DeleD Community Edition

MVi · Member Joined: 10 Mar 2010 Posts: 2

Texturing in DeleD could be made much easier with a few slight tweaks. I've narrowed it down to four aspects: snap, easy surface selection, easy texture selection and easy texture positioning/scaling/rotation.

QuArK is a good example. When you click on a surface, it opens this small texture tool in the lower right corner where you see the texture the surface currently has. But in addition to that, it shows the scaling and positioning of the texture with two vectors, one vertical and one horizontal, both inside a rectangle that indicates the shape and dimensions of the surface. If you drag the root of these two vectors, you reposition the texture. If you drag the end of either vector, you scale it along that axis. You can also rotate and skew the texture easily. All this with and without snap, whatever the user chooses. Both graphical and numerical tools are available. And when you click the texture, you get a texture selector screen. Very handy. I'd love to write this as a patch myself, but I don't have the proprietary Delphi compiler that is required.

In a level editor it is important to be able to create and manipulate geometry as fluently as possible, with as few clicks and button presses as possible. In addition to this, texturing in a general 3D-modeling program and in a level editor are two very different things. In a level editor the emphasis is on quick and easy texture selection and snap-assisted positioning on a rectangle surface. This, imho, means that we're not interested in UV-coordinates anymore, but instead higher-level things, such as position, rotation and scale of a texture on a surface. On code level this of course translates directly into UV-coordinates, but the difference for the end-user is huge. Try QuArK's texturing for reference.

Now, about subtracting. It's a wonderful tool, but there's one thing about it that makes it difficult to use. When I cut a window into a wall, the resulting wall is split into smaller convex boxes. This is as it should be. But the thing is that there's no easy way to separate them into separate objects because they are in fact one object. It would be better if subtract produced objects and simply grouped them together. This way the user could easily ungroup them if he wanted. Once again, see QuArK for reference.

Also, the map-importer is really slow for some reason. It takes more than 10 minutes to import a map with 500 brushes. Is there a solution to this?

chronozphere · Posted: Wed Mar 10, 2010 6:39 pm Post subject:

Hey welcome to Delgine. Very Happy

Jeroen · Posted: Wed Mar 10, 2010 7:27 pm Post subject:

Hi there MVi and welcome! Smile

Thanks for your suggestions. They're very useful indeed, especially as DeleD's texturing capabilities are rather limited. We could really use a few more coders. Is there any way you could get your hands on a Delphi 6 or 7 compiler?
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AWM Mars · Posted: Wed Mar 10, 2010 8:26 pm Post subject:

This is what makes this programme great.. first post and you have several replies from talented people wanting to help. Smile

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MVi · Member Joined: 10 Mar 2010 Posts: 2

chronozphere · Posted: Fri Mar 12, 2010 6:30 pm Post subject:

Paul-Jan · Posted: Sat Mar 13, 2010 1:15 pm Post subject:

About the freepascal compiler, yes we have looked into it. DeleD won't compile out of the box, in fact it will be a rather large amount of work to get it to compile on freepascal, but we are looking for people willing to (and with the necessary skills to) pick up that sub-project.