PlanetX Map Editor (1.2)

[pizzayoyo]

PlanetX Map Editor 1.2 has been released! Here is a list of all of the features currently in the program (new features are underlined):

Object Types:
- Texture
- DUDV Texture
- Material
- Environment
- Terrain
- Vegetation
- Wind - Can be applied to a vegetation object, shader-based
- Meshes
- Mesh Instances - Created from a Mesh, they are duplicated and save memory.
- Actors
- Actor Instances - Same as mesh instances, except for actors
- Directional Light
- Point Light
- Spot Light
- Particles
- Water
- Paths
- Volumetric Triggers
- Scripts
- Object Groups
- Texture Groups
- Property Classes - A set of properties with default values you can implement into an object's Custom Properties list
 
Editor Interaction:
- Move, Scale, and Rotate Widgets - Redesigned, much more intuitive
- Move-Drag Mode - The selected object follows the mouse, it's height is determined by the underlying landscape. Enabled by default when a new object is created. Click to place object.
- TreeView Scene Management
- Landscape sculpting and painting tools
- Vegetation placement, painting, and erasing tools
- Scroll-Wheel Menus - Click the scroll wheel on an object in the viewport and a menu of options will appear, such as Rename, Delete, view Custom Properties, and all custom object actions. If no object is selected, the menu will allow you to add a new object.
- Terrain Brush - Now appears as a circle, you can resize it using the scroll wheel

Additional Features:
- Movies - Updated to include mesh/actor instances
- Environment Paging - Meshes / Terrains can be paged in and out of the program based on distance.
- Hole Report - Now also lets you know of textures not referenced by any other object
- Open 1.1 Project - You can open 1.1 project folders and load them into the program.
- Custom Properties - Every object allows you to specify custom properties using the Custom Properties editor
- Plug-Ins
- Mesh/Actor Presets - To use this feature, add the ObjectPresets.dll plug-in in the Plug-Ins folder to the program. Allows you to export meshes/actors to individual files to import into other projects.

Loader:
- Load an exported PXM file into any .Net langauge with only a few lines of code. Includes an event that fires when your scripts call custom code.
- Access any object using its name, for example Map.Meshes("Name")
- Access to the internal TrueVision Objects, for example, Map.Meshes("Name").TVObj
- Movie control with StartCinematicByName, UpdateCinematics, and EndCinematic

-------------------------------------------------

This release featuers two demo levels, MedievalTown.pxm and MilitaryBase.pxm. The Military Base Level features a full demo movie ("MOVIE1_PLAY_ME"). Both were made by AGT.

Pics:
http://pizzayoyo.smithbower.com/px/ItemPlacement.jpg


http://pizzayoyo.smithbower.com/px/demo1.jpg


http://pizzayoyo.smithbower.com/px/demo2.jpg


http://pizzayoyo.smithbower.com/px/demo2moviepaths.jpg


http://pizzayoyo.smithbower.com/px/customproperties.jpg


Downloads:
Editor + Loader (Version 1.29d): http://pizzayoyo.smithbower.com/px/PXMEv129d.rar
Demo Levels     (Updated 8/23/09): http://pizzayoyo.smithbower.com/px/DemoLevels.rar

Licensing:
The cost to purchase a Single User License to the editor is $60. It allows you to activate the editor, which allows saving and plug-ins, on ONE computer only. Send the $60 to bo_alexander@comcast.net using PayPal.

If you already have a license then this download will already be activated for you.

[MoonWolf]

Nice to see the development is still going

I have a bug to report tho.

I start a new project. I add a terain and a texture and attach it to the base terrain.
I now load in a mesh from file and it works fine. but now my models are HUGE and i want to scale them down a lot. so i set the X/Y/Z scaling to 0.05. after that i add some more and do the same to them. So far so good and all looks nice. Now i save the project and restart pxme and load the project. Now the meshes have lost the scaling 0.05 and it has been set to 5 and that makes the model way to big. In the same time it seems to have lost its possition. When i rescale the mesh to 0.05 it is not possitioned in the same place where i placed it.

