Afterword - Thanx

I want to thank the fine folks at the TTLG forums (especially the Editor Guild) for all their help. Especially Xarax, Thumper, and Totality proved very valuable.

I do hope someone finds this useful (I certainly have re-invented the wheel, but at least I had fun :-). All your comments, suggestions, criticism or hints are welcome - flames will be forwarded to Dave Null ;)

If you want to use this in a game of your own, or want to add support for a game engine other than the Dark Engine, I certainly want to hear from you. I am looking forward to learning. There remains a lot of work to be done.

Please have the appropriate amount of fun.

Tels

Bibliography, Downloads

Here are some links to get you started:

The CoW homepage
Xarax site
Thief - The Dark Project page
Thief, System Shock forums, Editor Guild
Samples for this tutorial (Download latest CoW BETA, they are included in the dir tutorial/)

Glossary

A part of our world as well as the entire world. In my example always a cubicle. Can contain (is divided into) child cells, or can just be generated as a Room.

A cell can be generated as a room (with/or without walls). This is done by the Room Generator.

Takes the dimensions and center of a Cell and generates a room out of it by placing Brushes and Things.

A thing can consist either of Terrain or one or more Objects. Things are what you place in the VWorld concept inside the Rooms/Cells.

This is the static part the world consists of. In the Dark Engine, this is Brushes. Terrain polygons are limited to 1024 per scene in the Dark Engine.

Out of brushes the Terrain is generated. Only a limited amount of different brushes (cubes/wedges/cylinders/pyramids/dodecahedron) are available. You can, however, use some logical AND/OR/XOR combinations by using brushes that turn solid into water, or water into air without effecting other types of terrain. This enables you to build some even more complicated setups with fewer brushes.

An object is placed in the world, and does not consist of Terrain. An object can have a lot more polygons than the terrain, typically 300-600 for an AI object. Also objects have properties and interact with the world by using pre-compiled scripts.

The editor based on the Dark Engine.

A multibrush consists of Objects and Terrain and is something like a portable part of your level, which can be imported (at least parially) into other levels. CoW can generate VBR files (multibrushes) as well as full MIS (level) files.

The grid is very essential in DromEd. You have basically to snap each brush to the grid, so that vertieces and edges snap to each other. If you don't do this, you will run into problems in the optimizing phase. This all is very time consuming and frustrating. Objects are not effected by this. CoW automatically generates snapped Terrain, although for hand-editing or placing generated stuff, you have to use the grid.