fundamentals
- the p3d “engine”
It’s only Flash MX, not a real 3d engine, no polygons and
no hardware acceleration, that’s why a few restrictions apply.
First of all, there’s a lot of scaling, zooming and colourizing
happening within the game itself, that’s why hardware requirements
are relatively high (about 1GHz) and the resolution is quite low
(400x300 pixels).
The editing environment does require a minimum resolution of 1024x768
and don’t expect the preview window to run at lightspeed,
performance of the regular game will be a lot better.
For the Flash-technology-interested-geeks out there:
It’s basically plenty of bitmaps flying in your face and being
scaled a ‘lot’ (remember those 8bit racing games a decade
ago?), that’s why the levels themselves need to be quite linear
(actually the x-curvature is predefined and can not be changed),
resulting in a somewhat restricted freedom of movement (you don’t
want to see the ugly edges, do you?).
It goes without saying that the overall performance does heavily
depend on the number of visible objects and the viewing distance,
so, if it’s slow, use less objects and particle emitters.
workspace and navigation
Everything is windowed and mouse-driven, none of the windows and
dialogues can be scaled, though, but dragging them around is fun
too.
the isometric view
Probably the most important area, placing, moving and deleting entities,
scrolling around and triggering parametric effects, everything is
done here. The big red slider defines your current position within
the level and all new elements appear exactly at this point in ‘depth’.
Keep in mind, that there can only be one element per coordinate,
if you keep hearing annoying beeps you’re probably trying
to make elements overlap, dragging the slider or tapping the ‘up’
or ‘down’ arrow keys will bring alleviation.
messages
A window of lesser importance, if you don’t hear beeps, just
don’t pay attention to it. Whenever something doesn’t
seem to work, the message window is probably desperately trying
to catch your attention, to tell you what’s wrong.
files
well, loading and saving your level, what else did you expect?
If things turn out not quite like you imagined, you can perform
a ‘reset’, clearing the level and returning it to the
initial state or load one of our sample files.
Creation of levels is limited to one level per visitor, if you change
your mind, all you can do is start over.
height profile
Here’s where you may ‘terraform’ your project,
drawing hills and cliffs with your mouse, simply hold the left mouse-button
and drag away.
The second purpose of this panel is navigating within the level
on a larger scale by dragging the red depth-slider, while the orange
bar indicates the area that’s currently visible in the isometric
view.
Most objects should be placed on the floor, for your editing convenience
there’s the ‘align’ button, which adjusts the
y-position of already placed entities, according to the profile
you’ve drawn.
textures
Clicking a tile lets you change the ‘floor’ of your
level, changing it from mud too gooey slime and vice versa.
The chosen texture will be used from wherever you clicked until
the end of the level, so the most convenient approach is, to first
draw the height map and then assigning textures to define the soil
area after area.
backdrop
Pretty simple, this changes the background picture, even amidst
the level. Best used in conjunction with a temporal heavy fog.
objects
Most elements defined as ‘object’ are both immobile
and indestructible, most are rocks in various sizes.
Some fragile rocks can be shattered – intended to be the weak
spot in a massive barrier, for example.
The ‘crater’ or ‘lava pool’ element is quite
important, since here’s the spot to microwave your cargo.
These should not be placed in abundance, simply because that would
make the game ridiculously easy.
Furthermore you’ll find some buildings, flying saucers (grounded
ones), wisps of dry vegetation and so on.
Most ‘objects’ are supposed to be scenery and/or obstacles.
characters
Basically, characters are the nasties you can wreak havoc upon.
All of them come in different sizes and with embedded animation
and behaviours, just drop them anywhere and you’re all set.
Depending on your level of aggression, place as many as you wish,
keeping in mind that the games performance can suffer tremendously,
but around 25 visible elements should work fine on most systems.
sweep
‘Sweep’ does randomly scatter a definable amount of
selected elements within the given area, combining them into groups
where appropriate, which can be moved and edited at will.
‘Sweeping’ is best used to scatter smaller entities
like grass and such all over the place or to place a bunch of nasties
all at once.
generator
The ‘generator’ lets you specify a random amount of
objects which are plugged into the game at runtime, thus you can
neither see nor edit them within the interface.
‘Generating’ is recommended for smaller entities only,
because with exaggerated values it does have the potential to severely
clutter your screen.
Due to the random nature of this function, it’s an excellent
tool to build unpredictable levels with unforeseen encounters.
A tiny yellow label will appear in the isometric view, indicating
the spot where the effect starts.
inits
This initializes your level, setting the backdrop picture and defining
the initial atmosphere (fogging).
fog_fx
Lets you vary the atmosphere, by changing colour and range of the
fog. All values will be smoothly interpolated between two occurrences
of ‘fog_fx’.
A tiny yellow label will appear in the isometric view, indicating
the spot where the effect starts.
particle_fx
Creates clouds of small entities which appear and move randomly.
Sandstorms, meteors and annoying swarms of insects may be triggered
with these, adding life and atmosphere to your creation.
Please use with caution, too many particles will slow down the game
quite a bit.
A tiny yellow label will appear in the isometric view, indicating
the spot where the effect starts.
shake_fx
Just what it sounds like: make the screen shake and tremble for
a given time. Best used sparsely in conjunction with dramatic incidents
like a meteor storm for instance.
A tiny yellow label will appear in the isometric view, indicating
the spot where the effect starts.
sound_fx
Adding even more atmosphere, by letting you choose between a variety
of environmental sounds.
A tiny yellow label will appear in the isometric view, indicating
the spot where the effect starts.
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