DF-21 Forums

[lucius]

I am in the planning phase for a built in level and mod editing suite for DarkXL. There are several reasons for this:
*There needs to be an editor that supports new features (slopes, new texture formats, etc.).
*In order for Dark Forces editing to become fun and popular, proper - modern tools are required. WDFUSE, while great for its time, doesn't make building Dark Forces levels fast, easy and fun enough. Especially compared to more modern tools such as later Build editors and tools available for Doom based games and sourceports.
*Various Dark Forces conversion tools, such as converting textures and waxes, are not very nice to use and don't work under all modern systems. A built in level editing suite can make conversions easier and faster.
*WYSIWYG: the editor will be built into DarkXL - this provides many nice features.
-accurate 3D preview with editing capabilities.
-instant testing, edit and then start playing the level from any point. View the level in 3D from any point. Test INF, logics, sounds, VUEs instantly.
-better texture alignment tools, even align textures in 3D.
*In level VUE creation and editing with instant previews.

And more...

So to give you an idea of what I'm planning I'll briefly describe some of the editing features for the 3D mode.
*(optional) 3D grid, with optional grid snap, that is either shown as a plane or projected onto the floors and/or walls.
*Raise and lower sector floors and ceilings - this can be done using the mouse or keys:
select a floor or ceiling by clicking on the face with the mouse. A simple control will appear on the floor or ceiling which you can grab with the mouse and move it up and down by moving the mouse or press certain keys to move it by fixed amounts.
*Move vertices by clicking on a wall vertex or edge and moving it with the mouse. A control will appear allowing you to move it along a specific axis (by dragging the correct arrow) or you can move it freely. In addition snap to grid will work with the projected grid.
*Split walls by activating a control (button or key) and then clicking on a wall.
*Create subsectors or columns by activating a control then clicking on the floor (optionaly using the grid), drawing out your subsector directly in 3D. Then its easy to select the floor or ceiling and move it around.
*Select, copy, paste, move, rotate or delete groups subsectors - directly in 3D.
*Split a sector in two with a certain control, simply by clicking on two of the walls.
*Draw a quad on a wall and extrude it to make a new sector.
*Place and align object templates directly in 3D.
*Change textures on any wall (mid/bottom/top), floor or ceiling. Includes clicking on a wall to copy a texture, and clicking (with another button) to paste on another wall.
In the end, almost all editing could be done directly in 3D mode if desired.

And of course there will also be a fully featured 2D mode, easy sector drawing and editing in all modes, cleaving, automatic adjoining, user creatable object templates, prefabs, rotatable grid, custom grid sizes and much more...

Editing Dark Forces or DarkXL levels should be fun and easy. The creativity comes from the layout, gameplay, story and so on... not from fighting the system. With built in tools this should be accessible to anyone and provide really fast testing, iteration and editing.

If you have any ideas you'd like to contribute, feel free. I plan on doing this thing in phases as I work on DarkXL proper, so there will be incomplete versions released to get user feedback and testing. The first version will probably have only 3D editing and other limitations, but you'll get an idea what I'm doing.

And finally it'll still be a while before any real work is done on this, but I'll probably start working on it soon - but most of my effort will still be on the main DarkXL (game) for some time to come so initial progress may take a while.

Anyway, hope this clears up my plans. Any comments or suggestions are welcome.

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DarkXL....http://darkxl.wordpress.com

[Burning Gundam]

[neo]...woah[/neo]

So this is going to be sort of like Doom Builder (Which I LOVE) only much much better?

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I don't think outside the box... I customize it.

[BlazingPhoenix]

A Doom Builder-like editor for DF would be awesome.

[Taton]

Being able to split sectors is the GREATEST IDEA EVER!

That was the ONE thing that really drove me up the wall with WDFUSE.

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"A fight should be clean and elegant, without waste"
-Asuka Langley Sohryu, Evangelion

[sheepandshepherd]

It's simply amazing how much you're doing for this community, lucius
I agree, sector splitting would be VERY nice . . . maybe, allow the player to draw a polyline inside the sector and then split it into two or more pieces according to the line.
Speaking of that . . . in DF, adjoins are obviously always simple rectangles perpendicular to the floor. Will it somehow be possible to draw more complex shapes on walls and extrude/adjoin them to a sloping sector? I know this was how extrudes were made in one of the Jedi Knight editors, but the editor's limitations made it EXCRUCIATING to do it . . . I know this will at least be partially necessary to implement, due to sloping floors/ceilings . . .
One more thing - in DF, it was usually hard to get the desired effect using the two sector damage flags. If it's not too much trouble, could you give us a little more control over sector damage? Like, how much damage a sector does per second, and whether or not a gas mask will help, and whether or not it affects enemies.

