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1.2 Concepts

Creating maps for games and general 3D applications is one of the most important and decisive parts of game-development. Since the Crystal Space Engine uses its own map format (XML), so far you had to either hardcode them or use converters to make maps, created with programs artists use, readable for the Crystal Space Engine. CStudio is an effort to ship a map editing tool that is both easy to use and specifically designed for the use with Crystal Space. It saves the maps directly in Crystal Space format (in fact, the engine saves it) and maps are therefore saved more efficiently and more memory-friendly.

Since the Crystal Space SDK is a very powerful and feature-rich engine, the Crystal Studio Project is determined to meet the needs of next-generation game developers and lets artists directly influence things that had to be done by a programmer before. This could be simple scripts like triggering a door, have a light flicker, design shaders and have it displayed in real-time by the Crystal Space engine. This lets artists themselves create amazing effects without needing the helping hand of a programmer.

The 3D viewport output is generated by a Crystal Space application. This means that everything you see in it will be displayed exactly the same in the game! (Provided that you are using the Crystal Space engine, of course) You can even modify the world from within the 3D viewport. This can be very helpful if you want to see a certain texture mapped to a wall in direct context to the rest of the world without having to circumstantially recompile, save and load the map in another application. Just drag and drop the texture from the texture manager onto the 3D surface.

Portals and Sectors can be set directly in the editor. Portals and sectors are a very big performance plus and we will discuss this topic later on.

Creating content for 3D applications is always the most important thing. For a game, it is even more important than the engine itself. Having a look at the new generation of graphic cards and the growing complexity of modern games it becomes more and more important to give artists full control over how things should behave, look and feel like.


This document was generated using bare hands [TM].