What's the best Map Editor for free?
Community Forums/Developer Stations/What's the best Map Editor for free?
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| I was working with maplet for a long time and I really like the fast CSG tools, as well as Decorator to texture things intuitively and WYSIWYGish. Currently I am missing some things in this art path, things like: -edit on vertex level -set texture flags -powerfull auto-UV assignement with some options -boolean CSG with many shapes (eg sphere) with n segments -useful primitives , including quads -allow CSG geometry and simple mesh geometry parallely -Extremly intuitive user interface with tool-tips. -multiple import/export formats, eg. 3ds, x, b3d, ms3d etc. -mesh-terrain functions using vertexalpha for textureblending (as seen in ale/fle etc.) And of course it should be for free. What would you suggest? |
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| Ok, meanwhile I am also testing some editors. Currently Deled. Deled is pretty good, tho I am using version 1.0 lite right now. It seems many things are still missing: material editor, can't find it or it's not there (need masked textures) Lightmap properties (size etc.) point lights a bit hard to handle no dummy shading in non-lightmapped mode no CSG I just visited their site and the current lite version is 1.53. I tried to download both, the latest lite version as well as the smaller update zip. Both first gave me corrupt files, only half the size of what it should be. I then had to redownload several times until it seemed to work. Not sure if it's the server or my browser or system. However, the light version does not offer: CSG boolean subtract as well as TGA and DDS textures (as the pro version for about 60$ does). Not sure if I'd buy it if I couldn't test it before, these two features are very important for me, especially how well CSG works, how fast and how "clean", including the UV mapping options for CSGed geometry. So the conclusion is: Deled Lite is too limited, Pro may be good. I'd suggest the delgine group should release a fullfeatured 14 days trialversion or so. |
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| I suppose you could contact the Deled people and see if they could work out something. I know from their forums they'll make you a package deal on Dele Pro and their Nuclear game engine. (also soon coming out in Basic language) |
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| Thanks. I am already dealing with them and currently I'm waiting for a mail. |
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| Meanwhile, before I install this: 3D Gamestudio 5.5, is the editor (med?) anything good? export formats? Is the deinstallation painless? I got the full version on a cover disk, never instlled yet. |
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| Not really, probably none you can use and yes, in that order. It's for 3d GameStudio. I can't recall it exporting for anything else. |
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| Oddly I found that WED was the best tool to get my Maple 3D .map files created with 3dsmax into torque without all manner of precision errors. Quark, Radiant and Hammer were the other tools I tried. Those are all free. Of those Quark tended to have the most bugs but I think that was more to do with Garage games flakey map2dif tool than anything else. |
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| Ok, thanks. I just watched some screenies of Maps made with Deled, it's getting really good. EDIT I just try a CSG operation with the latest demo version (1.53) of deled: A boolen union of 2 overlapping spheres. What should I say, it's computing since minutes now. Maybe a crash. EDIT: those spheres had 20 segments. It took several minutes. Not sure what happened there. Now I tried with 6, 8 and 10 segments and it only took 10 secs each time. With 12 or more it's getting slow. well 8 or 10 is ok for games, eg a dome or so. |
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