Awhile age there was a thread started about using a level editor with the BGE. After some tweaking, I have found a way that you can use the level editor in Unreal Engine 4 to make levels for the BGE. If you’re wondering what the advantages of this would be let me list some:
-You can use Unreal’s BSP tools and than export the BSPs to Blender (Great if you like old school quake/Source engine style level design)
-UVs are maintained when exporting to blender, so BSP and landscape UVs carry over
-LoD is kept
-If you use a vegetation/model pack NOT made by epic, you CAN use the assets in a BGE game (This is stated under the unreal engine marketplace FAQ)
-you can use Unreal’s landscape tools to make terrains for blender game engine
-You are able to use a level editor intended for games (not the general use viewport that blender has, which is still good, I just find that UE speeds up productivity)
-You can use Unreal’s spline tools
-You can keep all the advantages of the BGE while using a AAA design tool
Personally, I think this is the best of both worlds. I can keep the power of blender’s logic bricks, and use the landscape/Level editor in Unreal. Doing this is simple, just make a level in Unreal, select everything, and choose “export selected” as an FBX. Import to blender, double the scale, and that’s it!
Unreal offers a variety of nice tools, but it has problems, especially with scripting. For example, a creating a basic ai that follows the player literally takes a minute in the BGE. In unreal, creating an efficient system like this would be complex and time consuming. I think that the logic brick system is better than Blueprints, but that’s just me. Plus, the BGE is very fast and has much lower system requirements than Unreal. (Not that I want to bash Unreal, I like Unreal, but it does has it’s flaws. If I didn’t like Unreal, I wouldn’t be using it to create levels now ;).)
What you’re basically wanting to do is use a 2GB application (that can get heavy on resources and data use even in the launcher) as a level editor. I would be inclined to say that it would be like using an howitzer to force a nail into a piece of wood.
Also, when it comes to BSP tools, there’s been a lot of comments about how useless they are in Unreal 4 (and good luck trying to suggest otherwise, because the mere suggestion for better building tools will send the UE4 fandom into a frenzy)
Wow, I never realized the the UE4 community felt such a strong animosity towards BSP. ;).
Personally, I love BSP modeling. When I export my UE4 scene to the BGE, I just join all the meshes in a BSP building together, remove doubles, and than separate by component to split different walls apart.
Using UE4 for level design has less obvious advantages too. For example, if I use the BGE to design my level and use several static meshes that are all the same model, I’ll have to change each individual model if I want to change the mesh’s appearance. Using UE4, I can reimport the mesh to UE4 and than reexport the scene to the BGE. Everything updates and my scene in blender is now how I want.
Not really animosity, more like apathy. Who uses BSP these days? If you want the level building style of it you can check out SuperGrid on the marketplace, I don’t think it’s not free though.
I still have an older version of 2.7 (possibly even as old as 2.70!), and I know that BSP via modifier in that is really glitchy. After just a few operations a mesh will become bugged out. I hope this new version in 2.77 fixes some issues ( I’ll have to download it later - my current version is so old it was released before the viewport optimization project was even started! :eek:)
Though I don’t know if it’s in the UPBGE version of Blender if that’s the one you’re using (they may not have everything up to date).
@Ace Dragon: upbge is up to date with the last Blender sources (1 or 2 update per week), but in my last release for windows 32 bits, I forgot to include submodules (addons+exporter/importer and maybe something else). I don’t know if Akira_san included submodules in his windows 64 build. Maybe we can just copy addons folder from an official build to have addons (because it’s not compiled, it’s python). (I’ll fix that in the next release)… Edit: I didn’t see, it’s a modifier… We have it in the release
There seems to be polar viewpoints where BSP is concerned. Some love it and want to see modern engines utilize it more, others think it is a leftover vestigial from the days of Quake. I wouldn’t like it as much if you weren’t able to specify texture scale and shift without messing around with UVs. It’s like the “3d viewport uv editing” feature that some modeling programs have. For creating buildings with indoor and outdoor geometry, I think BSP is the way to go. (In Unreal, lighting and collision is glitchy with BSPs, but I’m using them in the BGE anyway)
