Level Editor

[Michael]

Hi

currently there is no Level/World editor available for ZB. The reason is, that we purchased and used GROME (commercial product from Quad software) to create our levels. GROME was, at the time, the best choice because it offered a plugin system and we only needed to implement the export plugins for our levels and the import plugins for our models to be able to place them in the levels.
As ZB is FOSS now, GROME does not really fit into the concept anymore and we're looking around for a FOSS world/level editor that we could use.

I've found so far:

Ogitor: http://www.ogitor.org
GROME based, also pluggable. Needs to be further looked into, but seems to be the best so far.

Artifex Terra: http://www.ogre3d.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=42507
Which seems to be a good alternative to GROME, as soon as the website is up again. It is open source and it should be possible to implement some import/export code, if there is no plugin system yet.

Delta 3D Level Edior: http://www.delta3d.org/forum/viewtopic. ... =10&page=4
Would be easy to use due to the fact, that they use OSG (openscenegraph) like ZB, which would make the model import code pretty straight forward to implement. Altough from the screenshots i cannot see a heightmap editor/painter.


As the team a QuantiCode is currently short at spare time, we would really appreciate if someone from the community would be interested implementing a ZB level editor (plugins). We'd gladly give as much support as we can.

kind regards,
Michael

[Julius]

Hmm, I think this game would really lend itself for a ingame scene editor.

For a start it could just be a menu with placeable props (trees, buildings etc.) and parameter editing of them, while hightmap editing could be done in an external program (just a 2D picture in GIMP for example). Then have an Blender export script for the props and you are good to go.

Later a ingame terrain editor could be also added.

That would definitly be much nicer to work with than an external editor. And it might actually be quicker to implement too.

[Michael]

A ingame editor would need a huge amount of programming effort to implement:
- terrain editing
- texturing / texture splatting
- object placement
- lightmap baking
- layers
- resources

all things, others have made better before. therefore an external editor with a plugin system seems to be good solution

kind regards,
Michael