I am begginging

1 year ago by racenis

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I AM beginng making this new game. Very good that I am able to use my own assets, that I have created, because I have quite a few of them (mostly textures). I don't want use levels that I have already used on other projects, so I decided to create some new ones.

Last time made levels in blender, but it was very slow. This time I tried to use a faster program. Already know Valve Hammer, so instead tried Trenchbroom, which is open source.

Packed all of the textures from my texture library into a quake .wad file. Made a simple level, compiled it and loaded it into quake.

Used a Blender plugin to load the .bsp into Blender, then used my exporter plugin to export the level geometry into my model format. Used my level editor to position the level model into an actual level and loaded it. Very good success!

The workflow is very long, but it's still 2x faster than trying to import a model into source engine.

Figure 1. Making level in Trenchbroom level editor

Very easy level making, just like hammer.exe, some keybindings different, but else is same.

Figure 2. Imported BSP file model

This is how it is looking when you compile level seen in 1th figure and then use special plugin to import into blender. This model only needs to be made from quad into triangle (1 simple operation) and then it is ready to export. Very easy!

Figure 3. Imported Wavefront .obj model

This is same level from 1th figure, but this time it is exported from Trenchbroom editor into Wavefront .obj format file and then imported. This gives the brushes and it is very good because my engine has support for using these point based brush things as collision models (via Bullet physics "point cloud" collision shape).

In any ways, I have also found problem answer to problem that everyone had with my engine with last jam that I made game with it and submitted -- they said that the character controller is too unresponsive and slippery. Of course, lesser programmers would have started to tweak around with physics engine properties, but I am a greater programmer and therefore I choose the betterer solution -- not to fix, but to declare -- declare that the bug is not bug, but feature.

That is, for this game I have created personal character that is wearing vaseline-covered galoshes (see 4th fig.). That, of course, make walking feel slow and slippery and unresponsive, which means that this converts bug to feature and that means that this is the most ellegant solution to the problem. Very good solution!