DeleD Community Edition

[arthurdent]

Hello,

I'm fairly new to game programming and am putting together a simple game engine based on DirectX9. I can import meshes and animation and all that jazz from modellers into the engine using .X format, no problem, but I'm not sure how to handle lighting. I can programatically add lights, but I'd like it to be data driven. So I'm thinking that a level editor may be the way to go. If I was to get a DeleD 3d license and create my levels in this tool, can anyone give me any tips or pointers to how I can specify and more importantly read the lighting information that is saved from Dele3d into my game engine? Does DeleD 3d save into some format that has an easily accessible format, preferably with some sort well defined API code to read this data?

thanks in advance.

[Jeroen]

Hi there arthurdent, and welcome to these forums!

Using a leveleditor for adding lights is indeed a smart move. DeleD uses lightmapping for lighting scenes. This means, in general, that each polygon has a regular texture and a lightmap texture (the lightmap texture being generated by DeleD itself). For each texture, you need a set of UV coordinates for your polygon (one UV coordinate per vertex per texture).

Using lightmapping with the .x format might not be a good combination because the .X format doesn't allow multiple sets of UV coordinates per vertex. At least, not as far as I know.

DeleD's DMF format stores sets of UV coordinates per polygon. So if you have, for example, a material that has 2 regular textures and 1 lightmap texture, the polygon using that material stores 3 sets of UV coordinates. However, the DMF format, although being a relatively simple ASCII format, is rather hard to read (see the Help). That is why we decided to switch to XML. DeleD 1.6 (out somewhere this month, if all goes well with testing & debugging) features a new XML-based fileformat which is very easy to read and parse using available XML parsers. Therefor, you can do 3 things:

- implement your own DMF reader
- wait a little while for DeleD 1.6 and use the new XML-based format instead
- or do both, of course

[arthurdent]

Jeroen,

thanks a bunch for such a quick reply, that impresses me a lot.

Is lightmapping the only form of lighting supported by Dele3d? Are the simpler vertex-based lighting schemes also supported (i.e., just adding simple point light, spotlight, ambient light, and directional light sources to a scene)?

To be honest, I haven't dealt with XML much, so the prospect of having to deal with that is somewhat daunting. Unless there was some help available here on how to utilize that, I look at that as just another thing to have to worry about. I'd rather just have some sort of API in a DLL or something that made accessing it easier.

[Jeroen]

Yes, right now DeleD only supports lightmapping. It does so by offering the light types you already described: point-, directional- and spotlights. The ambient lightlevel can be set in the scene properties. Note that directional- and spotlights are available in DeleD PRO only. Vertex-based lighting is something we'll probably add sometime in the future, but a fixed timeframe for such implementation has yet to be determined.

Working with XML is a breeze if you have a good XML parser. For example, if you use a Microsoft .NET language (C#, VB.NET etc), you can load XML files quite easily using the build-in XML parser of Microsoft. I'm sure there are lots of opensource XML parsers available for other languages as well. The big advantage of XML is that it describes the data itself, making a file very human readable and therefor, easy to write code for (most of the time anyway). I suggest you get your hands on a parser and some documentation and try to read/write some basic XML files. You'll see how easy it is in no time!

[Paul-Jan]