So this is for me a bug that need to be fixed

Regards,
MoonWolf

[pizzayoyo]

Thanks for the feedback. Unfortunately I was unable to reproduce this problem. Were you using the scale widget or typing values in manually? Also, what regional settings are you using? Did decimal values for scale work for you in the previous version?

[MoonWolf]

Ok this is how i done it.

Start a new project.
1. I go in the navigation to Geometry > Meshes and rightclick to say add mesh
2. I place the little box on the landscape
3. Then i go to properties and choose a file in the filename property. (tvm file)
4. I click yes to load texture from model.
5. Then i scroll down in the properties to E - Scale
6. I enter value 0.05 (exactly like that) in the ScaleX and ScaleY and ScaleZ
7. I save the project.
8. I open the project and choose no to save current.

Now the values in ScaleX, ScaleY and ScaleZ are 5 not 0.05 and my model is in BIG size.

I use a swedish windows xp with swedish settings. Sweden normaly uses a comma(,) as decimal delimiters. but i used a dot(.) in pxme since i was unable to use comma.

Regards,
MoonWolf

[pizzayoyo]

The problem was in fact a regional settings issue. 1.2 uses a seperate thread for saving, and I forgot to set the culture mode to Invariant on that thread. I uploaded a fix, redownload the editor RAR and let me know how it works!

[MoonWolf]

Hi

I redownloaded and tested. It seems to work perfect now

Great.
I will start play tomorrow with this


Regards,
MoonWolf

[MoonWolf]

I have a question !

Am i doing something wrong now again? I have about 60Mb of Tvm and textures loaded into the editor. I made a minor city and saved the project. the .pxm file turned out to be about 1GB ? is it realy supposed to be like that ? when i open the project and take a look in the temp folder(textures) it has done some realy strange things with my dds files. one of the files is 2Mb in size in its orginal but in the temp folder it is 22Mb  ? is it realy supposed to be like that? if i would make a world with this system it would turn out to a .pxm file of 15GB with ease...

Regards,
MoonWolf

[pizzayoyo]

I'm using the SaveTexture method in TrueVision to save out the texture as DDS to the output folder. But it could be that the DDS file is storing a lot more information than needed. I'll change it so that it saves to the same format as you loaded it as when I get home today.

[MoonWolf]

Wow that was a quick answer.
I look forward to the update

Regards,
MoonWolf

[pizzayoyo]

Haha, yeah it was. Well I updated the downloads with the new texture saving method. Not using SaveTexture decreased both demo levels in size by about half, so I combined them into one download. I also combined the editor and loader downloads. As always let me know how it works!

[MoonWolf]

Wow what a change

After i reloaded all the textures and re-saved my project it became 124Mb in size instead of nearly 1GB. Everything is working like a charm now so far .

I have some ideas for future releases that can be nice to implement if you might find them good.

1. Having the widgets for moving and turning an object fixed in a corner and in one size. Why? well the widget is always on top of the object and if i zoom in in the bottom of the object i must zoom out to navigate with it. Not so efficient but working.

2. Keys for moving objects small portions. i was thinking like this sometimes you move an object very little to fit in to the rest of things and instead of changing values in the properties there could be keys for move small portions. Like R and F for moving Z + and -, E and T for moving Y +- and D,G for X +-. Much like the camera movement keys but for the selected object. and if you cold set a an option for fill in how much to move each time would be an extra +

3. As for the camera. I can't find any place to set it's default movement speed. i know it existed in earlier versions but i can't find it anymore. i found the <shift> holding for fast speed by accident and got happy when i found it

4. If possible to sort the geometry > meshes i would be glad. Like make ”sub directories” to put the meshes in. That would help a lot to find the one you want to use. And also a i think tricky thing. Snapshots of the mesh object in the list.

Well that is some things i have come up with and been thinking of I bet I will come up with more.


