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Old 14-09-17, 13:16   #621
Dustie
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The editor will have its own WAD2 format and there will be an app provided to edit them, like WadMerger for WADs.


Not sure about StrPix, though...
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Old 18-09-17, 16:34   #622
MontyTRC
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The new Wad2 tool is in development
Currently it can open both files, move objects from source to destination, delete objects in destination Wad2. We have many ideas for this tool, that will be used also for sound management and mesh import from custom geometry




Last edited by MontyTRC; 18-09-17 at 16:35.
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Old 18-09-17, 17:10   #623
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This is so amazing, thanks all the team for what you are doing for the community
I'm doing a course which will take me two years to be a Software developper, and five in all to be an IT engineer. I hope I will be able one day to do wonders such as you did !
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Old 18-09-17, 17:11   #624
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Great news
Not a request, but an idea: what if we have 2 lists for objects and ability to switch between them? I mean one list is the original names of slots (i.e. LARA, LARA_SKIN, ANIMATING1, PLANT5, etc.) while the second list contains corresponding actual names (lara's animations, skin, animated bird, static tree, etc.). The default names from second list are the slot names. I think for builders it would be handy to know what each slot actually contains.
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Old 18-09-17, 19:07   #625
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I'm so excited for this Will the Wad2 format support UV mapping?
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Old 18-09-17, 19:26   #626
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^ I think it does

Quote:
Originally Posted by MontyTRC View Post
Hi to everyone
It's time to do a little update.

Currently TRTombLevBauer is adding full UV support to the editor. That's mean that editor internally will think like a modern 3d editor and the goal is to use also free form textures like trapezoids. He also improved a little the speed of the compiler and improved grid lines rendering with antialiasing.

I'm working on a new (and long awaited I believe) feature: a new WAD file format, that I've called (with a lot of fantasy ) Wad2.

This new file format will be the only one accepted by the editor, but like PRJ you will be perfectly able to import all old WAD objects into the new format. And a new tool for mergin Wad2 and managing sounds will be written.
One of the main goals of Tomb Editor was to use new (and modern) file formats but still be able to import years of PRJs and WADs.

New new Wad2 file format will have some new features:
- Full UV support (now textures can be only rectangles or half part of rectangles)
- Import of static meshes from 3D programs (OBJ and in general every format supported by Assimp)
- A better sound management system
- A better sprite management system

The first release of the editor, planned for late october, will be delayed a little. But we would launch the editor with all modern features already available. We'll update in the next days
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Old 18-09-17, 19:42   #627
MontyTRC
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Thank you!
Yes, everything in Tomb Editor ecosystem supports UV mapping.
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Old 18-09-17, 20:03   #628
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Wad2 is amazing.. will it automaticale move and create sound.txt like that tool for baselevel for dxtre3d ????
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Old 18-09-17, 22:07   #629
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Hello everyone,

I am the level builder and developer that joined Monty about two months ago to work on the level editor. Before I worked on my own little private programming library to put some little known features of *.tr4 files to use (rougly similar to Meta2tr in purpose). However by itself this of course would just be yet another seperate tool. Luckily with the Tomb Editor project it's finally reasonably possible to improve the editor directly! That's why I decided to ask Monty, if we could collaborate.
Many thanks to Monty for this making this possible!

So in the last months I did quite a number of different things including refactoring (code clean up), adding features, fixing bugs, little usability improvements... In total many many little things. But instead of naming everything, I decided to only present some of the bigger improvements that are interesting for users (from my point of view anyway)

Posting something about what I have been doing was a little overdue at this point. It just takes effort to actually write it up and to make sufficiently pretty screenshots. So admittedly I was putting this off a little bit.
Anyway, here it is (finally ):
1. Improved 2D Map

So what's new about that? Well, first of all you can now freely move and zoom on the 2D map.
The coloring has been changed. I added slight transparency to the room filling color to make it possible to judge contours of rooms further down.

While level building a particular annoyance was always to select a specific room somewhere hidden in between everything else. To improve on that, I added that thing on the right. I call it a "depth bar":


You can change the visibility range on the bar to view different height ranges. By adjusting the range, room structures that were previously impossible to observe directly can be selected much more conviniently.

The depth bar also shows the stack of rooms under the mouse curser:

When rooms overlap under the mouse, different continous rooms stacks are displayed horizontally next to each other.

Using the middle mouse button, additional "samples" can be placed on the 2D map, that extend the depth bar.
This is handy for vertically aligning many room. (you can also vertically move rooms on the bar with the mouse)


In my opinion this almost entirely replaces the need for the sideways views that had been introduced in the NGLE. However we may still provide those in the future if necessary.
2. Level Settings Dialog
Winroomedit has all paths and dependencies hardcoded. This historically always forced people to the actually ridiculous pattern of copying the editor into every game folder. The *.prj files had to be inside the game folder aswell.

