Placing Entities
Blitz3D Forums/Blitz3D Beginners Area/Placing Entities
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| I find it extremely difficult to place many entities with preciscion throughout a level. Are there programs that integrate with Blitz3D that are able to place entities precisely? |
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| http://www.blitzbasic.com/toolbox/toolbox.php?cat=3 |
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| What I understand, and those more experience, correct me if Im wrong, if you use a mapping program, you can set all your objects on the map and then add script for movement etc from there in Blitz3D. |
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| The main function of a mapping program like Droplet, for example, is that it allows you to precisely place your entities exactly where you want them in your level. Most of them will export a text or data file that you can read into Blitz containing the positions and rotations of your items. Using this file your program can then easily load and position your entities in the correct place with correct rotation and scaling. Most programs will come with an example "loader" function to show you how to achieve this. It really saves you the time and effort of hard-coding the position, scale and rotation of every item in your level which would be very tedious and time consuming as most of it would be trial and error. Some will also allow you to add custom attributes that your program can understand and act upon - the most common being light and camera positions. |
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| Just a thought: maybe there's still a tool missing that is capable of doing the following: Position, scale, rotate etc. media object, and set all its possbile settings. The basement of it shoud be a systematic wrapping of all properties. Some kind of VirtualBlitz (VBB). Although, the graphical user interface should be far more productive than everything I know from microsoft. One-click solutions are needed. I don't want to be forced to -click the selection tool to be able to select a mesh -click the movement tool to be able to move it -click the selection tool again to select an other mesh and so on. Workflow and productivity should be a new reference for GUIs even compared to Pro apps. The tool would save all these possible settings of the entity, or other media object, plus allow some flexible user data. This editor could then be used by virtually any game engine. |
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| BTw funnyben123, you may try this one: http://www.melog.ch/dl/pledit05.zip Altough it's a simple editor that doesn't cover all settings as I described in my previous post, it shows the concept of it and also contains an example on how to load a saved world/map. |
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| thanks the program works very well. Should i take the information provided in the .pld file to place my objects? I was actually looking for a program that "integrates" itself with blitz. Kind of like how game studio's world editor, where the ide is practically a part of it. |
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| As far as I remember there is an example inside the zip file that will load the pld file (or more correct: load what's listed in the pld file). You may of course integrate both sources into one program and call the editor for example with a special switch on the command line, or you may switch to editing mode when the player presses a certain key. There are pros and cons in the combined gameengine/editor. One of the most significant pros is: if you edit the loader you will have to edit it only in one program. Con: the required dynamic entity management will complicate the game programming part. This code is BTW thought to be used in FPS games. |
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| Anyone ever tried 3D World Studio by Leadwerks? It allows you to create and place your own entities with custom properties. It is mainly a CSG editor, but you can place mesh objects and lights (to be lighmaped in the actual editor), and you can load heightmaps for terrain. It works great with Blitz3D and the author has provided his own function that simply LoadWorld(). www.leadwerks.com the function: http://www.blitzbasic.com/Community/posts.php?topic=51660 |
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