Does anyone know about a good editor that can be used to place models in the game world ? Does making your own world/level editor for your game is the only solution ?
For the ones making commercial apps, what do you use as a world/level editor for your game ?
I havent looked into this too much but check out MonkeyWorld3D:
http://monkeyworld3d.sourceforge.net/
Yes, I've seen MonkeyWorld3D before, any other alternatives or approaches ?
datx said:
Yes, I've seen MonkeyWorld3D before, any other alternatives or approaches ?
max should do all u need. at least thats what im using :D
I think people are confusing world editor with modeler. A modeler is used to build well… models. A world editor is usually used to place all the models in the game world, you load the models into the world editor, then export that scene with all your models & triggers in place to a file format (XML maybe) which can be read by the engine. You need a world editor because you can't import all your static geometry as a huge model. An option would be to used the collada file format to export scene data but I'm not sure if jME fully supports that, besides I want to read any other alternatives.
In a sense, you could just dump the SceneGraph to a file, and that is your world file… You could even achieve this in code. Is this alternative viable to you?
most companies(though we are just a few :)) build their own editors. we've done that at Jadestone and I know "the rest" does similar things…
For the simple layout stuff I need at the moment, I use blender. I have simple dummy meshes where I need stuff to go in the game, then I export to XML and convert to a jme file. I can then load that, find the nodes, remove the dummy meshes and replace with the real thing. Since I know how to use blender it's easier than learning/making a new application 
Since my models are all made in blender and it's easy to set up a plane to act like a terrain, it's easy to check that stuff looks right. Plus, I can render-bake lightmaps in blender if needed, with nice ambient occlusion effects etc. Hopefully soonish there will also be more advanced baking to render down from hi polygon models to low polygon game models
datx said:
I think people are confusing world editor with modeler. A modeler is used to build well.. models. A world editor is usually used to place all the models in the game world, you load the models into the world editor, then export that scene with all your models & triggers in place to a file format (XML maybe) which can be read by the engine. You need a world editor because you can't import all your static geometry as a huge model. An option would be to used the collada file format to export scene data but I'm not sure if jME fully supports that, besides I want to read any other alternatives.
oh, sry for the misunderstanding. from what ive read from other posts, jME supports collada very well. so i guess this would be a good option. :D
That's nice to know shingoki, maybe you could use COLLADA ? Blender supports it.
neakor, yes, from what I've read it seems jME fully supports collada, but I wanted to read other alternatives.
MrCoder, yes that's what I thought, the problem is that making an editor is almost trivial for people with lots of experience in the industry (like yourselves) but for an indie is not trivial at all, I think it would take me about two months to make a decent editor.
What about triggers and other stuff used in the gameplay ? do you folks use dummy geometry and then replace it with the correct action in code ? (assuming you are not using your own editor)
Yup dummy meshes for triggers, spawn points, anything like that, as well as visible objects.
when i found positioning a problem, i made it so that on update() it prints the camera's coordinates. All i had to do is test the game after the terrain is placed, go to the coordinates i like, and exit. It worked fine for me 