Screen/Tips

Concepts

Mych understands Screens. Thats 'cos he wrote them. And he's an uberl33t code moose-god. Mere mortals may not. This is a page for them.

A Screen is made of 3 components:

A magic texture. Slap this on any surfaces you like. Hell, slap it all over the map
A Screen actor. This is the brains of the magic texture and must be told which texture to make magic. However, it doesn't know what to put on the texture. It points to a Slide
A ScreenSlide. This is the things that actually creates content.

Map Screens

Here are some of Tarquin's thoughts of how to painlessly make a map diagram for a screen map thingy. These may be obvious, but I found them out the hard way.

Before you begin, you need to reconcile two things:

the size and proportions of the brush surface that will hold the screen
the proportions of the map that will be seen on this.

For a clear map, aim to use 2x or 4x the normal number of texels. ie, on a 128x128 brush surface put a 256x256 texture at least.

Making the diagram texture

Handy trick to find the coordinates for the corners of your map:

Centre your map on the origin. To do this, choose a focal point of your map. If it's a symmetrical team map (CTF, Jailbreak), use the point of symmetry. Select everything in the map (use drag-select: see mouse control) and move it so your chosen focal point is on the Origin (0,0,0). Setting the grid to 256 helps for this.
Still with the grid on 256, zoom out in whichever view you want to your diagram to be from. Make the red builder brush large enough to encompass your whole map, centred on the origin. Use the brushbuilders parameters, in multiples of 256
note down the dimensions.
Zoom to get the right sort of size. Maximizing the UnrealEd Viewport may help. It all depends on whether you want to do advanced image trickery in Photoshop.
take a Level Screenshot
In Photoshop, trim the picture to the outline of the giant red builder brush cube.
for the Screen Map Slide co-ordinates enter 1/2 of the brush dimensions. For examle, the top left corner will be ( -width/2 , -height/2 ). (remember Unreal uses a left-handed co-ordinate system)

Overlapping the edges

Screen suffers from a bug in UT scripted textures which tends to leave stray pixels on the edges of the texture. (Repeat: it's a bug in UT, not in Screen...)

To get round this, create a frame for the brush that holds the screen, covering a little bit of the edges of the surface that holds the screen texture.

Setting the ClientScriptedTexture property

To set this quickly and painlessly:

position the Screen actors in front of the physical screen brush
apply one of the Screen textures to the surface
select the Screen actor and open its properties
ALT-right-click the surface
Click in the ClientScriptedTexture property and click the "Use" button

Tiled Screens

Check tile alignment with a different texture... (not sure which one. Mych, how about bundling a non-symmetical texture just for testing purposes in the next Screen? It could mark the area of overlap glitch too... )

being thick about palettes

Mych, I've set my Slides to have the palette of the texture they use as background. The next problem is this: how do I force the Screen's texture to use that palette?

If you set the slide's Palette property, that's all you can do (since there's by definition only one palette per ScriptedTexture (UT)). —Mychaeel

Would copying the Palette setting from SlidebackgrounTexture's properties into that of MyScriptedScreen work?

Debugging Screens

In my experience, by far the most common bug with Screens is one of texture alignment. Apply a texture of the same size with clear edges, such as an arch to check panning, and apply something with text to check orientation.

With screen maps, note that the Y axis goes DOWN. See Unreal World.

Screens of the Rich & famous

Used Screen in a map? Care to let the Wiki how you used it?

Pressurized

A map for Jailbreak by Tarquin:

<tarquin> actually, for Pressurized I did this:

<tarquin> took screenie

<tarquin> converted to black & white

<tarquin> printed it

<tarquin> drew & wrote on it

<tarquin> scanned it

<tarquin> colorized it