Regards,
MoonWolf

[pizzayoyo]

Glad to hear its working well for you now! If you get the chance, try running the movie in the MilitaryBase.pxm file. It's basic, but its neat, and I'm interested in feedback on the scripting and movie control.

Now, about your suggestions:

1. The move widget works by finding the 3D location of the mouse and moving the object there. So if it was in a fixed position in the corner it would be hard to move the object. However scale and rotation would be fine in the corner...
2. Great idea.
3. I must have left that out, I'll add it to the toolbar.
4. I was thinking about better organization myself, such as Alphebetizing all of the lists of objects. Folders could be neat too, I'll look into it. And I think the snapshots of the meshes would be a bit tricky, getting it to align up right for a picture and all. But I can try.

Any other suggestions or comments? I'll be posting my list of ideas shortly, and I'd like to get peoples opinions on which ones would be useful.

[MoonWolf]

Oh yea!

There is one more request i have regarding the textures. When i import a tvm file it asks me if i want to import the textures. Ofcourse i want to do that! its just that if i have 3 models that uses textue tex1.dds it will load into pxme as text1.dds text11.dds text12.dds or something similar. is it possible to make pxme to check if the texture is already loaded and use that one instead? maybe have an option to set something to reuse already loaded textures if same name. that would save a lot of extra work to keep filesize down.

oh btw i don't know if you handle this. maybe it reuses the texture if it is from same location but i have all my models sorted in directory structure with textures in it but many models uses the same texture.


About the movie clip. i have loaded it and looked at it. i think it was nice. I have not overall looked mutch into the scripting and movies yet since i haven't figured out so mutch about that yet. one thing was can i turn off all the pathing lines meanwhile i watch? but i guess that is off by default in the loader outside editor. otherwise it was neat i liked it mutch i think i will use that feature later on when i have something to make a movie out of

Regards,
MoonWolf

[pizzayoyo]

The reason it asks you if you want to load textures is because if you have loaded a model and added normal maps to all of the groups individually, and maybe changed some textures, then if you had to regenerate this model it would definitely be useful to not reload the textures and remove your normal maps and change the textures back to default.

PXME does check for texture duplicates. TV's TextureSharing option is always on during mesh generation, so when PXME checks the Texture ID's on each of the groups TV made, if it finds an ID that already has a TextureObject it just references that TextureObject rather than creating a new texture. So if TV is failing to recognize that two textures are the same then I can't really do much about that. Maybe I could try to match the pixels, and if they match then use the original texture?

And if you want to turn off the path lines/nodes and light boxes, there is an option for that in the Options page.

[MoonWolf]

Hi!

Ok i was more thinking of comparing filenames to check. i have about 20 duplicates of a dds file each about 2.7mb and that makes about 50mb extra data. It might be a stupid idea i have but its seldom you have 2 difrent textures named the same. or is it just me that have unique names? . Anyway its not a big issue at the moment but i will have to go over my project later and delete and reorganize the textures and object.

I will also have a look at the video without pathing when im closing my own project for today

Regards,
MoonWolf

[pizzayoyo]

What if I have it check the filenames, and if it finds a duplicates, it asks you whether you would like to create a new texture or use the old one. You would be able to set a default behavior for this.

[MoonWolf]

That was the idea i had in mind

[MoonWolf]

I came to think about a thing.

Not something that i need at the moment but that could come in handy later on. How come you have made it like when you load a mesh into pxme that you have to place it on screen?
Woulden't it be better to have an assets storage where you can place evrything you need?
Often when you make games or things you need stuff like armour, wepons, amunition and so on that not is needed directly. it would be handy to store it in the same DB as the world so you don't need to have separate storages for it.

Just a thought.

Regards,
MoonWolf

[pizzayoyo]

Just change MeshMode from Standard to PresetOnly. That will mean that it wont be rendered. You can still make instances from it though, and those will be rendered.

[pizzayoyo]

I've already added the camera speed control and texture filename checking, and I'm working on alphabetizing the lists of objects as well as keyboard shortcuts for object manipulation. Expect an update in the next few days.