Trystan/11 17 02b

11/17/02 Tools and Utilities for Modding

Man, there's a ton of things to collect and use, all in the right order, to even start modding. Yes, I know, I'm a coder. I want to be familiar with all aspects of modding though. I feel like I should be, to help understand how things go together, and to help out in areas my mod might need it if we find ourselves crunched. (Barring my lack of artistic talent. )

Wally is a texture editing program available for free. You can also use Paintshop Pro (http://www.jascsoftware.com), Photoshop (http://www.adobe.com), or any 2D editing program out there. Wally is free, so it's what I'm going to use. A texture is simply what a surface looks like. Consider painting a wall. If the wall is your model, the texture is your paint. Texture size can be thought of as your paintbrush size. The bigger the brush the bigger the stroke of paint you put on the wall.

uPaint is a program that allows you to "paint" your textures onto your character models. You don't model the characters in uPaint, and you don't create the textures in uPaint. uPaint is a program that simply allows you to combine two previously created items into one.

Maya comes with Unreal Tournament 2K3, at least the "Personal Learning Edition." This is a pretty complete modeling program which you can use to create your own character and/or weapon models and animations. Alternatives are 3D Studio Max and MilkShape.

WOTgreal is an integrated development environment for UnrealScript. It is fairly capable of has Intellisense built into it. You can also use TextPad and uMake together. TextPad is a generic text editor with customizable coloring support and uMake is a small utility written by Mychaeel to ease the task of compiling your packages.

UT2K3 comes with several programs of it's own. Alternatives are created because some folks don't like how the supplied applications work. UnrealEd 3.0 is supplied with UT2K3 as well as Unreal Development Environment (UDE) 1.0. I believe UDE is the evolution of Visual UC++ but I'm not positive on that.

Wiki has an Application section with more stuff listed. As of right now the above are what I'm working with and hopefully will be all I need.

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