Win32, OpenGL and ODE Physics

FreeWorld Tutorial

By Alan Baylis 21/07/2003

Toolbar

The toolbar buttons have tooltips enabled so you can see what function they perform by placing the mouse over them. Most of them, such as the first four buttons should be familiar to you if you have used a world editor before so I will only go over the differences. The fifth button adds all selected brushes together into a single brush, the brushes can be convex or concave. The sixth button will carve all brushes that intersect the currently selected brushes. The seventh and eighth buttons allow you to group and ungroup brushes, the color of the brushes in the orthogonal windows will change to highlight them if grouped, if you don't like the random color that the program produces then keep clicking the group button until you get a color you like. The next three buttons allow you to save and load the currently selected brushes to and from a file. This allows you to construct separate, modular pieces of buildings and furniture and later use them to construct a complete world. The next button is the undo button, for now it only allows you to step back to before the last carve or add, though a future version will allow multiple steps back and will include undoing of all transforms. Following the undo button are the last two brush functions which allow you to select or deselect all of the brushes, this is handy when you have finished constructing the world because, at present, the only way to save the world in the editor is to select all brushes and save them to a brush file. Later I will finish writing the function to save all the world data, including lights and splines, to a single map file. The next button with a T+ on it brings up the texture window and the T- button will hide it again. I won't go into texturing details here except to say that the textures in this window were automatically loaded from the TGA image files found in the textures folder when the editor started. Next we have the spline properties button which will be familiar to those who have used the Spline_Ed program, if not then take a look below for a description of what these properties are. Following the spline properties is the static light properties, the static lights can be created and set here to be used later if you want to illuminate the world using light mapping in the viewer. I will go into more detail about the static lights towards the end of this tutorial. The last four buttons on the toolbar will respectively, set the overall grid size, set the size of the cell between the grid lines, toggle snap-to-grid and the last button will set the rotation angle used when rotating brushes and textures.