--------- FOREWORD: --------- This has been long overdue :P One big thing I've been doing while mapping is try to think of ideas to speed up the mapping process. I love love LOVE being able to do this real 3D mapping, but in comparison to more simplier mapping formats [Doom], it seems to sometimes take twice as long to make something in a 3D space in MagEd than it would in Doom Builder or something similar. Now I realize that this is almost always going to be the case just because of the nature of 3D mapping. So I'm not complaining about how tedious creating stuff in your editor can be...really, I'm not :D. Though I do think that whatever can be done to try and expidite the more mundane and tedious aspects of structure creation in MagEd should certainly be taken into consideration. It's my opinion that when you can speed up the processes of the more mudane yet necessary parts of mapping, it allows the mapper to be able to focus more on the important things (like gameplay, detail, aesthetics, etc). Let me give you a really good example of what I mean. Doom Builder 1 lacked the ability to do the more dynamic sector creation that you can now do in Doom Builder 2. If you had to throw some sector into the middle of a bunch of detail sectors or do some lighting in a room with a complex set of sectors already in it...well then, have fun drawing a million sectors for an hour or two. However now in Doom Builder 2, there's that new feature where you can draw that one sector that you need across all those other sectors that are in the way in one swoop...without the worry of unclosed sectors or other issues that eat up valuable time. Takes about 30 seconds to do what it used to take an hour or more sometimes, and the end result is exactly the same, if not better. That end result is the kind of thing that has motivated me to try and come up with as many ideas as possible to speed up the mapping process for us. And you have most definitely done this to a great extent already (like the carve sector and vertex stitch function...those are incredibly helpful). So I'm sure you agree with me that less tedious work = maor bettar for everyones. So in this installment of SugsNBugs, I'm definitely going to focus on tools to help us expidite the mapping process as much as possible. Hopefully my suggestions will be good ones...well, I hope the majority of them will be anyways :P. I'm sure you'd be happy to know that there really aren't many major bugs at all! And as usual, I know that your only one human being and as such you can only do so much in terms of adding all of this stuff. I try my best to remember that and not ask so much of you. ------------ Suggestions: ------------ (These are in no particular order) - Could you implement some sort of selection box for the 3D view? It would come in handy when you need to select one group of faces without having to go through and select them one-by-one. I figure the best way to do it would probably be to just select what's visible and not everything behind what you want to select. This would dramatically speed up the selection process in certain situations (since selecting faces in 3D mode one by one eats up quite a bit of time, depending on how large your selection is). Since the LMB also selects individual faces (and one might get in the way when you need to use the selection box), it would probably require some sort of key to be pressed in order to use the selection box. - Somewhere down the line a thing filter (ala Doom Builder) would be nice to have. I'm sure you already know how it works. Basically you would be able to select a certain filter and it would only display certain map things. So for instance if I wanted to just see light things, I could select the light thing filter and it will make everything but the light things disappear from the map. And then to get everything back to normal, you would just select the default filter (display everything/filter nothing). - When you select multiple things in the editor via the CONTROL key, it's really easy to accidently move things around (since holding/dragging highlighted things with the LMB is the same key you use to highlight/select things). I do it quite a bit whem manipulating faces; I believe it extends to map things, etc as well. An idea I had to fix this issue was to freeze being able to move things around the map space while the CONTROL key is pressed. That way, when you selecting a bunch of faces and you accidently move one around mid-select...errr well, you wouldn't have to worry about it anymore in that case :P - I've got a big one here that would, hopefully, dramatically speed up the making of structures and moreso detailing. It's actually a two part feature. First would be the FACE SPLITTER. It does pretty much what the name says; it would allow you to split an existing face into one (or more) faces of the shape that you choose. In it's simpliest form it would just cut up one face into two faces for various purposes. In it's more complex form, it would allow you to cut in detail faces without having to shrink or destroy the original face, draw in the new detail faces, and then pull everything back together. Ideally this would be a godly wonder if the auto face splitter was working properly (that thing that will automatically legalize a drawn face by splitting it into legal faces)... for the purposes of describing this feature, let's pretend that it works as intended. Alright, let's say I'm going through a map to detail it. As such, all of the faces that make up the structure of a map are in a more-or-less finalized size/shape/position. I want to throw down some floor trim on a set of faces. Normally, I would have to shrink or tweak those existing floor faces to make room for that trim. Then I have to draw the trim faces and manuever them in their spot. Now with the Face Splitter, it could work more like this: I highlight all of the floor faces that will need the trim in face mode and then switch over to the Face Splitter. It would then function almost like drawing a new face; I would just split each face by drawing a line from one point on the face to the other. It would then "split" the