Appendix A Organization Tips
There are several other books that cover the planning and process of game development and game audio development (see the Bibliography), so we will not cover those subjects in detail here. Instead we will offer a few tips that we hope will make your life easier.
Finding and Seeing What’s Going On
Being able to navigate quickly around your level and find the item you’re looking for, and remembering what it does when you get there, is the key to working efficiently and productively.
At the very start of the book we mentioned the use of bookmarks within your level to jump to specific areas. After pressing Ctrl and a number key on your keyboard to set these up, you can press this number to immediately move to that position in the level. What’s less well known is that you can also use these within Kismet in exactly the same way.
Don’t forget the Scene Manager from the very start of the book (Scene Tab). Here you can see all the Actors in your level and double clicking on them will snap all the viewports to focus on them.
If you can’t see something that you think you should then check the Show menu (click on Use defaults if in doubt). To more clearly see where your Sound Actors are you can toggle off various items using keyboard shortcuts.
Toggle BSP – Q
Toggle Static Meshes – W
Toggle Terrain – T
Hide selected Actors – H
Hide all unselected Actors – Shift + H
Unhide all Actors – Ctrl + H
Below is the tutorial level showing just the sound and light Actors – pretty isn’t it ?
What Does That Do Again?
Adding short text notes to some of the objects within your level can be very useful in keeping track of what you are doing. You can do this for Static Meshes and InterpActors using the ‘Tag’ within their Properties/Object menu, and you can also add Notes from the Actor classes tab. Enabling Actor Tags within the Show menu will make these visible in your level. Within Kismet there is a comments field within the Properties/Sequence Object menus that also serve a similar function, appearing as text above the objects within Kismet. You can also create comment boxes (and shade them different colors) around groups of objects within Kismet from the right click menu/New comment.
To aid communication in your team it’s useful to provide visual examples of what you’re talking about. Holding F9 and clicking in a Viewport or Kismet window will capture a screenshot of that Viewport or Kismet system (Stored here C:UDK(***)UDKGameScreenShots). This, combined with Actor Tags and the use of Comments within your Kismet systems, can be helpful to you in remembering what it was that you were doing!
Audio File Finder Utilities
As you develop a large sound or music library, you’ll need to be able to find things quickly. In addition to a sensible file naming policy (see the following discussion), you may also find some of these utilities useful.
Free/Donation Ware
Foobar (Windows)
SoundLog (Mac only)
www.soundlog.com/top/products/soundlog/index.htm
iTunes (Mac/Windows)
Commercial
Soundminer (Windows/Mac)
Basehead (Windows/Mac)
www.baseheadinc.com/basehead-feature-overview
Netmix
www.prosoundeffects.com/p1024/Net-Mix-Pro/product_info.html
Snapper (Mac)
www.audioease.com/Pages/Snapper/SnapperMain.html
AudioFinder (Mac)
Mtools (Mac)
www.gallery.co.uk/mtools/mtoolsmainframe.html
Naming Conventions
A game might have 100,000+ audio assets. You have to be disciplined about how you name your files if you are going to avoid this becoming a nightmare. At the start of a project you should establish a convention for naming your sound files. This may be the same as the one you use for your ever expanding Sound and Music library or it may be specific to the project. (Some platforms have a limit on the number of characters permitted within the filenames used, so you may also need to develop some meaningful abbreviations.)
In our Sound Library we’ve organized and labeled our sounds under the following categories:
• Air
• Alarm
• Ambience
• Animal
• Collisions and Destruction
• Dialogue and Vocal
• Electric and Electronic
• Explosive
• Feedback
• Fire
• Foley
• Liquid
• Mechanical
• Movement
• Spooky
• Weapon
• Weather
Not only do the sounds themselves need to maintain a meaningful naming system, but so do your packages, and the groups within those packages. You’ll have seen that in UDK packages relating to sounds or music have the prefix A_ and the assets themselves (mostly) use the following convention:
You will have to find a convention that is meaningful to you (people think about sounds in different ways and under different categories) or negotiate one among the team. The important thing is not the convention itself but sticking to it.
In a game consisting of several maps you might consider having a separate package per map. This would be for map specific items such as unique events, music, and location specific ambience. Alongside this you may have other items such as weapon sounds, impact sounds, and character foley in their own separate packages as they are used across all maps.
Batch Renaming Utilities
For a variety of reasons (one of which might be a change in the naming conventions; see the preceding discussion), you will find yourself at one time or another with the unenviable task or having to rename large numbers of files. Don’t do it all by hand. This sort of task is what computers are good at:
Total Commander
Better file rename