[lucius]

[lucius]

After build 9 I want to focus on finishing all the missing and/or malfunctioning INF code and logics. At that point I plan on opening up most of the other DF levels.

In order to help me accomplish this I'm going to start building test areas - basically "how to" levels that show off the various INF/geometry features that I find throughout the game. The idea is to get as many of these features as I can in a single level (or level set) so I don't have to play through the whole game to perform regression testing and to get it all working. In addition they can serve as level editing tutorials for new mappers.

Of course testing each level and playing through everything will still be important but once this is complete I expect much more of the levels to work correctly.

And finally during this process not only will I be finishing the DF functionality but I will also be building the level editor. I will be building my test level(s) in the new built-in level editor. I will still continue on with my plans for Build 9 (with incremental builds leading up to Build 9), and I will still make incremental builds as I implement and fix things. But this means that the level editor will start coming on line soon, although you'll probably need to use WDFUSE for awhile yet. I've started working on it with a little time, although most of my DarkXL time is still spent on main game tasks.

I'm mentioning all this to let everyone know that the progress won't continue like this for long - a level or two at a time - and that soon you'll be able to play through pretty much the whole game.

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DarkXL....http://darkxl.wordpress.com

[lucius]

Here is a first early look at the 3D editing in the built-in level editor.

Grid:


Drawing a subsector in 3D:





Drawing a opening in a wall, you'll be able to push it out to create a new sector, like a window or door.


Its still very early but you can see some of the early functionality coming along.

The grid can be rendered on the floor, ceiling and even the walls. Different grid sizes and projections are possible. In addition grid snap will work in 3D. Incidentally the grid is drawn as part of the surface using a shader - so it can be projected on any surface.

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DarkXL....http://darkxl.wordpress.com

[Pumpkinetics]

Allow me to be the first to stare in joy.

(0)_(0)

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"So, how goes (X) ?"

"WORKIN' ON IT! I SWEAR!"

[BlazingPhoenix]

Awesome, can't wait to make some DXL levels.

[sheepandshepherd]

amazing . . . simply amazing . . .

Anyway, will the grid be customizable? Will we be able to change the "origin" point of the grid and the grid rotation? Those would be VERY useful tools that were definitely missing in WDFUSE and the Jedi Knight 3d editor. Mmmm . . . not sure if this would be useful, but it might also be interesting to have triangle or hexagon shaped grids.

Just an early request, you probably already planned this, but I want to make sure . . . one of the most annoying things about WDFUSE was the control scheme. I think customizable Editor controls would be a very useful feature.

I really appreciate all the work, it's bringing the DF community back to life

[Burning Gundam]

[neo]...woah...[/neo]

This will be an immense help to me in the future, that way I don't have to continuously save and check to see if a room or area looks right every 5 minutes.

Looks great!!

Oh, which reminds me, Lucius, I'm still working on those testing ground levels. I didn't know the INF scripting was going to be a big deal, but I can make a level that focuses a lot on basic scripts and a few complex ones if you wish. I didn't complete any because I figured you had a pretty good grasp of things. But I can finish them for you sometime if that will help any.

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I don't think outside the box... I customize it.

[lucius]

[lucius]

[Burning Gundam]

Makes sense, thanks for the heads-up.

_________________
I don't think outside the box... I customize it.

[lucius]

I won't be working on the editor until later next week, hopefully I'll get a new DarkXL build before then. But I decided to show you guys something I have finished, creating subsectors and columns in 3D. I have a DivX movie here, the grid looks a little aliased - this is due to the compression. Also its playing SecBase midi music - obviously the editor won't play music when its done.

Anyway this shows drawing subsectors and columns in 3D. The subsectors have a raised floor & lowered ceiling so they are easy to see. Also grid snap is currently turned on - of course you'll be able to turn it off or adjust the grid settings.

Here is the movie: http://darkxl.df-21.net/Movies/EditorTest.avi
Its kind of big (39MB) so you may need to right-click as save to disk before opening.

Let me know what you think

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DarkXL....http://darkxl.wordpress.com

[klasodeth]

Wow! For something that's just a side project to DarkXL, I'm impressed with what you've implemented already! Don't you sleep?

[Tsophika]

Yeah... he's just Winston Wolff incognito.

[Magic_Al]

I second the Neo "whoa". The level editor shots made me think of The Matrix's Construct right away. But with DF textures. It would be hard to measure things in an endless white void.

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----- MagicAl`s DARK FORCES Niche -----
http://wayback.archive.org/web/*/http://homepage.mac.com/anewmanagn/magic_al/

Armed only with a blaster pistol and an intimate knowledge of
Imperial methods, MagicAl prepares to go to lunch....

[lucius]

Thanks for the comments.

Out of curiosity, did you guys watch the video?

