... Gets its own page on wikipedia, it's that hard core.

Every time I play Deus Ex, I want to mod it. Just like every time I play Unreal II: the Awakening, I want to blog about it. Just like every time I say something, Kilbirnie says the opposite and Jack fuckin' hates that shit.

I've tried to mod Deus Ex before, with varying degrees of success. I did most of my work a considerable number of years ago, back when command prompts were still scary. But now, I've jumped back in with minimal fuss and it is absolutely delightful.

This, then, is the story of my love affair with UnrealEd.

I first met UnrealEd when my family bought me Unreal Tournament for christmas; the unlocking of the floodgates concerning first-person shooters (before then, the usual "too violent" excuse flew around, limiting me to the likes of Age of Empires II and Need for Speed III). Needless to say, enthused as I was by AoE2's delightful editor, I blew my load when I learned that UT had its own editor.

Except that, when you're a young thing with nary a care in the world, the dull aqua-blue interface of UnrealEd 2 is fucking scary. It took me... Five? Six? Attempts to overcome my fear of that deadly grey grid, with a really super-basic tutorial.

I never did anything proper for UT. Tried a couple maps here and there, never finished them etc etc etc. But I did acquire all the basic skills required to operate UnrealEd, and despite not having touched it for a number of years now, they all came flooding back when I installed the Deus Ex SDK (had to install the "UnrealEd fix 4" to coax it into firing up for Vista, but that's neither here nor there).

Of course, with UT you can just build a map and go -- there are no peripherals to cater for, no outside influences. Of course you can add extras, but... You know what I mean. I spent plenty of time playing about with UnrealEd 2, being generally a bit rubbish but capable of assembling things. I've worked with UnrealEd 3 in the same manner, and to the same extent; and I have very very briefly dabbled in UnrealEd 4.

It's a lovely editor. Scary when you're new to it, but lovely. I'm well versed in 3D modelling these days, and I absolutely love the slab-sided architecture present in Unreal Engine 1 games. And the additive-subtractive way of working -- it's delightful. You know, space is infinitely solid and you have to carve it out (with squares and straight edges of all kinds), then add it back in, and carve it out again. It's closer to sculpting than modelling, I suppose, but it is rather refreshing and devillishly easy to slip into.

I've actually rather surprised myself. I've been adding banisters, door frames, all the little things that you don't add when you're young and don't understand that it's the little things that give your level life. Since I love the Paris level (where you can raid houses and it's all very open-plan), I'm working on a smaller-scale version of that. Okay, the big "building" that everything occurs in is pretty illogically shaped (not to mention Club La Porte de l'Enfer is on the top floor, above Jaime Reyes' apartment (complete with medbot), above Tres Chic the generic shop), but it's got trim and windowsills and lamps and even a few bins and rubbish bags in appropriate corners.

Basically, it's full of stuff I just never would have thought of back in the day. I don't even remember the slick ease with which I've done all this -- adding and subracting and intersecting and adding semisolids and zone portals...

Anyway, Deus Ex is an action-adventure-RPG -- it is nothing without conversations. Needless to say, ConEdit is not integrated into UnrealEd (I have a very sneaky suspicion that the original UnrealEd was written in Visual Basic).

I remember struggling with this quite a lot in the beginning. Basically, you've got to -- horror of horrors -- compile your code externally. This compilation then drags all the conversation files (and other gubbins you need) with it. Then, and only then, do you have a Deux Ex mod.

Juggling all that command prompt usage really riled me up back then, but this time I've been all "wait, why did I find that difficult?" You don't even need to do anything -- navigate to the System directory and run "ucc make". No specifying files or folders, no funny switches, absolutely nothing even remotely frightening. I had my dud first test-conversation ("Whassup bro?" "Nothin', yo." "No ho?" "I need ta go.") in there and working in the same few minutes it took me to refresh my memory of how ConEdit operates.

Of course, with all the delights of UnrealEd, also come the horrors. If you've ever been near an Unreal Engine game (probably only 1, since 2 and 3 are all static meshes rather than BSP consumption), you will have heard (and probably seen) "BSP holes". BSP stands for Binary Space Partition; basically, that's what makes things solid and not solid. Sometimes, for slights real or imagined, UnrealEd will punch great big holes in your level.

While you can just about live with the view of emptiness that you get in the editor, you probably can't live with the graphical insanity that results in-game from those unseemly rents in the fabric of reality.

I got my first one the other day; which is probably quite good going, because I've been working on this level for well over a week now. The thing with BSP holes is that they are nigh-on impossible to get rid of -- because you have no way at all of knowing why there is a hole in your BSP. There are some techniques bandied around, but not one of them can guarantee a result.

Luckily, I managed to fix mine... I noticed that the hole was spreading over one side of the map, the same side as the skybox. So I moved it over to the other end, and lo and behold -- the floor of Aucun Dites, le Motel! disappeared. Bye bye skybox and all its lights, and the BSP returns to perfection. Whew.

But nothing can reduce my love for UnrealEd. A king among level editors.