Real Relief

[www.sibvrv.com]

NecroDOME, jasonf...
Now I optimize my simple engine and add shadows with physics, but i cant create levels for it... who want to help me?
btw i have trying load Q1 levels with Reliefs, new demo coming soon

[NecroDOME]

looking forward!

[WILL]

A level editor would be a helpful tool...? Maybe someone could make a tool that can be extended so that way the workload could get spread around.

[jasonf]

What kind of game is it? what sort of levels are you interested in?

Do you have textures already? I have used apps like worldcraft to make quake maps, but it's been a while.. I used to make maps for the Torque engine.

It does seem a little old hat though, CSG levels do tend to look very boxy and it's very hard to make certain shapes.

PM me if you don't want to discuss everything in a public forum, although the more people you can get interested in helping out, the faster things will get done..

[NecroDOME]

CSG levels do tend to look very boxy

Unreal (and unreal tournament) have CSG levels. And they look nice - not boxy (well... it looks boxy cause old games do by default). The only thing you need with this is vertex editing. And thats the easy part of CSG.

[jasonf]

Vertex editing is also an easy way to bugger up a CSG level :lol:

It's true though, with skill, it's possible to make stunning levels. I always end up breaking mine whenever I mess with the vertexes though. I do wish that some of the tools would allow better control of the geometry... perhaps it was a torque thing but it was always a hit&miss affair for me trying to make organic looking shapes. sometimes things would look different after compliation than they did in the editor.

In my experience, CSG is great for boxy rooms, but as soon as you want something smooth or intricate, then the skill/results graph starts to go a bit turbo.

UT2004 has some truly amazing looking levels.. I think they use something else, there appears to be a lot of repeated, hi-res models used in the environments. Perhaps they've taken the bsp tree model and applied it to fixed entity positions.

[Robert Kosek]

UT2k4 makes use of "static meshes", or meshes that never change and are completely cachable by the graphics card. So it's like a display list.

[Traveler]

Ohh.. this is really nice!

Very interested to see where this is going to

[NecroDOME]

True about the "static meshes". UT2k4 uses CSG to make the basic 'level geometry', and they finish that with filling the spots with static meshes and terrain. And it indeed looked very nice! But if you try to make oranic shapes, you should make a mesh and add that to the world, don't model it with CSG. However the unreal editor handles CSG pretty nice! Sometimes it still bugs a but, but with a little edit-vertex tweaking you could fix most things!

EDIT:

@Will: Here are some ppl writing "a better 2D engine". Why not start a project "a better 3D engine" (with editor). I'm sure you guys could manage it! However I'm not going to help with coding, but could point you guys in the right direction. And the pascal-community would have a 3D engine with editor to make fancy looking games.

Anyhow to get on-topic: you could also model the walls in stead of make a heightmap out of it . It would be faster and in most cases beter looking.

[jasonf]

Garage games have recently completed work on their Constructor tool, which they've been working on for the last 2 years.. which is released for Free! I've not used it yet, but as Torque uses csg for its interiors, and as constructor exports to .map format, it might be worth a look into before we go off down the reinvent the wheel road

Here are some CSG editors, some free, some commercial..

Cartography Shop: http://cartographyshop.thegamecreators.com/
3D World Studio: http://3dworldstudio.thegamecreators.com/
Quark: http://quark.planetquake.gamespy.com/
Hammer: http://games.softpedia.com/get/Tools...r-Editor.shtml
Constructor: http://www.garagegames.com/products/torque/constructor/

so why on earth would we want to write another one?... :lol: