Fangame How-to:SonicGDK/Tips and tricks

A list of tips & tricks worth mentioning for those who want to use SonicGDK.

Editor tooltips

All the objects you place in a map with the Unreal Editor have properties; if you double-click on any of them, or select one of them and press F4, the Object Properties window appears with a list of properties and their values. When you mouse over the name of a property, the editor usually displays tooltips, which are very important if you want to know the effects of modifying a property.

Attachment of objects

Follow this little guide. It's also useful when you want a property of an object to point to another object.

Console commands / cheats

Console commands are text-based commands that you can run in the game. Cheats are also console commands; to use them, bring up the console by pressing Tab or Tilde(~), type them in and press Enter.

• fly: Lets the player fly.
• ghost: Lets the player fly through walls.
• walk: Cancels fly and ghost cheat commands.
• god: Grants permanent invencibility until you type the command again.
• slomo [number]: Alters the speed of the game to the value specified. 1.0 is 100%.
• stat fps: Toggles display of frames per second (fps) statistics.
• showdebug: Toggles display of a list of important values.
• show collision: Toggles display of collision primitives.
• nxvis collision: Shows most of collision shapes.
• Many more...
• And more can be found in the SGDKCheatManager.uc file of UDKdir\Development\Src\SonicGDK\Classes

Some commands won't be recognized because cheats are disabled by default; to enable them:

1. Remove the Globals.uci file (you should backup it) from UDKdir\Development\Src\SonicGDK
2. Run the Unreal Frontend tool (UDKdir\Binaries\UnrealFrontend.exe), click on the "Script" button and choose the "Full recompile" option.

To disable cheats after this, restore the deleted file and full recompile scripts again.

Sonic Physics mode

The "Sonic Physics mode" that you enable by placing SGDKStaticMeshActors or SonicPhysicsVolumes in a map, must be used only for loopings and walkable walls/steep slopes (greater than 45deg). "Sonic Physics mode" gets easily affected by little extrusions on the ground, so the meshes used with this mode need to be as smooth as possible.

If you want to use a StaticMesh with no simplified collision model for "Sonic Physics mode", you have to open it with the Unreal Static Mesh Editor window and disable the "Use Simple Box Collision", "Use Simple Line Collision" and "Use Simple Rigid Body Collision" property flags. You also have to make sure that each "Material" slot of the "LODInfo" array property has the "Enable Per Poly Collision" property flag enabled.