DeleD Community Edition

[antmck2011]

Just found DeleD and it looks pretty good. Much easier to use then Blender or anything else that's free.

I do have 1 issue though...

The grid lines are exactly the same width as the lines making up objects. So when an object is exactly aligned to the grid I can't see it. I've tried changing colours but that doesn't help. I really need the object lines to be wider then the grid, then I could see it clearly.

[Jeroen]

Hi there, welcome to these forums!

Having objects align with the grid can be very helpful during design. You'll see that when you get the hang of it.

Using other colours should definitely help if you can't really see aligned objects. What have you tried to change those colors?
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[antmck2011]

I didn't notice that you could change the background colour. After trying that I can see objects better. It was the default white colour that was causing the the problem.

Having said that - I think I would still like to have the object's lines a little thicker then the grid lines. The lines are pencil thin. Also, it might be that my resolution is too high? But I think it would be better with thicker lines on objects.

[chrisu]

I understand your concerns but thicker lines actually will implicate in wrong (oversized) bounds. So I would play around with the colors especially with lightness/darkness of them. Actually my config regarding the grid is very bright, not to say nearly white. And the lines of the objects are darkest black.

Maybe, linestyles (dotted, solid, ...) would be worth a further look, though they aren't possible in the actual state.

Cheers,
Chrisu.

[Nocturn]

You just need to work on the colors, something i would like to add: DeleD should be able to save Color Settings as a Template - and - it should come with a better default Color Template, because the default Colors that come shipped are very bad i think.

[antmck2011]

A template is good idea.

Is there any way of adding your own objects with custom properties?
I want to use DeleD to design levels to use in an XNA game. The fact that it can export to .X file is great. The objects are acutally orientated the right way and scaling is right too. One of the problems I have with Blender is when you export to a format that XNA can import the scale of the scene is set to something like 100 and Blender uses a difference co-ordinate system then XNA. So all the objects are rotated the wrong way. It has options to fix this, but it doesn't work. I'm very happy that Deled has this right.

What I need now is to be able to add spawn locations to the game level. eg a player start position. This would be an object without geometry like a light, but would have properties. Any way of adding this?

[Jeroen]

Each object has a Tag property. Look for it in the Object Inspector. You can use it to add your own properties to a object.

However, these are not exported by the Delgine DirectX plugin. Don't know if .x can actually hold arbitrary data like that, but if it does, some programmer could perhaps add to the exporter.

Perhaps JWatte's exporter helps out. If not, perhaps there's another plugin (that exports to a different format) that actually exports that Tag property. Suggestions anyone? You could use that plugin to export to that format and then use some other program to convert back to .x. My 2 cents.
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[antmck2011]

What's needed is a file to store the model mesh data (eg .x file), a file to store the raw geomtry (eg .RAW file) for collision detection, and another file for storing things like player start and other info.

The 1st two aren't a problem - just export to .x or .raw, but the 3rd one needs another exporter.

Also, how does lightmapping work? It doesn't seem to export in the .x file, so how can I use this in XNA?