All the popular titles in the market have their own 3D World Editors. In research I''ve done, people have talked about using these editors to build a world and then export them through the interface. "Extracting" then running yet another program to "filter" out what they want, because these World Editors are (of course) catered to their design with plugs for objects, triggers and the like. I been soaking up a lot about coding in OpenGL, actually put together some decent fun "demo" stuff, tweaking and making it do more than what the tutorials talk about. Simple animation stuff, nothing to the complexity involving moving through a world though. My next step forward in the chain of evolution for me is to create a 3D World and build a client engine to traverse it. As I take small leaps forward, my original world would consist of a small room with maybe a hallway leading to another room. Once that simple goal is reached, then maybe add lighting elements into it. Once that piece appears to work, then considered opening a portal to an "outdoor" world with a sky and a few trees, maybe some hills. Just small steps for myself and I stay happy. =) Taking all these design concepts into mind, I''d assume an editor of this magnitude would become quite complex right away. I''m just looking for general feedback on this whole design phase, how those who are experienced would approach it, what you would take into consideration, and what methods I might want to incorporate into the engine. I''m rather new to all this, so I''m still digging up a lot of information, but I''m making progress. Gravity is something else to be considered, but I''ll cross that bridge when I get to it. =) I don''t envision that being a real hard task to overcome though. I''ve read that if you are moving "Indoors" you want to use a specific type of Engine design, whilst if you were to move "outdoors" you would want to move into a different type of Engine design due to the large open spaces and distance projections and calculations. I suppose Unreal Tournament is a good example of this. Can anyone relate any articles, web sites, books or general advice on this topic of a 3d World Editor? There hasn''t been much that I''ve run across in the vast reading I''ve already done on the internet. Is it easier to use an existing editor like Unreal, World Builder, or QERadiant.. then export and filter what you need.. or is it worth the effort to incorporate your own editor? My only problem using this method are the copyrights (if any) involved in incorporating the same design schematic. While I can read data structures and draw images with textures accordingly, the only issue I see up front would be the manipulation of coordinates within an editor. Zooming in and out would be rather simple.. you just plot the coordinates further away or closer, but grabbing "specific" vertices, moving them around and associating textures with such elements.. and then there are other elements such as lighting and other objects of standard interface designs, triggers, etc. Oops.. better stop. =) I know there are a few books coming out, I''ll probably grab those for reading.. but they are generally out-dated by the time they get to the publisher. Too much knowledge isn''t a bad thing though. I read they re-tuned the engine for the release of Unreal Tournament. Can anyone explain what they changed and what type of technology they used for that engine? I probably ask for too much knowledge to be composed in one reply, but anything you care to comment on would help further my knowledge. I''m kind of stopped in my progression because I don''t know where to begin for working with a "World" of sorts. I''d be content with an "Indoor" world but I would eventually like to open up the transition to an "Outdoor" world as well. Cheers, Sleepy (as always!)

Oops.. buggy message board code! Never received notification of posted message, it just errored out with an ODBC time-out error. =)

u might wanna look at making the world in a 3d modelling program , 3dmax, blender etc and just exporting the data as a text file and parse just the file