Scales and Dimensions

You need to consider another factor when determining the size of your levels: how big it should look. Obviously, a large room looks more ominous than a small one, but what do you need to know to make objects seem to be the proper size?

Unreal Units, or UU. Often simply called "units". The UnrealEd grid, dimensions of brushes, positions of actors and sizes of collision cylinders are all measured in these units.

An arbitrary scale is used for game programming because the scale may change. One game may be an First Person Shooter, while another may be a space simulator with several planets on an entire map. Obviously, because of the constraint on the map size, you cannot have a whole planet on a map with the same scale of a First Person Shooter game. That is why everything works in abstract "units".

Lenght

But each game picks a scale to work at the size of players and objects, which means there is an effective conversion factor between UU and real physical units. In the Unreal series of games, this is generally held to be roughly:

• 256 UU = 487.68 cm = 16 feet.
• 1 meter = 52.5 UU
• 1 foot = 16 UU
• 1 cm = 0.525 UU
• 1 UU = 0.75 inches

• Player is 88 unreal units high, that's 1.76m, an average human male height.
• Player running speed is 440 unreal units per second, that's 8.8m/s, an average speed of a 400m runner.
• Dimensions of players and bots in UT2003:

  	standing	crouching
  height	88 UU	58 UU
  width	50 UU	50 UU

Player Enviroment

Ceilings

• Absolute minimum: 83 units
• Recommended: 128 units

From experience, it is known that a Player can walk into any room 83 Units or higher (the engine has the Player bobbing up and down), and cannot walk into a room with a height less than 83. It is suggested that rooms be designed a minimum of 128 units in height.

For best results, the ceiling should always be at least two feet above the player's head, and it looks best when significantly higher. In regular domestic architecture, ceilings under 10 feet high are uncommon.

Hallways

• Absolute minimum: 48 units
• Recommended:

These must be a minimum of 48 units wide, and, this is generally considered too narrow. When creating a passage that must be crouched through, the minimum ceiling height is 66 units, the minimum hall width is 52 units, and the maximums are 1 less than the minimum values described above for normal hallways.

Steps

• Maximum: 24 units
• Recommended: 16 units

TournamentPlayers can climb any step that is 24 units or less. Using 16 as default stepheight is a smart thing to do, because stuff will align to the grid better that way.

Jumps

• Approx. maximum jump up a step: 64

It is generally reported that the ability of Players to jump to some maximum height in game varies somewhat. Typically, all Players can jump up to a height of about 64 units.

Map Size

The Unreal World can have a maximum size of 524288 UU (=2^19).

Creating Textures for your map »»