3ds Max as a pure Level editor

#1

Simply enough, we need a good map editor, which could also work quite well with outdoor scenes and more complex, curvey shapes as map objects, not imported static meshes. We were planning to use GTKRadiant, but it doesn’t cut it for landscapes and more complex geometry, therefore we decided to go all-out-3ds-Max.

The game engine is our own and at a pretty high stage. Supposedly it would be quite easy to prepare Max for level editing, however, questions do rise.
For example: lightning, spawn poits, texture tile’ing ratios, units, et cetera.

So do any of you guys happened to have any similar experiences or maybe are aware of any sites with similar information?

#2

Hiya.

If I might make a suggestion…look into Softimage XSI. It allows you to “plug in” your games rendering engine into it so you can see how your level would look ‘on the fly’. As for import/export you could write one yourself, or you might want to use the “COLLADA” import/export ( http://collada.org/public_forum/welcome.php ). Besides, you can get 7 seats of XSI to ONE seat of 3DS MAX 7.

#3

Well, there’s no difference in writing an import/export mediator for Max or XSI, and Max supports DirectX shader’s and there’s no trouble converting any OpenGL shader’s to DirectX’s, so you can sort of see a preview in Max, too.

And upon checking I found out that GMax supports entities! Ain’t that cool? :slight_smile:
’
Well, I take it nobody had any similar experiences, so I guess I’ll have to nag the programmer to death about all the issues.

#4

Litho, I’m not quite sure what your asking. We use max as our level editor, and I’ve used Maya as a level editor as well (Maya is much better at it from my perspective, it’s data management is much better). At any rate, it’s a perfectly viable option. In terms of the specifics you mentioned like spawn points and so on, those will be reliant on whatever tools you write along with your exporter. You will have to write tools along with your exporter that allow you to have “special case” objects in max such as level objects (breakables) spawn points, nav meshes and so on. So, you’ll need to nag your programmers on this issue no matter what, since they will have to create tools to allow for the special case scenarios.

Hope this helps

#5

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