Option for starter kit with all template assets?

I’m still in early prototyping, learning, building, testing, etc. And got to thinking it would be really nice if all the items found in the various market place examples where to put as an added starter pack for all the game templates. I find myself jumping around between the game examples / demo levels / maps just so I have a few simple assets to test / use when doing tutorials etc. If there was a starter pack that had them all in there it would help with both the prototyping and the learning.

Just a thought, i’ve started trying to go into the examples and export the models, materials, and textures and put them all back together, but it’s time consuming, has to be loaded in manually each time I create a new project, and it’s a royal pain to get some of the things to tie back together correctly cause they are held together by blueprints etc.

One nice thing with udk is you had an overly expansive content browser full of everything you needed to just about make an entire game prototype. Now you get a small handful of things. Which is nice on one side cause content browser not flooded, but on flip side would be nice to have when you wanted to test and prototype build.

Did you use the migrate feature? With that it takes you 1 min to get the assets from one project to another.

You could also place those contents into the engine content folder, then you should have access to them in every project.

Does anyone know where some of the content is downloaded to? I’m digging through the folders but not seeing like the cave, shooter, etc. that I want to migrate materials out of.

Also, do I need to copy them over to the 4.0\Engine\Content folder or the \Samples\StarterContent\Content folder so I can just check mark “include starter content” and just throw everything in?

The samples will be downloaded into documents-Unreal Projects

Put it into Engine/Content -> but I haven’t tried it out yet, so probably it wont work ^^

Thank you, I will give it a try and let you know the results. :slight_smile:

EDIT:
Results: Yes and no.

I attempted the Content folder from the shooter demo. I placed it in the Content directory for StarterContent – (which I backed up first)
I started a new project, and selected “Add starter content”

It took a LOT longer to build assets, etc. since it was almost 1.5GB of data to copy over. Then, I received a lot of script errors looking for scripts in the /Game/Assets/ folder.
I then closed and reset my StartingContent folder and ok now.

So I would assume this:

  1. It is better to export and import specific items to keep directory structures, etc.
  2. Only copy the items you want, not everything…because it has to load every single thing/build all assets/etc.

Now some of this could be because my machine is a little slow, so you might experience differently…but I’m guessing if you threw EVERYTHING in there…you would be sitting for a while, since it has to copy over and build all assets for your new level.

Maybe if they put them all in one folder and organized it so you could say click IMPORT and then go through like the directory tree and find the assets you want to use. Like a Master Assets catalog or something.

But I would not recommend just loading every single piece of content into your editor every time.

Migrate works very well, just have to make sure you don’t have some odd folder structures in the game/assets folder. When you migrate it over it pulls all the items and keeps their folder structure, which works to keep things working. The import export option was a royal pain, the migrate works well though. Also I made a seperate asset folder for my stuff, so I can keep the two apart, etc. Working well to learn from etc.

Problem well challenge still stands though I have to download each demo, load each demo, grab a handful of things out of it, migrate it, and then use it. Versus having a possible option of either having a “use large starter kit” which has more of the demo stuff all shoved in, or use “small starter kit” which has just a few pieces.

But thank you for the migrate option, ive built out a project that has the stuff I want. And then I just load it and migrate it over to the new projects I create etc. when I need it.

I think this would be useful but i hope epic or the community will create a decent free content pack which includes all the common stuff you’d expect and then some.

While it’s nice you can take content from the demos it’s really not the same as having a good starter pack. I think this would help a lot of people just trying to learn or quick map creation for projects etc, also it would just be really useful in general and is kind of expected if you’re a mapper coming from other games.

In the Marketplace, when you click on a demo, theres a link just under the download button which tells you where its being downloaded to by default - you can click and change this also…

Couldn’t agree more, figured this was how it was prior to buying the unreal engine, but I’m finding it really hard to find some simple information like adding a gun to the fps template.

Another thing you could do would be, now that you have a project with migrated things in it, is to just copy that folder to a new folder (named whatever your new project is), then change a couple .ini files to match the new folder name (GameName in DefaultEngine.ini, ProjectName in DefaultGame.ini … both in the project/Config directory) … no need to migrate to a new area… In the default game ini there is also a project ID that you can recreate on the edit->project settings page (top set of options, above the Engine stuff where you define inputs, etc).

Handy if you want to scrap a project and start over, or once you flesh out certain things like movement, sky dome, weapons, etc etc… that you want to use across -all- of your projects.

Trying to put one of these starter packs together myself at the moment.

Hopefully I can find a way to build a custom vault pack and collect everything into one place.

Anyone had any luck making one? I’d be more than happy to share to collected vault pack (UE4 permitting) if anyone can help me understand how to create my own custom pack?

thanks for your help,