Actor Studio Tutorial Actor Studio Tutorial Miscellaneous Specifications (Actors, Textures, Level Design) GTest Options and Switches Programming Tutorials Take off the HUD and messages or modify them Scale down the world and its parameters Create a new UserContent (Ladder) Casting the shadow of the Bots Programming Tutorials by Bob Lawrence FMOD implementation for background sound

World Editor Tutorial 1. Presentation of GEdit 2. Building a simple room 3. Lighting 4. Adding actors (Bots) 5. Doors 6. Elevators and moving platforms 7. Mirrors and glass 8. Water 9. How to create a pencil of light 10. PathPoints 11. Sky 12. Change level 13. Compiling Appendix A: The Bots Appendix B: Entity Header files Appendix C: Shortcut keys Appendix D: The Initialization file

SPECIFICATIONS (ACTORS, TEXTURES, LEVEL DESIGN)

It is reasonable to say that actors (player, Bots, etc...) should remain around 800 polygons. Complex actors (e.g.: a dragon) could be pushed up to 2000 polygons, but this poly-count is pretty high and should be used with extreme caution. If you plan to have a lot of actors in a scene, try to stay in the range of 500. Remember that a good skin can balance the low numbers of polygons and that most of the small details won't even be noticed while the game is running. A polygon reducer for 3D Studio Max is available for free on the Internet. It's called PolyChop.
 

Textures

With Genesis3D v1.1, textures must have a size of a power of 2 up to 256x256 (32x32, 64x64, 128x128 and 256x256). Try to use the smaller size as much as you can. For large mural textures (e.g.: hieroglyph in a pyramid), don't hesitate to break the texture in several smaller textures that you will apply on several "Sheet" brushes. Also, textures must be 8bit color (256 colors). The engine will consider the last color (255th color; the palette is indexed from 0 to 255) as the transparent color. If you do not wish to have any transparent pixels in your texture, make sure that the 255th color of your palette is not used. Some good sotware to create textures are Adobe PhotoShop, PaintShop Pro or CorelDraw. Do not use the Paint program that comes with Windows. The colors of your palette will be messed up.
 

Level Design (maps)

Usually, a Genesis3D map is limited to 4096 texels in all directions. You could run into problems if you go over this limit. If you need to create a large world, lower the scale of your level (see "Scale down the world and its parameters"). Genesis3D v1.1 is using a BSP tree to build its levels (Quake style). This method is typically used for indoor levels. Some improvements were made like GenScape for terrain generation or the use of GenSurf and TerrGen that generates terrain for Genesis3D (see the Links page and the Download page for more information on these packages).