And there was light...

This weeks we will be presenting on the concept of knowledge relating to our project. From wikipedia, knowledge is define as "expertise, and skills acquired by a person through experience or education". From this topic I'll be relating back to my own expertise, experience and education while working through the initial stages of creating our unbuilt design as a ut3 map.

In previous years I have created a couple of maps for other games, so I came into this project with a little knowledge of the technical terms and basic concepts of level creation in the gaming context. Even though I had this previous expertise or knowledge I still had alot and still have lot to learn with the unreal tournament editor, (things have come along way since quake1).

Coming to this project with basically no idea about ut3, the first move in expanding my knowledge of the game (the feel, dynamics, level design styles and specific objects) was to actually play the game. Much like an architect would generally walk around in our world and look at other constructions and notice the effects of gracity etc.

The second step in expanding my knowledge relating to this project was to play with the editing program, I found this fairly daunting. Although the interface was very similar to other programs I've worked with (worldcraft editor for quake, 3ds max, etc) and the basics were similar (brushes, actors as entities), I found the way everything worked (creating brushes and moving around the interface) very foreign and I didn't progress very far.

Noting my failure in learning by a trial an error approach, I took the advice of the tutors and started looking at the tutorial videos. This became a large part of the learning I did with the ut3 editor and my knowledge has increased alot from them. By combining my previous knowledge with this current knowledge I earnt from the tutorials I could than, fairly competently start mapping our design.



When starting this mapping exercise, I knew my knowledge of architecture, in particular scale, probably isn't up the the standard of others in my group. I would have prefered to create a map from plans, so I could relate distances and scale but all I had to work from was perspectives. It wasn't too much of a problem but here was a place where my lack of knowledge definalty led me to loss time as I readjusted the scale, by trial and error, of the map several times and I'm still not entirally happy with it.



So in my experience I've seen that there a couple types of different knowledge types. Previous expertise or experience, the learning of something new through communication (the tutorials), the experience of the trial and error approach leading to knowledge and how lack of knowledge can disadvantage you or maybe it could present a unique idea.

Related Links

Wikipedia: Knowledge