Hey guys.
I’m a novice when it comes to the jMonkeyEngine and the SDK.
My plan is to make a basic first-person game to practice as part of a bigger project. One level, one weapon, one NPC, one cutscene, a basic health system and so on.
Now, my issue is this.
I can see that the SDK is well equipped for handling outdoor levels, what with its Terrain Editor enabling you to sculpt all sorts of landscapes and then add all sorts of models, geometries and particle effects from the Scene Composer.
However, what I need is the ability to make closed indoor maps like you see in virtually all FPS games - Doom, Duke Nukem 3D, Quake and so forth. Things like office buildings, hallways and corridors, movie theaters and other closed environments with roofs, walls and whatnot.
How would I go about doing this using just the SDK tools? Or is there some plugin which can facilitate this?
I’ve tried searching for suggestions and it seems that some people have employed procedural generation algorithms to generate maze-like spatials and attach them to the scene graph. This is not useful for me, however.
Do I need to integrate some external mapping tool like GtkRadiant to my workflow?
All suggestions and ideas are welcome.
the sdk scene composer, while has some level of ability to be used to “create” scenes. its feature set is really more geared to “compiling” them. eg everything in your scene would be made in blender. then inside of jmonkey you create a new .j3o scene where you just use the “link in scene composer” function to add stuff youve made (and imported into your models directory) to your scene and move it around.
also remember your “custom properties” in blender will be imported (in jmoneky its called user data). so in blender you could easily markup your objects with user data for information like “this is a door” “this is a button” and read that information in when you load your scene to attach the appropriate controls or whatever you need to do.
You could (perhaps should) make your entire map in blender, and just leave out your assets that are “shared” between maps (like character models and weapons) to be linked in to the scene after importing in jmonkey.
There could of course be other approaches to this.
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Thanks for your input.
Any other suggestions?
I’ve heard people recommend SketchUp as a mapping tool due to its simplicity and ease of use. I might look into that, but unfortunately it does not support Linux natively, which is the platform I’ve developing under.
Are there any special purpose level editors that can adequately interface with jME3?
I don’t know about any FPS-oriented editors, no. Here’s a decent Blender guide (that incorporates SketchUp)
And you’re right about SketchUp, it can be a very effective level design tool. For your final level you might wanna redo it purely in Blender because you have more control over the aesthetics that way, but SketchUp lets you prototype your level designs very quickly.
