On-Mirror's-Edge Forums

Crikey. The Unreal Editor has changed a lot since I last used it. It's part of the game now? Didn't see that coming. I'll have to look into this, thanks. Especially as I want to use some of those lovely high-res unlockable drawings as a background.

wow this looks very interesting... I'm hoping to see alot more interest here to open up mirror's edge! very high hopes (possibly even MP, lol)...

would it be possible (since UT3 and ME run on the same engine) to jerryrig some of the network code from UT3 into ME? It'd be pretty crude and hard as hell but hey nothing's impossible right? (hell, look at MTA for GTA )

@Tonxey - That was kind of why I started experimenting with this in the first place. Unfortunately, I haven't had any success exporting content just yet. Will look into it more thoroughly next week, I'm really busy at the moment.

@Devlin1991 - I'm excited about that as well, but when you think about it maybe it's best if they don't allow custom game clients to connect to the servers. Some cheating dickhole will find a way to exploit it and ruin the good, clean fun for the rest of us. Besides, it's unreasonable for us to expect that they will dedicate their resources to tracking our maps in the leaderboards, store ghost runs, etc.

@John9600gt - I've seen a lot of people wishing for multiplayer in a more tranditional sense, but here's what I think: coding it won't be the hardest part. What's important here is to make it fun, and that's harder than it sounds. EA DICE have put a lot of thought in making the game play well from a first-person perspective, and the "multiplayer" maps (time trials) are designed for a single runner. Just try and imagine more people on a level like those - pure chaos. At leats you can clip through the ghost runners, if those were actual people, a whole new set of problems emerges, never mind the potential for griefers.

That being said, there is room for multiplayer in Mirror's Edge in my opinion. It just has to be a different game type, with different rules. The first thing that comes to mind is a sort of a tag race with two players - one is the hunter, the other's the hunted (sort of like those PK runner sequences in the singleplayer). The hunted player has a flying start, some time to distance him/herself from the hunter, and if he/she is taken down, the roles immediately switch, the hunter becomes the prey. Haven't figured out exactly how scores would be kept though, it's just a thought.

@Remies67 - If you've bought the game, you have the editor right now. But it's pretty technical, and there's not much we can do right now.

Last edited by wysiwtf (2009-01-21 14:12:17)

I second Remies67, I would like to start playing with it asap.  I am actually interested in making some urban visualization 'walk-abouts'.   I don't need launch pads and run-along-wall features, just a map that I can walk around in, so I am not interesting in how to make special items that are exclusive to Mirror's Edge.  Also, there won't be any need for 'objectives'.  I'll just exit the level when I am done walking around in it.   

Currently, I am only interested in

1) Is the process for importing models from 3ds max or other packages same as other Unreal Ed games?  (I guess I'll have to find out about those myself once I can launch the editor)

2) How to launch a custom map in single player mode for walking around in.  (via command line)?


Later when I get a hang of the basics:

1) When you mentioned that the UnrealEd is unstable here, is it because there are too many effects and entities, and that some files are missing when effects are triggered thus crashing the program?  I assume that a simple level for walking around without scripted AI and stuff should be fairly simple and stable.

2) If a level consists of indoor and outdoor areas, are they treated as "different files", and if so is it easy to handle levels across different files?

Thanks to ****

Thanks again ****:

    I will play around with the editor soon, and make some really simple levels like a floor plate with a few boxes of stuff to test things out.  I assume that I can launch a custom level via console like the way how it is done in Brothers in Arms Hell's Highway (another Unreal 3 game that I like).  I guess the console command might be exactly the same since the launch command are the same.  However, I need to study the folder and file structures for the map levels more carefully to spot differences.

Does anyone know how the streaming in UE3 games works? I know programming but it's been so many years since I did anything with games or 3D graphics I am a clueless noob once more Unfortunately I think the details and documentation are only available under NDA.

Does it load levels (as opposed to chapters) in one shot? I had imagined that each level is laid down on the CD in a contiguous block that can be read directly into memory, so they know that it'll take about X seconds to load the level data for this section and it takes Y seconds for Faith to run through the previous section even in the best possible path, so if Y > X by a few seconds you get a seamless transition.

I wonder how assets are managed. Some stuff like rooftop textures and billboards will obviously be shared between the different levels. I can imagine that either level assets are organized into blocks and then levels say "I need the following asset groups: rooftops, billboards" or "I need: ropeburns office assets" etc. And then these asset groups are also laid down in one strip on the CD for max throughput. The risk being you load some data that isn't necessary.

