Mapeditor

The map editor can be started by pressing 'F8'. Don't load it twice, otherwise you will need to restart Luxinia (fixed in next Sparc release).

Loading and saving

At the moment, the mapeditor lacks a GUI element for loading / saving maps.

This is done using the console, which can be opened by pressing F1.

Type

  • saveworld("myworld.lua") to save your map as "myworld.lua"
  • loadworld("myworld.lua") to load your map as "myworld.lua"

Alternativly, you can write after startup in the console
  • defaultlevel = "myworld.lua"
(but only if that level exists already)

You can type then saveworld() or loadworld() without passing the worldname, plus you can test the gameplay.

GUI

The Mapeditor shows a huge GUI:

You can fold and unfold the menus by clicking on their titles (works for the mainframe as well).

Location bar

The location window.shows the location and orientation of the currently selected object.

Rendering bar

The rendering concerns the display of all visible objects. You can either select a model or a billboard that should be displayed at the given location.

The game is using layer 4 and 5 for displaying its stuff, so the this is a suggestion which layers to use:

  • Layer 0: draw without depthtest (much cheaper than drawing WITH depthtest) and without depthmask background stuff, mostly with additive blendmode
  • Layer 1: draw models that require depthtests
  • Layer 2-3: draw blended stuff that requires depthtests
  • Layer 6-9: Stuff that needs to be drawn after the player objects were drawn (for example foggy blends)

The current release only supports Layer 0-5, but this is going to be extended.

Blendmode: set a blendmode. Additive blendmodes are most simple to use and do not require sorting.

The renderscale and the color can be used to set the displayed size of the object and its modulated color value (won't work for models).

Be aware that you shouldn't place too many billboards on top of each other - drawing large billboards many times have serious impact on the FPS rates on slower machines. Try to keep the number of redrawn pixels (multiple billboards on top of each other) at most at 5, the less the better.

Light

Handles effect lights. You can set a range value and a color. This is quite tricky as these are OpenGL? settings at the moment, maybe this is going to be replaced by vertex-/pixelshader lighting. Be aware that only three effect lights can influence a model at the same time.


Game

At the moment only, the enemytype is used. Set the enemytype to a value in order to spawn a ship there if the player approaches this position.


Trigger

The trigger allows you to load a piece of code if the player approaches this point. Type a string in the filename field in order to load this script from the "scripts/ingame" directory.