The vanilla Unreal mapping tools are, for lack of a better term, pointless. Creating a rectangle is many clicks, not to even mentioning changing it’s vertices and basic shape.
The point of the visual engine part is for you to be able to design the game quickly, without guesswork. But, this engine is slow compared to Hammer editor, a product of 2000s. It’s faster to block out a greybox level in Blender than in Unreal, and that’s not a compliment to Blender.
These are the points of interest:
(I intentionally selected points which any intern could add in few minutes.)
If any of these are already possible, mention them below and I will edit.
Creating shapes is slow
- You can’t draw simple geometry like rectangles on many side views before committing.
- Moving a vertex on grid 1 when on grid size 5 moves the vertex to grid 6, instead of 5. Grid size should lock any selection to a multiply of the grid size, not just increase or decrease by grid size amount.
- You have to hold alt at start of moving the selection for it to copy. Why not let this work no matter when alt is pressed?
- No automated/special copy. If I want to copy something hundred or thousand times, it takes ages to copy and move manually. What if I want each copy to be rotated 10 degrees more than the last?
- You cannot name geometry by selecting many different geometry. But, you can name geometry the same name. Why is this is a limitation then? It makes everything slower.
Selecting is slow
- Side views do not affect selecting. If I want to select all lines stacked on top of each other from a side view, I can only select one at a time, even if I draw selection boxes. Same for vertices. So… why are side views a thing?
- You cannot group selections. So, if you made a house, you have to sluggishly travel to the folder of your house, and select “select all” in order to move it, instead of grouping it and moving everything if one of the parts gets selected.
- Basic BSP geometry, the one you need to manually move, is nearly impossible to see with it’s dark blue color not contrasting against dark void in side views.
No way to add vertices to shapes.
- There’s no way to add a new vertices. If I want to turn a pyramid into a rectangle, I have to remove the pyramid, add a rectangle, and then move all it’s vertices in the right place. Compare this with just adding one vertex to the pyramid.
- There is no cutting tool, allowing cutting geometry along a drawn line. This allows you to make doorways and ramps in split seconds.
No group tag management
- There’s no simple way for hiding all objects of same type in a level. So, if you want to see what the level looks like without props, cubemaps or other accessories, you can’t. You can only hide all gizmos
The engine has some type of management of these tags already, models aren’t the same thing as trigger volumes. Yet, there’s no way to hide all trigger volumes in a simple way.