't automatically find them.

Do you see the progress bar that appears while MeshMaker is searching your texture packages or doesn't MeshMaker attempt to search anything at all on your system?

Are your prefab textures located in MyLevel instead? That works too, but you'll manually have to select your map file using the "Browse" command that appears when you click the texture name in the list.

If the problem persists, you could help me fix (or find, in the first place) this problem by sending me the .t3d prefab file and the .utx/.u texture packages in question. Please also include the full names of the directories they reside in.

Originally posted by purice
i don't think this is a bug, it's probably just me being an early morning m0.
i thought my prefabs were fuXored in one way or another so i tried the MyLamp.t3d and got the same thing. if you think this is a bad place to um.. report potential bugs i'll be glad to delete this post.
again, it's probably me being stupid.

Click to expand...

Uh. I have a bad feeling about this; it might well be a bug (and a simple one, fortunately). Try this: Manually add "E:" in front of "Maps\MyLamp.t3d" and look whether it works then. If it does, the problem is that I simply forgot to consider the possibility that Unreal Tournament might be installed somewhere else than on drive C. (/me slaps self.)

By the way, I absolutely appreciate your feedback...

Well, I'm working under Windows 2000 myself, and MeshMaker doesn't show any problems on my system.

I just tried to reproduce your problem by mapping my Unreal Tournament directory to drive F:, but alas, it worked for me. (That's a strange thing to say, actually. )

Could you please have a look into your registry? MeshMaker gets your Unreal Tournament directory from there, and from what I heard (never experienced it myself), the registry key in question gets frequently messed up. For you, it should contain the following value:

Originally posted by limpbizkit
when it doesn't find a texture, i cannot access the little browse screen for the textures..

Click to expand...

You can't...? Unless MeshMaker displays "None" in the left column (which means that the prefab wasn't textured in the first place), you should still get a popup menu with "Browse" in it:

Ah.

I'm very relieved, actually. I originally added code to MeshMaker that checks whether that registry entry exists at all and that asks the user to browse for the correct directory if it doesn't, but I didn't think about checking whether the "Folder" setting, if it is present, actually points to the correct directory.

But that's a good point; MeshMaker should actually verify that the registry points to the right directory rather than assuming it does. Will add that at once. Thanks for reporting.

[edit]
The updated version is up, though FilePlanet might lag a bit behind with updating and mirroring the files. In any case, the German Link-M mirror actually carries the latest version.

Hmm-m. That looks very much like how it's supposed to look if there's no texture on the prefab at all. That might be a bug in MeshMaker, of course.

Could you please send me that terrain.t3d prefab to mychaeel@planetunreal.com so I can check that?

Originally posted by purice
i'm no programmer, but i'd imagine idiot-proofing your apps is a most time consuming process

Click to expand...

That's probably why coding the interface took about trice the time of creating the actual conversion code...

I also found (and removed) the closely related buglet that made a German error message appear on your screen. That's not supposed to happen, and I found the single place where I had missed to enclose a statement in proper error handling code.

Hmm... keep in mind that meshes don't have per-poly collision, so they're not really suited for terrain that's supposed to be walked on...