Rebuilding the Textured View


The 3D view in the editor runs a limited version of the G3D renderer, which means that it requires a BSP tree to render its own internal view. Of course, you can tell with one look at the editor that the full version of the level isn’t what we are looking at. Unlike some editors such as Jet3D and Unrealedit, the Genesis 3D editors don’t provide a fully lit 3D view.

Tip

If this is a problem for you, you can use 3D Studio Max to create your Genesis levels and convert them into either 3DT level files or ACT Actor files.

What the above ramble was meant to describe was the process of rebuilding the BSP view in the editor. After each change you make to the brushes, the editor must do a rebuild on the fly, calculating the textured 3D view that you see. This is not noticeable when you first start out (like with our four brushes), but when you get upward of 500 brushes and dozens of textures, the editing process can become extremely slowed by the constant rebuilding of the BSP view. In the RF Edit Pro editor, you will see a message in the lower-left corner saying Rebuilding Trees. This can take anywhere from near-instantaneous to almost a minute on some larger levels.

To enable or disable the auto-rebuild, go to Mode, AutoRebuild BSP and uncheck it. This means that the Textured view won’t be updated until you click the Rebuild button or go to Build, Rebuild BSP Tree.

Multiple Brush Cloning

Our new room has two walls, and we need to finish off the others. Let’s be a bit fancy to show some other features of the editor. Select the two walls in the room (Ctrl+left-click) and then clone them. Move them aside so that you can tell they are different from our first two walls, something like Figure 28.9.

click to expand
Figure 28.9: The brushes are cloned.

We’ve cloned the brushes in the lower-left window. Notice that the other windows haven’t updated themselves. This is because the screen shot was taken during the clone process. Once you let go of the mouse button, the other wireframe windows will update, and the Textured view will update if you have auto-rebuild enabled.

Rotating Brushes

Now that we have cloned our brushes, we need to rotate them 90 degrees from their current position, after which we will move them into place, perpendicular to our original two. To rotate the brushes, we need to right-click (with the brushes selected) in the top view (upper right) and choose Rotate 45. This will spin the two brushes around 45 degrees. Do this again, and the brushes will be in their proper rotation.

It is important with the various action modifiers (Move, Resize, Rotate) that you are clicking in the correct view. Luckily, the new editor has a pretty good undo/redo capability (Ctrl+Z to undo your last action), so you aren’t as affected as with the old editor. Previously, one wrong move and you had to rebuild entire sections of your map, which was not much fun.

Tip

Make backups of your level periodically (do a save as a different filename), just in case you break the level, something goes drastically wrong, and so forth.




Awesome 3d Game Development(c) No Programming Required
Awesome 3d Game Development: No Programming Required (Charles River Media Game Development)
ISBN: 1584503254
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2006
Pages: 168

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