Hello, I am searching for a good 3d level editor for the game engine that I'm creating. Right now I use DeleD. Its extremely good for use in home-brewn 3d/game engines but one drawback is that it doesn't support entities. Also, its material system is a bit rigid - doesn't allow you to specify normalmaps, heightmaps, nor set values for ambient, shininess etc. After hours of googling, I ended up downloading quite a lot of editors, two of which are Getic 3d, Quest. Unfortunately both of them use BSP, which I don't want. So please suggest some 3d level editors. It doesn't need to have terrain. And it shouldn't use BSP. It needs to have entities which can be bound to external files (scripts). But most of all, it needs to be free. [smile] Thanks

In my humble opinion;
If you got the skills to do a game engine - a editor would be a walk in the park!
And it gives you a lot more flexibility in terms of what can be done etc.

My game-engine has a built in editor that is used for object placement, heightmap texturing and editing - so that anyone can design a level and edit it in realtime.

Cheers!

/Robert

Engine design isn't usually coupled with GUI design.. Sometimes it's best to adopt a well-done map editor.

That being said, I'm not at that stage yet - but I would look into this (used to be Worldcraft). I remember Worldcraft seemed to be popular. I also remember CryTek had made a cool one too for Far Cry.

Quote:Original post by Rasmadrak
In my humble opinion;
If you got the skills to do a game engine - a editor would be a walk in the park!
And it gives you a lot more flexibility in terms of what can be done etc.

My game-engine has a built in editor that is used for object placement, heightmap texturing and editing - so that anyone can design a level and edit it in realtime.

Cheers!

/Robert

Well its not really a walk in the park if you are looking for some higher level features.
Usually developing a map editor requires a strong mathematical foundation beyond what you need to write an engine.
A real editor isn t just heightmap editing and prefab setting, its about designing complex shapes with easy to use tools and an editor must be reliable, no artist wants to lose his hard work of the last hours.

You need:
- a flexible system to handle objects (another level of abstraction doesn t hurt)
- you need some sort of scene partition
- a undo/redo system that either stores delta backups of modified objects or complete copies
- a abstracted interface to file i/o of your map data
- a shader implementation as you have it in your engine
- a material system that builds on top of textures and shaders
- a good mesh class, while designing my editor internals I redid the mesh class 4-5 times, in the end I chose a imperative design, so that modifying objects take care about the data in the mesh class
e.g.:
a) define index and vertex buffer size (vertex data(normal,color ...) has the same buffer size as the vertex buffer
b) you need to set all the values from outside

I know this requires some effort when writing the code, but you don t restrict yourself in the way you use the mesh class and in the end when using it in the editor it provides all the features required to render the mesh without a ton of useless code polluting the implementation code

- a filesystem like physfs(google: physfs) that can load zip files is also a plus, that allows easy pack file versioning depending on the row your set your search paths.

Quote:Original post by smr

Quote:Original post by Rasmadrak
If you got the skills to do a game engine ...

But does he have the time?

Sometimes it's better to swallow a bit of pride and use something not-invented-here.

Yes thats right, but most of the time you do not get access to the source code and apply some useful adaptions to make things easier for artists

I started making an editor, its quite time-consuming and harder than it seems. And my expectations from an editor was too much for me to cope with. [sad]

Quote:That being said, I'm not at that stage yet - but I would look into this (used to be Worldcraft).

Thats the Valve Hammer editor, it uses BSPs and is set up for Half-life, Quake.. games. [sad] I tried it already.

Quote:- a shader implementation as you have it in your engine
- a material system that builds on top of textures and shaders

I'm not really crazy for a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor. But if its possible then I would surely jump at it. I just want to be able to place objects, customize the material system, and customizable entites. I was surprised to find there are so few level editors out there...