Helpful tools/programs list

Community Community & Industry Discussion
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Since I’ve found a few cool things I thought I would compile a list. For now I restrict it to what’s been incredibly useful to me as well as free.

Scape (free) is the fastest terrain sculpting program I’ve found, it uses GPU acceleration. Other programs I feel are a bit slow if you want to get something up and running quick. You can change the heightmap dimensions in Settings\startup.conf when you have downloaded it. Save as “16-bit RAW (Intel)” on Windows, and you’ll have to tell it the dimensions when you load it again so I keep that in the filename.

The Compressonator (free) will optimize your textures with a few clicks and can also effortlessly convert image formats including DDS. There’s DDS converter similarly.

Haxe (free) is a new and easy-to-learn language that compiles to c++ and other languages, so you can quickly create simple utility programs with it, e.g. there are one-line functions for saving and loading text files.

Bulk Rename Utility (free), a powerful yet simple file rename utility.

FileSeek (free) - This is amazing if you need to search a code folder for specific functions or variables you’ve lost track of.

SpaceMonger (free). Have you ever wondered why your C drive is full? This will show you where by dividing hard drive usage up into blocks, so some folders become huge and others tiny, and then you can see what you need to delete.

UE4 FBX Exporter : TS_UE4FBXExporter (free)

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Autohotkey - A simple scripting language for Windows that can send input to other programs. Useful for testing GUIs and gameplay.

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SSbump Generator - generates normal maps, non-shadowed ssbump maps, or embed directional ambient occlusion

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Thanks for the info.
A question about haxe, Do you use it as a standalone tool, or to generate ue c++ code ?

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Thank U Archibold! Scape it’s Great!

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You download it and use FlashDevelop as the code editor, the language is like Java or C sharp. Then the compiler compiles your code to c++ for you. And then that code is a separate application, it’s not part of the Unreal Engine game. No, for Unreal coding… well, maybe it’s possible because there is a Haxe scripting library that runs in c++. I am thinking about it. Haxe just feels better for me, even though I have a few years’ c/c++ experience.

If most of the Unreal Engine was ported to Haxe it would run slower, but still fast enough I think.

://learnxinyminutes/docs/haxe/

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thanks I downloaded Haxe and Flashdevelop for other works here in the office it seems really interesting.

Regarding UE, I was thinking about a port of HXCPP compiler to UE4 to generate classes… a kind of Unreal Script but compiled to native code…
but that’s beyond my capabilities…

Something like this (made for Unity) ://proletariat/2013/10/10/free-hugs/

Also Scape is really impressive ! thanks again

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Unfortunately for what you want, you can’t just get away with Haxe’s untyped keyword, because the headerCode meta tag just doesn’t work, or at least on my PC it doesn’t. I don’t know the stuff behind Haxe’s build system and it seems to complex for me. But maybe one of the devs can be commissioned to provide what you want.

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is it easy to get scape terrain into ue4?

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Yes, even easier than CryEngine.

I’m not sure whether you need the project heightmap/terrain settings to be the right size first, I remember choosing something, but anyway:

  1. Change the startup.conf file in the Scape folder, in data or something inside that folder, by setting the terrain dimensions to one of these heightmap dimensions. Bigger size = more detail

  2. When you’re finished sculpting the terrain, save it as 16-bit raw format (it will ask you when you open, for the dimensions, you type it in)

  3. Import in ue4 using these simple steps.

Also something I left out about Scape: I use Ctrl + Right Click drag to get around much faster in the editor.