Win32, OpenGL and ODE Physics

FreeWorld Tutorial

By Alan Baylis 21/07/2003

The FreeWorld editor was made to help alleviate a problem that many face when developing a game, at least for freelance/hobbyist game developers, which is that in order to program your own spatial partitioning system such as BSP trees, octrees and many other features you need to have world data to test them with. The choices were often to use a pre-written tool to extract the polygon data from an existing map format or write your own tool, unfortunately most existing map formats are confusing and making your own tool can be a challenge, especially if there is very little information available. For small tests you can just calculate the data yourself but it can take a lot of time if you want to test your program in a lot of different cases. The intention behind FreeWorld was to create an editor that exports the simplest data format possible so that writing your own world loader is made easier.

The editor is still under development, many changes to the program and interface will be made in the coming months. It also needs a lot more error checking and other niceties to be added to the program so you should save your world to a brush file (discussed later) regularly and if you run into an error message you can try ignoring the message and undo the last carve or add, if this doesn't work then you will have to abort the program. Also note that a  lot of the following tutorial may have to change with the next updates or be scrapped altogether.

When the editor starts you will be asked for the name of a couple of data files, one is for a spline data file and the other is for a static light data file, for now choose the default files for each and the editor will begin. You will see that it has the standard three orthogonal windows and a perspective window. You can open as many windows as you like by using the main menu, though I haven't set a different camera for each perspective window, you can press C to cycle through five cameras using a single perspective window for now. If you find that the movement in the perspective window becomes slow then minimize any unused orthogonal windows you have open or maximize the perspective window.