face into two (or more) faces in relation to the line that was drawn inside of it. Shazam, I now have floor trim in a fraction of the time! Now if, for some reason, I needed to get a little more complex with the splitting of my face, it would basically work the same. Let's say I have a square face and I need to cut a zig-zag through the middle of it. In essence you would just do the same; select the face, switch to face splitter, and draw the zig-zag from one point on the line of the face to another point of any line that makes up that face. From this point, if the face were just split into two faces, both would likely be illegal because of their convexness. However, with the auto splitter, everything would be split into legal faces as soon as your done manually splitting the face. In the long run, when we've got bigger and more complex maps to do, this feature or something like it would be invaluable to me. I could to a bazillion things with it. Going along the same lines as the Face Splitter is my other, similar idea; FACE MERGE. Hey, I wonder what that does! HEH. I wouldn't necessarily consider it as important as the Face Splitter, but it would have it's uses. Since map creation can sometimes be a dynamic process, alot of the time you will have extra, unnecessary faces that can and should be one single face. This is a tool geared more towards keeping a map as clean and optimized as possible. And I'm sure that it would have uses beyond that as well. - While working on the lighting and thing placement in Quayplex, it occured to me that all of those thing icons were driving me a tad crazy. Sometimes there would be a light thing right in the way of a face that I needed to move or something. When you get a lot of them in a map, they can really get in the way. They already sort of fade when your not in Thing mode, but I think the problem is that they overpower lines and the grid. If you could have it set where the Thing icons are semi-transparent to the grid and are drawn under face lines when NOT in Thing mode, that would be ideal. - Got a quicke here; I keep forgetting that I have to delete a vertex to get rid of it. By that I mean I'm really use to merging verticies in Doom Builder when you drag one on top of another. I would usually get caught with an error message about an extra vertex that didn't need to be present because I would just slide it over to an existing vertex and merge it (or so I would think :P) I thought maybe there was a reason why it wasn't the same in MagEd. I haven't come up with a reason why yet though, so I figured I'd request that it work the same way in MagEd as it does in Doom Builder. Obviously if there's a reason why you don't want vertices merging like that then just ignore this. - I probably already brought up some difficulties I was having with a chunk of the texture aligning in Quayplex. Although that problem in Quayplex would pretty much extend to every map I would end up making. It had to do with an angled trapezoid face that I was using for trim on a structure. The nature of the shapes face and orientation made it impossible to close to it to get the texture to align to it the way I wanted. Earlier I found out that my way of drawing a face to keep it's width at certain angles (in relation to a face that would run horizontal/vertical in a 2D view) wasn't very accurate at all. For example, I would have a face that was 16 map units wide and ran vertically. And then if I wanted that structure to extend to a 45 degree angle and then run horizontally, I would use a 2 by 1 rule to keep that angled face as close to the 16 map pixels width as possible (I can grab a picture of this if needed). If I wanted it to be really REALLy exact I would tweak it on a 1x1 grid...but that just throws a monkey wrench into everything that is drawn around that structure when it's on such a small grid. So I usually do it on an 8x8 or larger. Anyways, to get to the point, this 2 by 1 rule that I use is not exact enough to align texture to exactly; the larger the face is, the more error there usually is with the face not fitting the width right. I guess what I'm getting as is for some way to possibly be able to stretch textures so that they can fit odd areas. I tried using the scale to stretch but it just warps the face horribly. This is usually a problem with trimming and the like. So some more dynamic options to strech and align textures would be wonderful. - I don't recall if I made this suggestion yet or not...but uh, here goes. In Doom Builder, those Thing direction arrow pointer thingys are very useful. And now I realize that I took them for granted while mapping in Struck. The 3D view kind of takes the place of a direction arrow for certain things (ie. monsters, weapons, etc) since you can just tell which direction they are facing just from looking at them. However I think it would still be very benefical to have direction indicators to eliminate any and all possible confusion down the road. The idea would be to have them in the 2D views as well as the 3D views. I think the 2D view would be pretty straightforward to see how they would work...pretty much in the same way that they look in DB, except that the directions would be seperated by the view (angle, pitch, yaw...right?). As for 3D mode, I think some sort of simple arrow grapic that would hover around the perimeter of the thing so show it's direction would work just fine. Anyways, I think this request stems mostly from having to figure out how to point those dang direction lights :P. Since I'm not always that great with working with number values (in relation to just about anything) and I'm better when I have visual cues to work from, this would make it so much eaiser to figure out my thing directions and cut down on confusion in the long run. ----- Bugs: ----- - I can't remember if I reported this one to you or not. Selecting faces with Backsides turned on always seems to break down for me once a map reaches a certain number of faces...or something. Although I could select them in Sacrifical ok if I remember correctly...and it's currently the map with the largest number of faces. Dunno what's going on here.