Grome Editor with support for TGEA

#1 "The Torque community will love working with Grome and it should bring an immediate increase in the visual quality of their scenes."

How is it going to increase the quality of Atlas? Isn't it just a replacement for L3DT?

#2 I'm still getting the hang of Grome, but having worked with a lot of editors (L3DT, Leveller, Freeworld 3d). Grome is by far my favorite. For a more affordable editor, its still hard to beat L3DT, but Grome is the best quality I've seen. The layers, smudges and texture tools are top notch. Another thing they are making it so that you can place DTS objects in Grome, and have them exported as a mission file. The advantage of that would not only be the placement, but moreso the fact that it could bake the lightmaps from things like trees into your atlas file, which would be a huge addition.

I'm still learning Grome, and I don't have a lot of experience editing terrains. I'm a programmer forced into doing my own art, but I have always done my own terrain as a result of that. Some early terrains I've done while learning the tool though:

#3 Im debating wether to get grome or not. I am just curious about how good it is at exporting to atlas? ..are there pipeline issues? ...in other words, how well does it tie in with TGEA.

#4 Also is the difference between professional and standard a big deal in relation to torque? ..will it effect the size I can make my map etc.

#5 Hi Barry, Grome at the moment won't compile straight to Atlas, but outputs files are Atlas ready along with a suggested compiling script to be used. Their hoping to integrate further over time with a direct compiler, and support a proper DTS module for placement within Grome, and further mission export.

As for the two versions it depends on what your trying todo and at what resolutions. The standard edition your limited to 4 zones, each zone supporting a maximum mask size of 512 x 512 pixels (so a total of 1024 x 1024 for opacity textures & lightmap) - where as the Professional edition their are no limits on zone count and the pixel size of the masks, so effecitivly you can create and manage vast areas depending on your system specs.

The difference with Grome over others you can edit in true real time (after all thats what it was designed for specifically), and with the release of 1.2 is much faster than the previous versions - it also supports many more outputs for other programs/engines along with a hefty toolset.


@J.C - Looks good!