CShop - a room in two clicks!

Community Forums/Developer Stations/CShop - a room in two clicks!

IPete2(Posted 2003) [#1]
Hey team,

I may be behind here but I've just discovered something really great - due to a post by Shawn Swift elsewhere here (ta Shawn!)...

(1) Creat a big cube

(2) Select Hollow and 1 pixel

Voila - a room :). Simple but very useful for the portal stuff in Singularity too!

BTW I've made a hinge door entity for CShop and Singularity if anyone's interested. You can only have it face the 4 compass points, but you can hinge on either side, attach sounds for opening/closing, set the open and close yaw, and the speed of open and close.

IPete2.


sswift(Posted 2003) [#2]
I don't know how cshop works, but I presume that the 1 pixel thing is the thickness of the walls.

If so, why make 1 pixel wide walls? Probably uses the same number of polygons as more pixels. :-) I doubt cshop optimizes the exterior polygons away.

I wonder if shop has any subtraction capabilities though. If not, then of what use is it to make a hollow cube room? You need a door to get in! :-)

I've never used cshop, so forgive me if I'm mistaken. :-)


JaviCervera(Posted 2003) [#3]
Almost all the professional map editors I have ever used have 'Hollow': Valve's Hammer, Quark, Qoole...


Gabriel(Posted 2003) [#4]
I wonder if shop has any subtraction capabilities though.


Yep. It has carve, which is CSG subtraction. The advantage of having depth to your room is that windows, door frames, etc are already there when you carve a door/window/grate/whatever.

I'm gonna have to try this SS2 level editor some time ( assuming it's available ) to see how it works. It's obviously very different from all the CSG editors I've used.


JaviCervera(Posted 2003) [#5]
what's SS2 Sybixsus?


sswift(Posted 2003) [#6]
System Shock 2, a game I worked on.

First person shooter with RPG elements, set on a space ship in the future, with a compuer that has gone insane. It has a cult following though didn't sell really well. The game allows you to create a character of one of three types and build up his skills as you progress in the game, so you can make a military grunt, a hacker, or a psychic weapons specialist, or any combination of the above.


"I'm gonna have to try this SS2 level editor some time ( assuming it's available ) to see how it works."


I'm pretty sure the editor is available, and if it is not, then the editor for Thief the Dark Project is identical and I'm positive that that is available.


"It's obviously very different from all the CSG editors I've used."

It's pretty crappy actually. :-) It has some good concepts but the interface was very poorly thought out.

For instance, if I remember correctly, there is no way to move vertices around. If you create for example, a wedge, (which btw, was not in the editor until I requested it after months of work had already gone into thief without it) then you could change it's shape only by changing the scaling factor for each axis.

The way the CSG worked was there were nine kinds of brushes.

Air, Solid, Water, Air->Solid, Solid->Air, Water->Solid, Solid->Water, Air->Water, Water->Air.

So let's say you wanted to creaate a room. You'd plunk down an air brush in the shape of a cube. There's your room.

Now lets say you wanted to create a pit with water in the center.

You could carve a hole out with another air brush, and drop a water brush into it, but that was discouraged. I think it was because there were issues with floating point accuracy and csg operations.

Or, you could plunk down a solid->water brush that intersects the room and empty space. But if you wanted to have a pool where the water was not flush with the floor you'd have to still use an air brush to carve out the start of the hole and then finish it with the solid->water brush.

Converting solid to water to air also often came in useful when trying to create certain complex geometry that would be otherwise impossible because of the lack of vertex editing.

For example, as I said before, there was no WEDGE in the editor until after Thief was complete and work ws progressing on Thief 2, because nobody thought ot request it except me! :-)

As a result, any time in thief you see an incline, that was made by rotating a cube.

But there's a lot of cases where you want to create things which are impossible to simply create with a cube. So people would use the conversion brushes like say, you would use an intermediate variable to swap two values. c=a a=b b=c.

So they would place a cube in space, and use the conversion brushes to convert one part of it to water. Then convert another part of it which was still solid into air, and then convert the water back into solid, which allowed them to create shapes which they could not otherwise create without vertex editing.

Unfortunately I can't think of any specific examples right now from thief where they needed to do this, but when I started working on shock 2, I found I needed to do this all over the place to create doorways with angled edges and a door jamb. That's what drove me to ask for vertex editing but they said that was impossible because of the way the whole CSG system worked, and I took a peek at the code once to see how they added new shapes, and sure enough the way they added shapes was not coded in such a way as to allow the shape to be modified later. Even though it SHOULD have been. So I asked for the wedge instead which probably resulted in drastic improvements to the game because of the amount of time it saved over the other methods of creating angled geometry which shock 2 needed a lot of.

Anyhow, I don't think the whole CSG thing is a bad idea at all, it works really well in Unreal, and it keeps your maps a lot cleaner looking than Quake style editing which creates six cubes per room, ignoring all the splits which occur when you do something simple like adding a door or window. Then you've got a minimum of eight cubes for one room. And making sure you don't accidentally move any of those cubes and create a hole in your level making visibility calculations break is a real pain in the ass. So I like CSG like Maplet and Unreal use. The only thing which annoys me about it is that it might be nice in Unreal if instead of the universe starting out solid, it started out hollow, because it makes constructing buildings outdoors with sky kinda a pain sometimes. Skies were such a pain in the ass in the Duke Nukem 3D editor too. I loved using the Build engine though. But I don't miss the limitations of it.


Smurfpuss(Posted 2003) [#7]
Well cshop3 is easy to use and using the singularity engine the creation of fps is a peace of cake!

damm i suck in the kitchen well i will have to make a go any way


JoshK(Posted 2003) [#8]
You could save that room as a prefab and make a room in one click.


jfk EO-11110(Posted 2003) [#9]
Is there a fully baken piece of cake out there? show me.


QuickSilva(Posted 2003) [#10]
Can I just ask a quick question about Cartography Shop 3 as I have tested the demo and it`s great (going to buy real soon) Is it possible to enlarge the 3D view to full screen?

Sorry for being a little off topic.

Jason.


IPete2(Posted 2003) [#11]
Quicksilva,

No, you cannot make any window bigger I believe. Ashame but true at the moment (I don't know if Josh is going to implement a fullscreen in the future).

IPete2.


QuickSilva(Posted 2003) [#12]
Damn, that`s probably the only feature missing that`s stoping me from buying it :( I think you need to be able to look around a full screen version of the 3D view to get a good feel of how your finished model will look in the game.

I hope this is a feature that will be added soon as otherwise it`s a great program, well worth the money.

Jason.


IPete2(Posted 2003) [#13]
Yes,

I agree, although I already have it!

IPete2.


QuickSilva(Posted 2003) [#14]
IPete2, If you take a look at the following link it shows a full screen 3D preview mode, so my question is could it be an undocumented feature?

http://cartographyshop.thegamecreators.com/?m=showcase_view&i=34

Jason.


IPete2(Posted 2003) [#15]
QuickSilva,

Yes, you previous CShops could go to full frame as I remember, however look at the date of the post - June 10th 2003.

This is pre-CShop 3 - I may be wrong (please be wrong!) but I think when Josh moved over to OpenGL for the perspective viewport, he may have had to ditch fullscreen. I believe he had to write the code from scratch, perhaps if he can update it later we can get another version.

At the moment I am fairly sure it's not possible. Sorry.

IPete2.


QuickSilva(Posted 2003) [#16]
Ok, thanks for letting me know. Fingers crossed for a newer version eh?

Jason.