UMS/AdvancedTutorial

Unreal Movie Studio Advanced Tutorial

by Hugh Macdonald

Introduction

This tutorial aims to give the UMS user information about the extra director functions, including changing level, sound effects, and triggering other effects.

Adding Sound Effects and voices

Sound effects and voices are done in exactly the same way. If you have ever done more complex maps in UnrealEd, you will know all about SpecialEvents (hereafter refered to as SE's). SE's can control a lot of things, one of which is sound.
SE's can be found in the Actor Classes Browser under Triggers >> Special Event. Add one of these to your level, and move it to the right place where you want the sound to come from.
Now, load up the relevant .uax (Unreal Audio file). This can be done by going to the SoundFX Browser and clicking Load at the bottom, and selecting the file.
If you want to import sound files, instead of clicking Load, click on Import. Then, find the .wav files that you want to use. (When you name the files, I would recommend using the format ssNamell where ss is the scene number (use 01 instead of 1), ll is the line number (same thing applies - 01 instead of 1) and Name is the name of the character) Import the .wav files one character at a time. So, say you have a character called Suzi, you would import all of Suzi's lines at once. (Make sure they are all in the same directory, and click on the first, hold down SHIFT, and click on the last one) When you click on Open, you will be prompted for the Name, the Group and the Package. The Name should stay the same, as long as you named them all before. For the Group, I would recommend using the character's name, in this case Suzi, and for the Package, you should call it something to do with your film. DO NOT call all your files (.uax, .utx, etc) the same thing. IE, for The Castle, I called the sounds package TheCastleSounds.uax and TheCastleTextures.utx rather than having TheCastle.uax, TheCastle.utx etc.
Once you have all your sounds imported, it is time to go to the Special Event properties. Go to SpecialEvent → Sound. Next, find the sound that you want to use in the SoundFX Browser. Click on it once (double clicking will play it) and then click on Use in the SE properties.
Because SE's can do so many different things, you need to tell this one that it is meant to play a sound. This is done from Object → InitialState. Change this to PlaySoundEffect.
Now you will need to give the SE the right tag (Event → Tag). I would recommend calling this the same name as the line.
Triggering the sound effect from the director is the same as triggering any other ready built-in effect, which is covered in the next section...

Triggering events

Triggering events using UMS is very simple. All you have to do is put Effect Whatever, where Whatever is the tag of the event being triggered. So, for a sound event, if the SE is called 03Suzi05, you would put Effect 03Suzi05 into the director.

Setting the speed

I have already covered this partially in the very first tutorial, but I am going to explain it a bit better here. SetSpeed is, unfortunately, limited by UT to between .2 and 40. This is still quite a big range. I can't really see a time when you would want to go much over 2, but there have been times when I have wanted to go to less than .2
The command for SetSpeed is just that: SetSpeed in the Script, and the speed that you want it to go at in the ScriptVals

Changing the Point of View (POV)

This does the same thing as making a camera CutTo, but this will set the view to be from a pawn's point of view.
The command is ver simple - POV Pawn1 where Pawn1 is the pawn that you want the POV to be from.

Playing and changing music

One of the great advantages of Unreal engine games is the format of the music. Being in XM format gives editors much more control over what part of the music is played where. It is very easy to have a repeating section of the music, which suddenly changes when something important happend.
The format in the director for the music is PlaySong SongPackage.SongName. The SongPackage and the SongName are, in most cases, the same. They can be found by going to the Music Browser and loading up a .umx file. The name of that file is the SongPackage and the name of the song which appears in the browser is the SongName. Because only one song can be held in each package, it is very unusual for these to be different.
If you don't know about the format of XM or MOD music, then do skip onto the next section of this tutorial, as this may just confuse you, but if you do know about this sort of music, then you will know what I am talking about.
The ScriptVals is the section of the song to play from. As this command can be used for changing the section of the song, you will need to have a look at the original song for this.
In one of the ScriptVectors slots, you should put the number which corresponds to the transition that you want. If this is not a whole number, of if it is 5 or more, then the song won't change. However, here are the transitions for 0 to 4:

0	An instant change
1	Segue (I think this means that it waits until the end of the section before going to the one you told it to)
2	A medium fade
3	A fast fade
4	A slow fade

Changing the HUD

This was covered pretty well in the first tutorial, but I will go over it again here. To change the HUD, the command is ChangeHUD HUDPackage.HUDName where HUDPackage is the package that the HUD is included in, and HUDName is the name of the HUD.
So, for both the HUD's that were included with UMS, the HUDPackage would be UMS and the HUDName would be MovieHUD or Letterbox

Putting Dialogue onto the screen

There aren't many uses for this command as it stands at the moment, apart from, maybe, putting something onto the screen to say where a scene is taking place. You can't actually control where on the screen it is, though.
The Script command for the dialogue is Dialogue Message that you want to appear.
ScriptVals is the size of the text, ranging from 1 to 7. If you leave it at 0, then the text will be the same size as it was the previous time.
ScriptVectors contains the colour of the text. X corresponds to red, Y to green, and Z to blue. These values should be between 0 and 255. If you find that your text does not appear, check that the colour is in there.
If the text is longer than one line, then it will carry on on the next line.
The text will stay on the screen until you do a blank Dialogue command.

Looping the director

You can, if you want, get a series of commands in the director to loop. This is done by putting Loop 6 (or, instead of 6, you put the command number that you want it to go to).
In ScriptVals, you should put the number of times that you want it to loop back. If this is 0, then it won't actually loop back, meaning that it will have done those commands once only.

Spawning objects

With this command, you can add new objects to the level, in the middle of a scene. You can't, unfortunately, change the properties of the new objects, apart from setting the Tag. If you want to make, say, a person suddenly appear, then I would recommend having them elsewhere in the level, and making them move to that point with a move time of 0.
The command is: Spawn Package.Object AnotherObject where Package.Object is the object that you want to appear, and AnotherObject is the object that you want the spawned object to appear with.
ScriptVectors has the offset from AnotherObject that you want the new object to appear at.
ScriptRotators is the rotation of the new object
ScriptNames is the tag that you want the new object to have. This is useful if you want, say, a camera to track the new object.

Changing levels

This is very simple. All you have to know is the name of the level that you want to load up. It shuld either be in UnrealTournament\Maps, or a subdirectory of UnrealTournament\Maps.
The command is: ChangeLevel SomeLevel.unr or ChangeLevel Somedirectory\SomeLevel.unr

What's next

In the next tutorial, I will cover setting up Interpolation Points.