Placing items into your map

Prerequisites:
Navigating UnrealEd
Wolf's Basic Tutorial

Overview:
At this point you should already be familiar with placing items into your maps, but I thought I'd go into a bit more detail about some of the Deus Ex items you can add. This will cover adding pickups and non-geometry (non-brush) items.

1. Select the type of item from the Class browser

To place items in your map, make sure "Classes" is selected in the Browse drop-down on the right side of the UnrealEd window. You'll want to keep "Only show Actor classes" checked, since that's all you care about.

Some of the most common types of items you'll add are under:

Actor -> Decoration -> DeusExDecoration
Miscellaneous Items

Actor -> Decoration -> DeusExDecoration -> Containers
Breakable crates, boxes

Actor -> Decoration -> DeusExDecoration -> ElectronicDevices
ATM's, vending machines

Actor -> Decoration -> DeusExDecoration -> ElectronicDevices -> Computers
Personal computers, public computers, security computers

Actor -> Decoration -> DeusExDecoration -> ElectronicDevices -> HackableDevices
Security cameras, alarm units, control panels, keypads

Actor -> Decoration -> DeusExDecoration -> InformationDevices
Books, DataCubes, newspapers

Actor -> Info
DeusExLevelInfo (important if you use conversations!)

Actor -> Info -> ZoneInfo
ZoneInfo items, SkyZoneInfo, WarpZoneInfo

Actor -> Inventory
All the "pick-ups" in the game: weapons, ammo, multitools, lockpicks, medkits, NanoKeys, etc.

Actor -> Keypoint
There are several items in here that can be useful, but most are a little more advanced. A couple of the more useful things here are the AmbientSound and InterpolationPoint items.

Actor -> Light
Regular lights and spotlights

Actor -> NavigationPoint
The one you're already familiar with is PlayerStart, but there are lots of other interesting ones too

Actor -> Pawn -> ScriptedPawn
All of the non-player characters (NPC's), including humans, robots, and animals

Actor -> Triggers
A huge number of important things are in here

 

2. Add it, position it, rotate it

There are two basic ways to add an item after selecting it in the class browser. Either right-click in your map and select "Add XXX here" or hold the "A" key down and left-click. See the UnrealEd Reference for information on how to move and rotate the item into position.

 

3. Set the item's properties

Something you'll do constantly when adding stuff to a map, is change the properties of items. To pull up the Properties window for a single item, you can either right-click it and select "XXX Properties" or you can just double-click on it. To select multiple items, hold the CTRL key down while left-clicking on them. If you select a group of the same type of item, you can then right-click on one of them to set all of their properties at once. That way, you could adjust a whole group of lights, for instance.

That about does it. I don't have a specific tutorial here, so just play around with adding pick-ups and characters to some maps and adjusting their properties.


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