Additionally moving levels between computers was painful. For example having a level on an USB stick that is taken to different PCs was unpleasant, since the old editor insisted on using absolute paths for *.wad-files and textures, meaning that they had to be reselect constantly.

This is now solved with the level settings dialog:


The path to the level file is by default replaced with the dynamic $(LevelDirectory) placeholder, which always points to the current level directory. All paths can be customized. If a *.prj file is imported (like my jungle level, see the pictures above), all paths are automatically setup so that they point to the original game files.

Its probably also worth mentioning that the font and sky texture can now be loaded from sane image formats like *.png, *.bmp, *.jpg or *.tga instead of weird raw file types.
3. UV Texturing
All people who have used Meta2tr software should be aware of it, but I still think it's very surprising that the *.tr4 format supports proper UV mapping. No core design game or tool makes use of it and the official level editor even enforces alignment to 16 pixels boundaries. However, luckily for us, from an engine and format perspective there is no reason for that. Only the editor needed to be updated and that's what I did. Internally UVs are now everywhere.

All the typical texturing restrictions are removed, except that one texture selection cannot span more than 256 pixels (or 255 strictly speaking). But it is now possible to select any texture region with subpixel precision. A video demonstrating how I image this to be useful:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i30QL22uvzM

It's possible to select textures crossing page boundaries. Textures can be of any size (like 177 pixels wide, or 10000). To allow working on massively different scales, subpixel precision on the one hand and super big textures consisting of 256² tiles on the other, I added zooming to the texture map.

Eventually there should be a tool to project the shape of polygons in the level backwards onto the texture map. Besides just being convinient sometimes, I hope this will encourage level builders to use more complicated level geometry.
4. Eliminating 'No Collision'
I don't know how many people here have actually questioned it, but I think the 'No Collision' feature never made much sense. Basically it only ever resulted in problems, because it is very easy to forget marking all triangular portal sectors with 'No Collision' from below and above.

Anyway this is now the past because triangular sectors will now 'just connect' automatically when the floor matches the ceiling.


Of course their is still the small possibility that someone actually wants a solid triangle above a portal.
This particular usecase has been superseeded by the 'Force floor solid' feature.
5. Grid walls
The new function to grid walls is now trying to be more clever.


Generally I think that this kind of tools is an area where we can do a lot better in the future.
Technically there is also no reason why there can be only 5 subdivisions on walls (or only 2 on floor/ceiling ledges!).
6. Resizing rooms with portals
The old editor had a very annoying limitation that rooms could not be resized when there were portals
This situation is now fixed and all portals are kept.
7. Fractional Fly Bys
Fly Bys support fractional values for speed, angles, ...
8. Light options
There are now a few additional options for lights:


If 'Shadows' is disabled, obstructing geometry will no longer cast shadows in the light.
If 'Statically' is disabled, the light is not used for room vertices lighting calculation. (eg you can create a sun that only illuminates Lara and other Movables, but not the other geometry)
If 'Dynamically' is disabled, the light is not used in gamefor movable lighting. (you can think of this as turning any light to a kind of effect light. The light only affects the room geometry)
9. Line Rendering
I was inititally not planning on including this here, but the feedback was particularly positive in the development chat, so here is a quick mention.

I have rewritten the line rendering shader. Now it is using anti aliasing and the lines are of constant width, giving the editor a very consistent look in comparison to before.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4eb4EItpME

(Screenshot of how it looked before: http://www.imagenetz.de/img.php?file=c60c0d9ca3.png)
10. ...

Its more and more about boring internal details so I will stop here.
However I still want to answer some questions.

Quote:
Originally Posted by FairFriend View Post
edit: one more question, if you don't mind. Do you plan to include a "compile and play" option like in ngle?
Yes that feature is available and you can customize what happens in the settings dialog I have shown above.

Only indirectly related:
Usually the new TRNG tomb4.exe shows this Press CTRL key for SETUP dialog on startup. While testing the level this takes away a lot of unnecessary time, so 'Compile and Play' does now actually suppress that dialog by default.

(It would be really nice if an engine programmer could write a patch for tomb4.exe to directly launch into a level without going through the main menu)

Quote:
Originally Posted by Caesum View Post
By the way, I was wondering if it's possible to make the editor make level .tga set by itself from separate textures used in the editor? I mean, something like in modern games where you can load all important textures(that are in a separate files) and make something like a catalogue of textures. Then it could combine these files(only those used) into one .tga during level compilation into tr4 file. What do you think about it?
While introducing the UVs, I refactored the texturing system and I plan on implementing the necessary GUI to load any amount of texture files at the same time. Currently however this is not yet possible (mostly because GUI) and I can't promise how long it will take, but eventually this will be possible.

