The tools of the trade

Hi every person! As my very first post in the weblog, I really feel like I needed to do a small introduction. I am Luis, I'm not that identified compared to the 2 visible heads about here :P but I'm the other programmer here at Frictional, possibly some of you may well know me from the forum, but I kinda vanished from there a while ago... But I am here again, and this time I promise to be a small more continuous than before, which shouldn't be that challenging :)

As you may possibly currently know, I'm quite considerably creating the game tool suite myself, and a lot of stuff has been going on for over a year now. Up to now, this suite is composed of a Level Editor, a Model Editor, a Particle Editor and a Material Editor. All of these use the HPL engine constructed-in GUI method, which tends to make it actual effortless to use the renderer along, that signifies I can actually do genuine time in-game previews of stuff.

I am confident you currently know about the Level Editor, and I know you have had a glimpse of the Model Editor in the final workflow demonstration video. But what is this Model Editor for anyway? I'll explain.

Outside the HPL engine realm, a model is just geometry: vertices and edges, textures and texture coordinates, possibly animation information... That is cool, and enough if you want to use it ingame as a static object (portion of the globe, that is)... but what if you want some thing to interact with?
That is exactly where the Model Editor comes in, to truly give some "life" to that inert geometry. In a nutshell, what you do in it is choose a mesh, add physical bodies and joints (if required), attach sounds, particles, billboards, edit animations, and then you are prepared to go!
It may sound like a great deal, but the tool tends to make these tasks genuinely straightforward for the user to do. Ever attempted to mod Penumbra? Then you are gonna love this. In truth, you are gonna really like it regardless of whether you attempted or not :)

1 of the nice functions this editor provides is to test the model "ingame", which means you can test the physics and animations of the object just like it really is gonna be like in the actual game. They say a picture is worth a thousand words, so a good video have to rock then :P



Well, that's been sufficient for a nice post. I bet you happen to be now asking yourself why I didn't mention the Particle or Material Editors, and you never need to have to worry, I am just saving them for later :)