Mapping For Dummies

From UFO:AI

Intro

Welcome to Mapping for Dummies, the complete newbie's guide to actually working within GTKRadiant, specifically in context with building maps for UFO: AI. It is intended to get you started building your first map, then modifying it. Like a 'Hello World' project, you won't necessarily do much else with it other then learn.

You want to get your hands on a copy of GTKRadiant, available here.

Secondly, if your computer is hurting for processing power or RAM, you probably don't want to get involved in mapping. It's not very kind on resources - at least not the map compilation.

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Prepping the Software

Before launching GtkRadiant, you want to find your path to the ufo.exe file on your system. In this folder you'll find a folder called base. Inside here are files with .pk3 for the extension. They're simply .zip files with a different name. Unpack them into their subdirectories. You then want to rename the .pk3 files to have a different extension, .pk3.old for example will work. This is so the game software looks for the files in the directories instead of continuing to look at the compressed zips. You can also just move these files to another user generated folder.

When you launch GTKRadiant, select UFO:AI in the game selection before hitting OK. If you don't get this box during the splash screen, you're in Q3Radiant, and need to upload the GtkRadiant version.

Next, In Edit Menu -> Preferences. You want to look for the 'Paths' category on the left. Now, you want to make sure the 'Engine Path' entry is properly filled in. You're looking for the path that leads to the ufo.exe file. It should also have the folders base, build, src, and tools in it. For my system, this is C:\Program Files\UFOAI21 (Windows default install locale for 2.1 and 2.1.1). If you don't do this step, your textures and models will not function properly.

And finally, we want to make sure your build parameters are accurate. Go to menu 'Build', and then choose 'customize'. Highlight 'Final Build' at the top, and make sure it reads:

[ufo2map] -bounce 0 -extra "[MapFile]"

If it doesn't, change it.

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