Where to Start?

When learning any new software program, particularly one as complicated as a complete game engine and tool suite like Reality Factory, it is easy to feel overwhelmed. This chapter is designed to help get you familiar with the primary Level Editor that you will be using to create your RF levels, RF Edit Pro.

Tip Before we jump into the editor, however, let’s take a brief tour through the Reality Factory tool suite and see what the engine has to offer. At this point, we assume that you have managed to install the Reality Factory engine (either the one provided on this book’s CD-ROM or potentially a newer release from www.realityfactory.ca). New releases come out approximately every two months or so, so it’s a good idea to check the Web site often for updated releases and bug fixes, not to mention resources, sample scripts demonstrating certain types of gameplay, and more.

Reality Factory installs by default to C:\realityfactory. Inside the main root directory you will see a number of applications (EXE files), dynamic link libraries (DLLs), and some other resources. The RealityFactory.exe application is the main game engine itself. If you create a game with Reality Factory, you are in essence customizing the behavior of the engine by adding a custom menu, heads-up display, weapons, characters, and of course, levels.RealityFactory.exe becomes YOUR game (you can rename it once you are done making your game, add your own icon, and so on) and is freely distributable for commercial and noncommercial use.

Note Check the www.realityfactory.ca site for more details on the Reality Factory license, and check out www.opensource.org for more information on open source software in general if you are not familiar with it. Open source software (OSS) has recently caught on as a phenomenon in the operating system and business market and is slowly catching on in the game industry. OSS projects rely on community input and feedback, not to mention contributions (code, resources, financial, and such) to further the projects’ development. Instead of keeping the software’s code (the blueprint of the software) locked away in a vault where no one can see it, like proprietary software, OSS projects provide the world with the means for examining, testing, and using the code based on any of hundreds of different open source licenses, some more restrictive than others. The Reality Factory license is known as an MIT-style license, which is one of the most liberal licenses (meaning you can do just about anything you want with the software) that software is released under. Please check http://www.opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.php for more information on the MIT-style license definition and other background on open source software in general.

The rest of the Reality Factory directory structure is broken into a number of subdirectories, described below:

Icons: This directory stores icons for the entities that you place into your levels (lights, doors, and so on). These are used only by the editors.

Install: This is the directory of configuration files for your RF game. You can define custom effects, heads-up display, menu, attributes, camera settings, and much more just by modifying these INI files. Check the Reality Factory documentation for more information on the INI files.

Media: This is where the content of your game is stored. There are a number of subdirectories underneath that contain the different elements of your game, including actors, audio, bitmaps, levels, and video that make up your game.

Scripts: Reality Factory has an integrated scripting language (called Simkin) that is used to customize the behaviors of your game’s characters (friendly and not-so-friendly). Scripting in RF is beyond the scope of this tutorial, but you can check the Reality Factory site for more details on the syntax and functions available to you. There are a number of sample scripts provided in the Scripts directory of your install, and they can be opened with any text editor (like Notepad) for viewing and customization. Simkin is similar to more advanced languages like C or Perl, but is much easier to learn and use.

Source: This directory contains the entity definitions for the Reality Factory engine. This is the glue between the editors and the game engine itself. The editors read the gameentitydatatypes.h file (a C++ header file defining the entities, such as lights and doors) when you load a level. This tells the editor what properties or options are available with each entity so when you compile your level for testing in the game engine, the game engine can read the information and execute the game level.

Tools: All the Reality Factory tools are in this directory. There are a number of applications, each designed to help you with a specific component of Reality Factory game creation. They include ActorView.exe (an actor viewer so that you can view your RF actors), Astudio.exe (the Actor studio (which is used to compile your 3D models into game-ready actors), rfpack.exe (drag-and-drop textures onto rfpack to build your own custom texture libraries that can be used in your game levels), rfvfs (loads and displays RF pack files, which can be used to simplify distribution of your finished game and supports encryption of your game’s content to protect it from theft/hacking), and many others.