St. Basil's and the Unreal Editor

So we've been at college for exactly a week now, a despite a rocky start, were now stuck into two new units; 3D Environments and Game Engines, both of which can be fully realised on brand new quad core SLI computers.
The 3D environment brief has us ultimately making either a scene in 3dsMAX, with a video fly-by, or a interactive Unreal level. This has large crossovers with the game engines unit, which we started today, but will not receive a brief for until next week. In the meantime however, I have started modelling St. Basil's cathedral for the 3D environments unit (the big, colourful multiple domed thing right next to the Kremlin), as my original thought of a pagoda was shot down in flames after I learned Mark was doing something similar.
For today though, we concentrated entirely on the game engines unit, and from now on, I shall be updating this blog much more frequently than last year, so as to help me keep a record of my progress to help with end-of-unit write ups. Today's happenings after the jump.

The first half of the day we spent about an hour doing our environment work, while Shaun set up the shared drive and the resources we needed. After that, Shaun had arranged a guest speaker from NC-Soft, a QA games tester he had teached to use the Unreal engine over the summer. It was interesting to get his perspective on the industry, and obtain some first hand knowledge of one route into the industry (despite not being multi-lingual or having any qualifications), and how to progress up the ladder from an entry level position.
After that, we lunched, then got stuck into the Unreal Editor via some video tutorials. The editor its self is the the old 2.0 version, and the educational license, so bugs are abound (in particular an annoying saving one). Despite this, I found the tutorials easy to follow and a great help to me. I got quite far in the tutorials, in front of many others in the class, and I hope to complete that section by the end of our next session.
The Unreal engine treats the entire world as solid, so to create a room, you make a wire-frame box and 'subtract' it from the game world, creating a room. From there I proceeded to texture and light the room, learn navigation controls, as well as modify and delete aspects of the world that I had created. This was all fine and I had no trouble with it at all, but from then on, things got a little more complicated.
Next up in the tutorials was adding to the world via subtraction, which was similar to creating the original room, but focused more on replicating the brushes and moving subtracted elements. After that came adding to the world via addition, which is extremely similar to creating the room, but instead you 'add' to empty space you have created by subtracting from the solid game world in the first place. That sounds a lot more complicated that it is, but once I got my head around it it became surprisingly simple.
Following that came stair creation, which was deceptively simple. There's numerous options and limits (like a 45 step maximum per flight) and you have to do some actual maths (Gasp!) to work out your individual step height and the number of steps for how high you need to go.
Afterwards came placing static meshes in the scene, which caused no problems, and was very simple to do.
The trouble came next, by creating a static mesh from scratch (made more difficult by that every present saving bug, something we think is down the the college's horrible network setup, in which the unreal editor doesn't like saving to a hard drive that isn't in the computer, but instead is located on the other end of a network cable). The idea in the tutorial was to set up the beginnings of a lift, and as a lift moves, it has to be a static mesh, not a subtracted or addition element. I did it in the end though.
I only got part way through the next tutorial, which setting up the static mesh as a 'mover' so that it would function as a lift. It seems simple enough, such as setting at start position, an end position, the time it takes to rise and fall, how to activate and how long before it descends again. I just managed to get through to to testing the lift before we had to leave for the day, and it work fine, except for one bug. The lift worked and functioned like I'd set it up to, but it was invisible (!?). I talked to Bod about it, apparently he'd had the same issue, static meshes as movers not displaying. He's used the engine before though, and I'm confident he'll come up with a fix (hint hint).
If I remember to stick the files on my memory stick, tomorrow I'll upload some pictures of the tutorial level progress and the current state of the Cathedral.