I''m new to the world of DirectX, but I think I have a pretty good handle on the basics - enough to start some simple game design anyway. Unfortunately, drawing 3D levels and terrains on graph paper, then manually entering in all of the vertices is a real PAIN! Is there any software out there that can help me design levels and terrain, then export everything out to a .x file that I can then use? I''m looking for something to get started, and really don''t want to spend too much money. Any suggestions? TIA!

I''ve been looking for the same thing, but so far nothing has met my needs.

There was Vista Pro 4, but it wouldn''t do anything useful unless you had the registered version. Every other program I looked at would not export the height values, so they were of no use.

In the end, I decided I''ll write my own terrain editor, but that will take some time.




University is a fountain of knowledge, and students go there to drink.

That''s mainly what every game developer does out there. They all write their own level editor. It takes time to do so, but in the end you have an editor that works perfect for your game and you know exactly how everything works.

Sand Hawk

----------------
-Earth is 98% full. Please delete anybody you can.


My Site

yep best just to write your own, it''s a pain, but hey. Perhaps just a simple ''click-to-place-vertex-here'' system and nothing more would do the trick for you.

There are a few editors i''ve heard of, but have never used myself.
Try http://www.qeradiant.com/ for id software''s Q3Radiant. It''s supposed to work well.

Check out terragen (its one of the best free terrain-packages that I''ve used)

http://www.planetside.co.uk/terragen/

There are several plugins available for 3D-model
export but even without I think you can export Lightwave objects.

I tried Terragen but it would always freeze and crash on startup.


University is a fountain of knowledge, and students go there to drink.

If you want terrain why not look into height mapping with grey scale images.

I was searching through flipcode.com the other day and saw a open source editor, Aztec3d. I tried it for a couple of hours and it looked fairly stable. It also has the ability to export 3ds files. From there you can use the conv3ds utility provied in the directX sdk.

Hope this helps.