Quote:
Originally Posted by SrDanielPonces View Post
Since (apparently) the grid space is bigger, is the room limit increased (bigger than 255)? Because the current one is so small that I reach the limit very fast
First regarding the grid, there actually is nothing stopping you inside the editor from placing the rooms really far away from the origin. However there is a catch: Tomb4.exe stops rendering the game correctly for about X/Z>100. So for bigger maps, we need better engines.

Regarding the second question: Partially
I believe you can create more than 255 rooms, but all rooms beyond 255 must not have traversable floor or ceiling portals.
This is a *.tr4 file format limitation. If we want more than 255 rooms with traversable floor or ceiling portals, we need a better level file format.

Quote:
Originally Posted by ggctuk View Post
I assume it will be like a toggle: you can manipulate objects "classic style" according to clicks/squares, or you can toggle the editor to manipulate them freely. I'd love to see free rotation manipulation too - at the moment you can only rotate an object along the horizontal/X axis.
Actually, its not a toggle right now. All objects are completely free to be moved anywhere.
You can put all cameras, items, statics, whatever on wherever you want them to be on your square.

Also for rotation. We already support free rotation but only around the Y axis.
No other rotation angles are stored inside *.tr4.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Caesum View Post
Right now I have a problem that I'm working on a TRLE project with several people and we have our TRLE on Google Drive so everyone could work on the same build at the same time. Everything works pretty well except that ngle.exe saves its settings/configuration directly in the TRLE folder, so we can't really have personalized settings because they override each other lol. Is Tomb Editor gonna address this issue?
Yes.

You no longer have to put your editor in the level folder.
There is a 'TombEditorConfiguration.xml' file but it's in editor's folder not the level's folder.

Quote:
Originally Posted by LCEF (CA) View Post
So, if I understand, we will be able to make an UVMapped OBJ with an external software (Blender in my case) and import it in the Editor to be "inside" the geometry ?..... Were is the trap ?
My question is more about limitations, for exemple texture infos, or the maximal vertex number for a whole level (only geometry with imported OBJ). What are those limitations ? (maybe is too early to know.. ^^ )
The *.tr4 file format dictates a maximum of 65536 vertices, triangles and quads (each on their own) per object. This is more like a theoretical upper bound though, because due to engine limitations apparently the rendering fails with fewer already. This has been brought up in the development chat but there was some disagreement about where exactly the limit is.

Anyway, there is another issue which is a lot harsher in my opinion: The 'object texture' limit. Basically you can apply only 32768 unique textures in a level. This may sound like a lot until you realize that with UV mapping, basically every single polygon gets a seperate texture area. So for normal UV mapped objects (that are not created with huge caution to exactly reuse texture mappings) basically the polygon count equals the 'object texture' count.

Quote:
Originally Posted by LoreRaider View Post
I hope that the prj importer will be made soon, I would like to see my current project on that new editor
Quote:
Originally Posted by Titak View Post
And current prj's can then be converted to prj2?
The *.prj importer is here since quite some time and working well. (Checkout the pictures and videos above)
It's our main way to actually test the editor.

It works very well except some texturing cases.

Quote:
Originally Posted by ggctuk View Post
Ooh... I might have missed the memo... does that mean Tomb Editor is a complete editor, including the ability to edit WADs as well? Thus making WadMerger and strpix redundant?
No, however Monty has plans for a seperate tool that replaces those.

I also hope that one day we can do a similar thing, as proposed for textures:
Load different *.wad files at the same time and merged them on the fly. (Like using eg one Lara.wad shared between all levels and including *.wad files from the internet directly)
No promises right now though.


I also read all the suggestions that have been brought up in the thread even if I did not specifically address them here. Basically for 80% I can say its on our to do list and I hope we can include it eventually. But I don't want to cause unnecessary disappointments, so I won't go into detail about what is going to happen when.

Last edited by TombLevBauer; 18-09-17 at 22:11.
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Old 19-09-17, 01:11   #630
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This is all incredibly amazing. Thank you guys for all the effort you put into this. I really do believe that of all the developments on here this is the most important one for the future of this hobby. I'm most happy about the connecting rooms improvements because that was a massive pain for me personally!

Random request (I mean at this point I am sure you are sick of them): I don't know if this has to do with the editor or the engine or whatnot but do you think it would be possible to create water rooms with the option to disable the light effects? Since you guys seemed to have added some additional lighting options.
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