UDK, scripting, and examining objects

Smashbox

I'm looking for some general advice, and you seem like the people best-able to help.

I'm fairly new to the UDK, but I do have experience with several other 3D engines, with Flash/Actionscript, and with OOP. One of the most difficult things about teaching myself the UDK toolset is that I don't really have a sense of the BEST WAY to solve some problems, or examples of others' workflow. I don't need you to solve my problems for me, but if you've got advice, or a direction to point me, I would very much appreciate it.

The problem I want to solve:

I want to place objects in a game environment that display a tooltip when aimed at. When the player presses a button, I want the object to appear close to the camera, and be rotate-able by the player (In other words, the player can pick up and rotate the object, looking at it from any angle). The object needs to include a text description that will be displayed onscreen using Scaleform, too.

I think the most well-known example of this basic functionality is probably in Skyrim:


How, generally speaking would you go about accomplishing this goal? (i.e. would you create a new object class in Unrealscript, use triggers and Kismet, how do you store data associated with an object, etc., etc.)

Thanks for reading, and thanks in advance for any advice (even partial) you might have!

illo

here ya go

neat UI stuff in actionscript 3.0
http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/Scaleform.html

if you havent read this, you should. will help with how the engine classes are setup.
http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/MasteringUnrealScriptBaptismByFire.html

JamesWild

Try and figure out how weapons are put on the screen. Find how the weapon mesh is specified, (the name of the variable in the weapon object) and then find the references to that variable. Then one of them is most likely going to be making some kind of actor out of it with a stuck-to-screen property somewhere.

Smashbox

Awesome - thanks for the suggestions, guys. Much appreciated.