DeleD Community Edition

[neq]

hi,

im a hobby coder and currently doing an OpenGL Engine.
I think DeleD Editor is very good and i especially like the Map-Format.

But there are some important (and easy todo things) not implemented:
At first ... i have an folder with about 300 textures. I couldnt find a function
in the texture manager to add the hole folder - so it took a lot of time adding
all textures to the texturePack.
And the texture packs which are included seems to have a different format ( after every foldername are 4 integers ) ... when you make a new texture pack the format does not have this 4 integers. (lol was very shocked that the map i made myself couldnt load in my engine.)

While testin around with D3Radiant (doom3 editor) i saw a nice feature ... when a light is selected, it shows the lights range... would be cool to have somethin like this in DeleD.

Oh and ... i couldnt find a description of the texturepack-format, well its very simple, but for developers it would be very comfortable to have this in the documentation... the documentation could also include more information about how to write a plugin... i coded delphi for years and its no problem to have a look at the example if i ever need it, but others could need some more info about the functions names return values structure etc.

But anyway DeleD is a very cool MapEditor

PS: add to your uses list (if you re codin delphi 7) XPMAN ... this make DeleD use XP-Styles (still compatible with other Windows Versions)

[Jeroen]

Hi neq, welcome to these forums.

Thanks for your suggestions, it's greatly appriciated. About the texturepacks: you're right about the "add a folder" option, I should build that in. However, I think I'm going to wait a while because we will most likely implement materials in a future version as well and the whole texturepack idea might go overboard. Besides... 300+ textures... that's a lot! Remember that all textures in your texturepack are actually loaded to your graphics card. I assumed that an average level would only consist out of around 50 textures or so...

About the texturepack format: you can ignore the 4 integers, that's some data left over from a previous texturepack format. I've left them out in the current versions. A description of the texturepack (or materials for that matter) and a plugin SDK have yet to be written. I hope to get some time for that soon but well... i don't bet on that anymore (i'm coding all this in my spare time which is limited ). Anyway, long live the forums, i'd say, because i can always give short answers here.

[neq]

300+ textures ... do u mean that DeleD load em all to the graphic card ?
if u mean that an engine loads em all... my engine reads the texture pathes and
loads just the textures used on the map ... and i need all the textures in the pack cuz while makin a map its uncomfortable to look thro the explorer window and addin just the textures to the pack that i need... anyway the material system would be a cool thing (dont forget makin it extendable in somehow ... maybe somethin like an extra string param where developers for example can give a filename of a shader or something like that).
If u decide to implement materials later and developin more your texture pack idea:
i had the followin problem with my big texture pack - it needs much time for loadin the hole thing, but the texture window just displays 4-6 textures at the same time. u could implement an thread based loader which loads the textures at the moment the user needs them. The windows explorer is doin it like that (on WinXP) ... u know this feature showin a preview of the pic in its icon ... if u have a big folder of pics and u scroll down very fast u can see the explorer loading the previews.
Or easier just use a thread for loading the textures so that the user can start directly with the mappin... i would implement it like that: first load all pathes and initialize the textures to (maybe) 256x256, then start the thread which loads all the textures-data.
this should be no problem for the users cuz everything in OpenGL havin a not existing texture is just white. hmm no more ideas at the moment .. maybe next time

[Paul-Jan]

Neq... have you ever tried to implement an application where multiple threads in a sinle process simulteneously access the OpenGL device? There are usually *quite* a few pitfalls to overcome, quite cool if you just got it working like that.

[neq]

yes i already tried multithreading ogl ... sry i hadnt thought about that problem