Aliens-esque map, editor features
<div class="IPBDescription">Learning Spark</div>Hi guys!
Been playing around with the Spark editor the whole night and I have to say, I like it very much. It feels and handles very much like the old Build Engine editor back in the Duke Nukem 3D days - which is a good thing. Allthough Spark is very specialized in terms of the environments it's meant to produce and render (draw distance limit) it is way easier for me to get quick results and judge my visual style than in UDK for example.
I miss two handy features in the editor though: a quick numeric display of my currently visible faces/triangles (to monitor my budget of a certain area) and a way to import splines from, say, Illustrator (dwg probably). After all, most of the time what you do in Spark is box modelling geometry. During my first learning session, Ive cobbled together some Hadley's Hope style corridors - those beams on the sides would be much easier to build if one could prepare them as basic flat splines/shapes, import them and extrude them (I could think of more trickery with that technique).
Also a quick way to jump into the game as either Marine, Skulk, or into Commander view without setting up all of the entities would be great - would simplify the whole testing a lot and support the iterative mapping process.
Long story short, have some pictures (I brightened them a bit):
<img src="http://i.imgur.com/aIxkO.jpg" border="0" class="linked-image" />
<img src="http://i.imgur.com/E2AMO.jpg" border="0" class="linked-image" />
Been playing around with the Spark editor the whole night and I have to say, I like it very much. It feels and handles very much like the old Build Engine editor back in the Duke Nukem 3D days - which is a good thing. Allthough Spark is very specialized in terms of the environments it's meant to produce and render (draw distance limit) it is way easier for me to get quick results and judge my visual style than in UDK for example.
I miss two handy features in the editor though: a quick numeric display of my currently visible faces/triangles (to monitor my budget of a certain area) and a way to import splines from, say, Illustrator (dwg probably). After all, most of the time what you do in Spark is box modelling geometry. During my first learning session, Ive cobbled together some Hadley's Hope style corridors - those beams on the sides would be much easier to build if one could prepare them as basic flat splines/shapes, import them and extrude them (I could think of more trickery with that technique).
Also a quick way to jump into the game as either Marine, Skulk, or into Commander view without setting up all of the entities would be great - would simplify the whole testing a lot and support the iterative mapping process.
Long story short, have some pictures (I brightened them a bit):
<img src="http://i.imgur.com/aIxkO.jpg" border="0" class="linked-image" />
<img src="http://i.imgur.com/E2AMO.jpg" border="0" class="linked-image" />
Comments
I would just say, don't use the extrude tool. You'll end up with additional lines and vertices. The best way to do 3d is drawing a mesh. Evil_bOb1 has some tutorials somewhere, which first taught me the idea, since then building whole complex maps takes me much less time, as I end up with a single piece of geometry for the whole map..
<a href="http://www.unknownworlds.com/ns2/forums/index.php?s=&showtopic=115823&view=findpost&p=1922342" target="_blank">http://www.unknownworlds.com/ns2/forums/in...t&p=1922342</a>
<a href="http://www.unknownworlds.com/ns2/forums/index.php?s=&showtopic=115823&view=findpost&p=1926215" target="_blank">http://www.unknownworlds.com/ns2/forums/in...t&p=1926215</a>
They are two posts in the same thread..
Thanks for the links! I'm gonna be streaming again tonight while mapping. Link's <a href="http://www.unknownworlds.com/ns2/forums/index.php?showtopic=123425" target="_blank">here</a> in the new thread as I couldn't change the title here.
ns_bast was alien themed, but NS2 is now a commercial game so there are copyright issues involved. Community alien themed map, go for it :P
hehe I'd like to. But let me get to know the engine first. all I do right now is free-for-all lego :P
greyboxing a decent layout and going on from there will be the next step.