Worldcraft and torque link

#1 You shouldn't be using worldcraft/hammer unless you're making a non-profit game.

#2 Have you tried googling for 'em?

#3 Yea... unfortunatly Worldcraft has license issues... if it wasn't for that we would have used it insted of creating Pipeline.

#4 AH! Shameless advertising!




(j/k)

#5 I know... i know... i totally cringe when i do it, but you gotta do what you gotta do. =)

#6 Yes Ben I googled for it but the link is broke as I said.

I thought hammer could be used for creating maps. Yer telling me now we can't?

#7 Why doesn't someone make decent exporters for Max, Maya and Lightwave? Now I have buy Cartography shop? Link is broke on that by the way or they have website down. This is gettin really depressing.

#8 Cartography Shop is a EXTREMELY awsome editor. However, if you want something less pricey. Get Quark, and watch those 3 new videos in the resource section. EXTREMELY HELPFUL! I learned quark in 20 minutes with those things!

#9 @Howard - The reason is that BSP geometry has some strict limitations on what is allowed for performance reasons. Map editors are designed specifically to export BSP geometry. You could argue that these limits are no longer nessasary, but for now the Torque DIF format is what we have.

This link (ignore the possibly insulting title) explains what BSP is and the whys and hows of it's use.

For some reason the developers website for Cartshop is down... you can get to it directly to download the trial from over here.

#10 @Tom I'm quite familliar with the BSP concept. IM just really frustrated over the tools as are 3 professional artists workin on this project. The question in the post was where is the link to the docs or tuts on hammer no one will answer. We have time and money invested in Max, Maya and Lightwave which I consider "Professional" tools but somehow the exporters for each falls short of expectations. I dont mind spending money on software but we seem to spend all of our time on hacking things together to make them work and little time on the game. Now I have to go to my artists and tell them to learn a new creation tool (Cartog), then buy an exporter that may or may not work properly. Thanks for the input.

#11 Howard,

Due to the recent website upgrade, some documentation has gotten misplaced. I'll make sure I bring this up when I get to the office tomorrow morning. (It's 10pm on a sunday evening; I'm not going to drive over to Rick's house, drag him out of bed, and force him to fix the site when he could do it tomorrow morning without any hastle.)

I have seen no effective BSP style exporters for Maya/Max/Lightwave, not from us, not from anyone else. At best they're hacks prone to emitting broken or overly complex data. Editing a BSP model in those tools is comparable to using Word for your image editing work - you can do it but it isn't a good match.

The DTS exporters for Maya/Max work well enough to have multiple shipped games on them. Creating game art is challenging - but we ship tools that are proven to work in production situations.

Maybe you should spend a little time and research the art tools to find a solution that works for your team? There's a good half dozen ways you can create interiors, and if you need to you can always write your own object type.

#12 @Tom I downloaded the demo version of Cartography and it looks like a hammer knockoff. I notice it didn't mention anything about creation of "portals" . Does your exporter/converter add the portals?

#13 @Howard - In fact Josh Klint who wrote Cartshop notes UnrealEd and Hammer as his insperations for it (mostly Hammer in CS4).

Our exporter adds all the Torque entities and special textures to Cartshop (portals, lights, worldspawn, etc). This screenshot sort of shows the dropdown in Cartshop. I wished that we could have had a fully working demo to give to people, but time would not allow it. We plan to fix that issue for the Cartshop5 release.

#14 The Quark videos referenced above are great. You can get up and running with Quark in no time at all following them.

However, Quark still feels klutzy to me - always has. Texture links get forgotten, windows pop up on top of each other and you can't get to the one underneath, etc. Cart shop is much cleaner in that regard (I've only used the Cart shop demo once, but from what I've seen, it's better than Quark ;)

After seeing this video (http://www.sickheadgames.com/pipeline.wmv) I'm most likely getting the full version of Cart Shop and buying the pipeline. It just doesn't get much easier than what's shown in that video :)

#15 Yea, I agree, Quark is rather klutzy. The UI Needs alot of work, and I haven't figuared out how to scale objects properly. Cartography Shop, IMO is the best editor on the market. It will work for any game that supports .map files. Supports plugins, and you don't have to load entity lists.

#16 @Chris - One thing to note is that Cartshop's default .map export doesn't generate the correct texture UVs for Torque. The Torque .map exporter in Pipeline does.

Howard i apologize for hijacking your thread.

#17 @Tom

Thanks for pointing out that link to the BSP for dummies page. But I have a question on it. When they are showing the animated gif of the BSP tree being built, how are they determining which way the arrows on the planes point and on which side of the node to place the next node. This is a concept I've been fairly fuzzy on and it seemed like as good aa time as any to try to nail down whatever I'm not sure on. Thanks for any info you can provide.

#18 @Todd - My understanding is that the arrows in that gif are representing the normal for the split planes. The normal is only used to decide what branch in the tree to take, so it doesn't really matter what side to declare the "front".

#19 No problem Tom any knowledge is good, still I wish someone would give me or fix up the link to the worlcraft tutorial GG had when the other website was intact.
Also just as a test can someone tell me HOW to make a portal with hammer?

#20 Select the brush
choose "tie to entity"
enter "portal" as the entity type