Ether One is coming to Unreal Engine 4!
So we’ve got some pretty exciting news to share!! We’ve begun the process of transitioning all of our Ether One content from UE3 over to UE4. It’s a pretty big step for us to take and very exciting challenge but I hear you asking ‘what does this mean for us?’.
Well, it means we have access to develop on a lot more platforms (along with keeping up with technology!). It doesn’t mean that we’ll be releasing on all of them, but as you can imagine it’s opens up a lot of doors to get Ether One out to as many of you as we can (did someone say PS4?).
We’re going to be posting updates of our development throughout the process for those of you interested in how we’re approaching the transition. We’re also going to be learning UE4 as we go so prepare for some hickups! We think it will be a fun learning process for us though and more than anything we’re excited to see how Ether One will look in the new Unreal Engine!
So far we’ve spent about 2 weeks in the engine so we’re still trying to find our feet but we’re starting to get to grips with the engine and it’s power. It’s such a step up from UE3 it’s unbelievable!
—————————
So where to start?
The first step was to export ALL of the content from our UDK packages. It was simple enough but very time consuming. A tool that was an absolute life saver was from a guy called Matthew Swanton (@matty3d) – You can find his tool here: https://forums.unrealengine.com/showthread.php?3172-Tool-UDK-T3D-to-Unreal-4-T3D-Tool
The tool allows you to copy and paste actors’ exact locations from your UDK map to your UE4 map. UE4 works on a folder structure similar what you’d find in Windows. The main thing to keep in mind with this tool is that if you have a package in UDK called ‘Modular_Assets’ then you’d create a folder called ‘Modular Assets’ in UE4 in the exact same way. It’s kind of hard to explain but something like this:
Once you have all the folder directories set up you need to import ALL of the content back into UE4 going folder by folder. I mainly just created one sub-folder for ‘Meshes’ and another for ‘Textures’ since I could add the other ones at a later date (I didn’t bother with the ‘Material’s’ folder until later). Once you have all of your static meshes and textures back into Unreal it’s just a case of copying and pasting your actors into the tool from UDK. Then converting the data. Then copying into your UE4 map. As long as you have imported all of your assets into the right folders, it will pick up the reference and paste the actors into your map.
Tip for using the Tool: Right click on an actor in UDK – select – select all same class (this will select all floors for example). Then hit Ctrl+C (to copy) and hide all of those actors. Then paste into the tool, convert and paste into UE4. That way you know what you’ve already pasted and can stay organised. The downside is that you have to do an entire map all at once because if you shut UDK – you guessed it – everything resets and unhides and you have no idea what you’ve already pasted!
It sounds long winded but it’s actually pretty simple and It only took me about 3-4 days to get all the folders set up with content imported. Most of the time was spent pasting large numbers of actors which froze up my computer since I don’t have the most powerful PC. You can use that time to go through all the awesome Unreal Engine videos that are out there on the YouTube channel though!
I think that’s a good place to stop for now. The next post should be a lot more art and gameplay heavy but at least this gives a starting point for anyone making the transition and wondering if they will have to build their maps from scratch (which I initially thought I would have to do!).
Thanks for reading!
PS. Does anyone recognise this place yet?
