Ciaran’s Toolbench Blog, Part 2!

Hi, Ciarán here again, continuing my introduction to GameBase’s level editing software, Toolbench…

The newest feature of Toolbench is the water editor. It’s a brilliant feature that really adds an extra level of detail to the game and is easy as pie to use. Simply drag a water entity into your level, size and position it correctly. Assign a water flow .tga file to it and then edit the water flow direction and speed as you see fit. To edit the direction you simply draw along the direction you want the water to flow. If you want a river flowing into the sea then draw along the river to the sea, however if you want the waves lapping up against the shore then draw in the direction of the shore. There is no limit, just draw where ever you want, in whatever direction you want.

There is an option to control speed so a river can pick up speed as it approaches the sea or goes around bends. And you can control the alpha on the water for shallow and deep water. You can alter the colour of the water too so you can have sea water and swamp water. All updates are in real time too, so when you click save on your changes you can instantly see your changes in Toolbench without having to shut down the water editor, by turning on the animation in the tool.

Simple.

Beyond the water feature, Toolbench is just as simple to use in adding new props, new textures, new masks is all very straight forward, so there is so much scope for users to personalise Toolbench to their own needs. Additionally, Toolbench allows me to create multiple palettes so I can quickly jump between my ‘mountain creating’ palette and my ‘mountain painting’ palette to my ‘road paint’ palette and so on.

Also, prop placement is equally simple. You select a layer you want the prop to go into, you go to the props list and you drag it in. Manipulation tools allow you to do the standard things such as rotate, translate, scale but you can also check for duplicates and snap to ground. All of these commands can be put into shortcut keys to speed up development along with handy features like multiple views.

That about does it for my introduction to Toolbench, stick around for some updates on our other tech, some great screenshots and previews of our games and other news!

– Ciarán