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DarkXL....http://darkxl.wordpress.com

[lucius]

I recorded another movie showing drawing columns inside of subsectors, selecting and moving surfaces such as moving floors and ceilings up and down and moving walls around. To move a floor height for example, select the floor and you can either hold a button (control in this case) and drag it with the mouse, or you can use a key (arrow keys for the movement). It automatically decides the correct thing to move (floor, ceiling, wall) based on which surface is selected. Eventually snap to grid will be supported for movement (including vertical) which makes lining things up much easier. Of course there will be many more alignment tools eventually.

The movie- http://darkxl.df-21.net/Movies/EditorTest2.avi

Here is the other movie in case you missed it last time- http://darkxl.df-21.net/Movies/EditorTest.avi

Any comments are welcome. Let me know what you think

P.S.: DivX is required to play these movies. Also right click and save then open works best.

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DarkXL....http://darkxl.wordpress.com

[Burning Gundam]

So is this going to be sort of like the DoomBuilder editor only better? I'm already loving the way this looks, and I loved using DoomBuilder for building DM maps.

_________________
I don't think outside the box... I customize it.

[lucius]

[sheepandshepherd]

WHOAH big download
Sorry, my internet is ridiculously slow . . . but I'll watch it when it's done, it shouldn't take all that long.
Random question for you guys - do any of you here have really slow internet? If nobody else does, don't worry about reducing the size of your videos, lucius, I'm getting DSL as soon as my middle-of-nowhere town gets it, which is supposedly happening sometime soon . . .
Otherwise, if a lot of people have a problem with long downloads, you might want to also put them on Youtube for those people, in addition to the high-res AVIs. Just a suggestion, in case you like it

[lucius]

The problem is that the compression and res. have to be decent since its drawing lines in 3D... if the quality is too poor it'd be too easy to miss what's going on. If its a big problem for people, let me know though.

Anyway let me know what you think once you watch the videos.

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DarkXL....http://darkxl.wordpress.com

[sheepandshepherd]

[lucius]

Yes there will be a toggle to select vertical edges. Basically you'll select an edge and it'll draw a thick line so you can see it. Then you move it around just like the walls. Since its doing raycasts to determine which surface you hit, it'll be pretty simple to accurately select the nearest edge.

At the end of the week I'll get to splitting sectors, extruding walls (creating a new sector), and other ways of creating new sectors all in 3D.

And of course I'll be working towards getting the next DarkXL build out too.

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DarkXL....http://darkxl.wordpress.com

[Fenwar]

This looks fantastic; when I'm editing I often find I spend longer in-game checking what I've done from all the angles than I do in the editor.

This would be the perfect opportunity to drag my old half-baked .GOB files out of mothballs...

[lucius]

Currently I'm working on splitting sectors. Basically when you draw a set of lines, where the ends each touch a wall, it'll split the sector into two sectors - while setting up the adjoins of course. If you just want to carve your sector, then you can just delete the new sector (select the floor and hit delete). It'll handle the walls being adjoins and split them up and setup all the sectors correctly and handle multiple interior points. I even plan on it splitting columns and sub-sectors up eventually. I'll probably put up a movie of it in action soon.

Similarly, eventually, I plan on having it so you can draw a sub-sector right across an adjoin and have it split up the sub-sector and setup all the adjoins accordingly.

Basically if you do something strange, I want it to either do the right thing (automatically splitting up the sub-sector for example) or fail gracefully. You don't have to worry about open sectors, bad adjoins and silly stuff like that. You can't make an open sector - if you delete a vertex then it generates the missing edge for example. If there is something that goes wrong it will fix it well enough to run and report the issue. While it can't keep you from doing things that won't run well in vanilla DF or something like that - it can make sure that the technical issues are handled.

Note there will be metrics that will try to assess problem areas or issues with passing DF limits. While I expect it be able to tell you if DF will crash or have a catastrophic problem, I suspect it will miss HOM problems or performance problems in DF... you'll still have to test in the original if you want it to run well there. It'll try to guess of course and I suspect it'll get HOM issues right most of the time. But perf. is a bit harder to judge sometimes (especially when it relies on things like DOSBox settings and stuff like that).

For DarkXL, though, what you see should be exactly what you get.

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DarkXL....http://darkxl.wordpress.com

[lucius]

I made a movie that shows splitting sectors as well as creating sub-sectors inside of sub-sectors while handling all the adjoins properly, automatically.

I've been putting all the movies on http://www.gametrailers.com so I can use the built-in movie player and save memory on the ftp.

Here's the movie: http://www.gametrailers.com/player/usermovies/268965.html

There are some line drawing bugs, no big deal I just haven't spent the time to fix them yet.

Let me know what you think!

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DarkXL....http://darkxl.wordpress.com