how to make levels?
Blitz3D Forums/Blitz3D Beginners Area/how to make levels?
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| What is the best way to make different kinds of levels? For example, if I wanted to make an indoor level, should I make one large mesh for the entire level in my modeling program? If I do this, should I texture the level the same way as a smaller model - with one image, or is there some way to apply more than one image to a large model? With outdoor levels, should I just make a new model for each building and put them on the terrain? Thanks |
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| I'd recommend using tiling textures, and single UVW UVmapped textures for areas of interest. Hide some of the tiling with multitexturing and lightmaps/vertex colours etc. Normaly to get the speed make a extra low poly version to use for collisions, and use that for gameplay. TO start optimxing your scene, it can be useful to combine models that share the same brush. and break there up intelligently where you think you will get an advantage by occluding them. Blits has a bounding bopx frustrum occlusion system I think so anything that has a bouding box within the cameras view gets drawn. It all takes a bit of practice and experimentation really, and much depends on the target system. Really low end systems suffer a great deal from too many surfaces in the scene. easiest way to think of a surface is as a seperate mesh with a brush assigned. (part of the reason you can get benefits from combining same brush meshes into one large one). Keeping polycounts of individual meshes at under 2000 polys seems to be beneficial too :) |
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| Thanks, this helps a lot. |
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| A simple solution is to use Maplet for the Building MEsh and Decorator to add the textures. http://www.blitzbasic.com/Products/maplet.php http://www.blitzbasic.com/toolbox/toolbox.php?tool=26 Alternatively you can use Slim Shady (toolbox / lightmappers) with exported meshes of Maplet and Decorator, tho you cannot use Maplet Lights in Slim Shady but you'd have to recreate them, but it allows to add further meshes and save the map as a singe mesh with multiple textures. The mentioned tools are all for free. If you are willing to pay some $ then I'd suggest [g]iles, the best lightmapper so far. |
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| If it is your first 3D FPS or wlakaround type of game I would keep it REALLY SIMPLE to get the code straight and working... Use MAPLET and have some fun with that. THEN when the engine works make the map using the heavy hitter tools mentioned... All are fine examples of what to do... But start with the basics and you won't get discouraged as easily. There is a lot for you to learn... Take it slow and ask for help if you need it! Rook |
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| Maplet's quite easy to start with, good for indoor levels. Although moving the camera around is a bit fiddly and it's hard to get the shapes you want. Once you get the hang of creating and loading basic levels, try something like this tool, called GLET: www.navisaer.com/gletsite/ It's quite easy to use. |
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| One problem with maplet is that it makes terrible meshes, since it doesn't arrange the tri edges well at all. Leaving you with vey messy long thin triangles. Could really do with some kind of optimizing algorithm. I'd move onto something else ASAP. |
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| You should not use one large mesh. If you use one large mesh Blitz3D's frustrum culling can not cull anything but your one large mesh. Export it as hierarchical model and load it with loadanimmesh |
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