Deconstructing Constructor - Part 5

Welcome to the fifth in a series of frequently infrequent talks about Torque Constructor. This is a continuation of my blog/.plans:

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4

You may also want to read Matt's .plans:
Of mice and men and Constructor
When will Constructor ship?

And stop by Ron's .plan to find out about running under Linux:
TGE-L, Constructor and TSTPro

What is Torque Constructor
Torque Constructor is a .map (as in the .map file format) editing and .dif (the Torque interior file format) producing program being developed by Matt Fairfax, John Kabus, Ron Yacketta and myself under the direction of GarageGames. You may have seen the Development Snapshot of the Day posted back in March '05 where the project was first announced. If you're familiar with programs like Valve's Hammer, with a smattering of traditional 3D apps such as NewTek's LightWave or Luxology's Modo, then you'll understand Constructor.

Discussion: Objects Menu
In today's episode (for the GDC '06 demo impaired :o), I'll once again talk about what I've built in Constructor from my last update at IGC '05 until the end of the year. Specifically we'll look at what you'll find under the Objects menu today.

Constructor Objects Menu

I've divided the Objects menu into three sections. We'll go through each of them below.

Brush & Entity Grouping
There are times when you're working with a map that you'd like to group like items together. This could be a series of brushes, a collection of entities, or a combination of both. To make a group, you simply select the appropriate objects and use the Objects->Group menu item or its keyboard equivalent. Now whenever you select one item in the group, all the items in the group will automatically be selected.

The user has clicked on the rectangular brush and a grouped point light entity has automatically been selected with it

And if you'd ever like to select a single object without selecting everything within its group, you just hold down the CTRL key and click on the object. Something to note is that unlike selection sets (discussed last time) an object may only belong to one group at a time.

Lock Position & Orientation
There are times when you'd like to make an object unselectable so that you don't accidentally move it. You'd still like to see it for reference but not modify it. That's where object locking comes in.

Locked brushes are not selected with the yellow drag selection box

Using the Objects menu you may choose to lock those objects that you have selected, or everything that is not currently selected. You may also swap what is locked with what objects are not locked using the Objects->Inverse Lock menu item. When an object is locked it is drawn with dark blue edges to show its different state.

To remove the lock on the objects you use the Objects->Unlock All menu item. As you cannot select a locked item it is not possible to just unlock a few of them at a time -- you must unlock them all at once.

Hide from View
Sometimes you just need to get objects out of your way. For example you'd like to remove the roof of a building to make it easier to build its interior. In this case you'd like to hide the roof:

The top of the Orc Tower has been hidden to reveal its interior

As with locking an object, you may hide what is currently selected or hide everything that is not selected. When an object is hidden it is completely removed from the scene and does not block your mouse operations. And if you'd like to swap what is hidden with what is visible, you'd use the Objects->Inverse Hide menu item, just like you do with locking. As you can tell, locking and hiding are very similar to each other. :o)


That's it for today's quick run through of the Objects menu. I've attempted to make these operations feel familiar to anyone that has used a digital arts tool. Until next time...

- LightWave Dave

PS: If you've been paying attention, some of you may notice that the pictures have shown more than what I've talked about here. I'll shed more light on that in a future article...