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| Thoughts on the editor | |
| Posted By: Mark Levin <mglevin@uiuc.edu> | Date: 10/28/99 10:12 a.m. |
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I was wondering exactly how Halo's editors, be it map, physics, or anything, would look. Here are some thoughts on the issue. Seeing as Halo is the next generation of the Myth engine, Halo's editor would likely be the next generation of Loathing. It would allow editing of a terrain mesh and the bitmaps that are textured onto it, as well as placement of models, objects, and entities on or above (or below?) the mesh. It would have the usual views: A real-time 3D view that approximates what you see in the game, and a set of secondary windows or pallettes that let you edit the tools or select game items. Direct color map editing I doubt will make it in. This is usually done in Photoshop anyway, and Bungie can't exactly improve on that program while trying to make a game at the same time. However, we still don't know exactly how Halo handles ground texturing, as many people have pointed out a plain Myth-style bitmap would be unworkable in terms of time and storage (if a 2x2-km Myth map is 10MB, how big for 2000x30,000-km?) . So there are a few possibilities left: Either Halo uses some more traditional form of tiled texture mapping, or the color map is generated on the fly as a procedural texture. I don't think the latter is too likely as it would be very hard to design an algorithm that make colors that is both realistic and random, so I'm assuming here that the color map, whatever it is, is static and editable by the user. What if Halo could "blend" texture maps with the alpha channel so that different types of terrain appeared to flow smoothly into each other? This could be done automatically by the editor by tracking where the textures are being painted and generating the alpha map automatically by placing alpha templates and scaling, rotating, or shading them as needed. Another issue that comes up when dealing with a whole world is scale. Loathing's interface isn't that good for building large things, you edit on the range of a few dozen polygons. What if you want to make a giant hill a mile across? You'd have to do it a tiny step at a time. It would be impossible to finish Halo with that sort of editing. So Halo's editor must have some large-scale tools that work on a scale of hundreds or thousands of polygons, and up to kilometers long. So I suggest that the Halo editor will use "prefabs", a concept already seen in other game editors (specifically, UnrealEd). The Halo editor would have a library of prebuilt general shapes, like "hill", "lake", "mountain", "sand pit", and so on. Each general group would have a number of randomly selected sub-items, like some of Marathon's scenery items. Using this tool would be like placing models in Loathinbg, except that the prefabs wouldn't show up as distinct objects, they'd be integrated into the mesh and connected realistically to the rest of the mesh with interpolation. For example: To make a bumpy, hilly terrin, the user would place 5 or 6 hills in a tight pattern. The editor would link them so that the ground flows smoothly from one to the other. Each hill would be randomly selected so they all look slightly different. Then the user could switch to the Loathing-style polygon-level tools and tweak the hills to get the desired effect. The same could be done for a water system: Place a lake with the prefab tool, then use a "dredge" tool to dig a trench in the ground and automatically fill it with water. Another tool I think would help with large-scale mapping would be a "random scatter" tool, like Painter's image hose. It would take a "class" of scenery, prefabs, whatever and place random elements from it at random locations within the area you drag the brush over. Set it to "tree" and wide scattering and you get the forests we've seen in screenshots. Set it to "shrubs", narrow scattering and you could make a plain or the remains of a razed forest. Set it to "hills" prefabs, scale them down a lot, and set it to tight scattering to get bumpy, rockey terrain. And so on... Thought? Comments? | |
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| Replies: |
| Thoughts on the editor | Mark Levin | 10/28/99 10:12 a.m. |
| Re: !!!!Very nice... Bungie, I have an add on... | Mage | 10/28/99 3:57 p.m. |
| Re: !!!!Very nice... Bungie, I have an add on... | Loren Petrich | 10/29/99 12:06 a.m. |
| Re: !!!!Very nice... Bungie, I have an add on... | Mark Levin | 10/29/99 12:34 a.m. |
| Sheesh... | Chris | 10/28/99 4:58 p.m. |
| Don't get your panties in a wod | Gandalf | 10/28/99 5:49 p.m. |
| Actually... | Mark Levin | 10/28/99 5:52 p.m. |
| Re: Actually... | Island Four | 10/28/99 7:58 p.m. |
| Re: Actually... | Frost | 10/29/99 12:00 a.m. |
| Re: Actually... | Loren Petrich | 10/29/99 12:14 a.m. |
| Re: Actually... | Giule | 10/28/99 10:45 p.m. |
| Re: Thoughts on the editor | Loren Petrich | 10/28/99 10:57 p.m. |
| Re: Thoughts on the editor | Loren Petrich | 10/29/99 12:00 a.m. |
| Re: Thoughts on the editor | Mark Levin | 10/29/99 12:46 a.m. |
| Re: Thoughts on the editor | Traxus | 10/29/99 8:19 a.m. |
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