Or, references could be done discretely for each object or texture in the level and there is no grouping, but levels can intelligently back-reference to previous levels to avoid dropping and then reloading stuff that is already in memory. Eg, if you run across a rooftop level, then through a door, a few corridors, then back onto a rooftop (seems very common in ME) then the first level for outdoors chains to the indoor corridor level that is intentionally simple and fast to load, then the third rooftop level can simply say "I am using materials A B and C from the level two loads prior to me", and because the game is linear it knows ahead of time that the third level will use assets from the first, so it can avoid dropping them whilst dumping the data for the second level. In such a system I guess you'd need some sophisticated statistics to group assets that are likely to be accessed together into contiguous sections on the CD. Perhaps the game engine in a special mode can "learn" what is accessed when and then figure out the optimal CD layout.

The way streaming works is almost certainly why doors slam closed on you a few moments after you run through them. The whole ME level design is set up so that you can only move forwards and never back. Whether that's by self-closing doors or just large drops that you can't get back up, at some point you cross a transition that you can't return to, so the old data can be freed to make room for the new data that's about to be loaded in. That implies there must be some kind of ordering constraint on the levels, and that it's not a PURE "load the level you are running towards over the level you're running away from" type function. Otherwise I'm sure ME would include at least a few places where you backtrack.

There are so many interesting tradeoffs in this kind of system. You want to maximize the available memory for the current scene, but you have to be able to load a ton of non-visible stuff in the background. So does that imply that at any given time, a big chunk (half?) of the systems memory is dedicated to holding the next scene, waiting for you to run into it? Or does it stream rooms in ahead of you "just in time"? There are points in the game where it pauses so it can complete loading the next section, but the points where it pauses seems arbitrary. I mean it's not just before you open a door, normally, it can apparently happen at any time. So it must have some sense of your progress through the currently loaded scene and how complete the next scene is.

I've been assuming that loading is IO bound, but when I installed ME to my x360 hard drive, I didn't notice any difference in level loading times and I still found places where the inter-mediate loading screen appeared. So I might be wrong and loading is CPU/GPU bound (texture decompression?).

It'd be nice if a DICE guy could chime in. Inquiring minds want to know

Last edited by cantarell (2009-01-23 08:08:08)

Wow this is awesome! too bad i dont have Unreal editor, but you can save textures using Texmod and take models using 3D Ripper Dx, so you can make texture mods atleast =P

what does MP mean ???

It's going to be tough to significantly modify the levels without lighting getting messed up. Remember that the game uses the BEAST lighting engine:

http://www.illuminatelabs.com/products/beast

Which means the shadows and so on are all pre-calculated.

You can't add a huge feature like multi-player to a game just by using UnrealEd, even if it worked flawlessly.

devshire wrote:

Final weird little observation with the in-editor game environment:  if I happen to walk around an area in the game where Faith is not supposed to be normally, ie on street levels instead of the roof top areas of the level, she'll suddenly die after a little while XD.

Most likely there's a trigger volume there that you're walking into that's reducing health or set to kill the player upon entering. 

devshire wrote:

Secondly, has anyone been able to take a look and explain how sections of the levels are linked through different files?  Do you guys think that the level is built as one big model somewhere else, broken into pieces, and then exported to UnrealEd?

Levels aren't loaded all at once, but are broken down in sections, and loaded as player progresses through

Hi Blizzard:

     Have you tried to load your custom map to play from the command line instead of from the editor?  In other words, have you tried to load it from Mirror's Edge.exe MYTESTMAP by creating a new shortcut of Mirror's Edge and adding your custom level name to end of the exe path?

      I notice that it takes longer for me to load a second level in one session in the editor, and at first I thought the editor was crashing but I just let it load and eventually it did load.  This happened to many different sections across different levels of the game.  So Blizzard, did the editor simply crashed back to desktop, or did it just kept on loading and appear frozen?

       If you can, can you show us a screenshot of your level?  I have yet to find time to play with making anything in the editor but is eager to see someone making a move to try it.  Did you put a skybox in your level?  As stated from my earlier post, I don't know why the skyboxes are missing from the outdoor levels of Mirror's Edge when I open them in the editor, and I just kept seeing tearing and streaking when I move around while facing the area of the sky. 

     Also, anyone been able to figure out how the sections of the levels are linked?  I don't see any trigger points in the sections that triggers loading 1 section of the level to another.  Maybe I've got some display options switched off?