One of the most annoying things about writing my own engine was the difficulty in creating new levels for it, which had me thinking about a way to break the operations used in building levels for a large subset of current games down into primitive operations that can be used to build a versatile level editor, in the same way that we broke modeling down into operations that gave us apps like Maya, 3DSMax, etc.

I want to share my thoughts so far and get some feedback from a variety of people working in different scenarios. My editor, which goes by the codename Fiat Lux for now, is aimed at building 3D environments of the sort seen in Uncharted, God of War, Gears of War, etc. Right now I'm focusing on static mesh based environments and not heightmaps, though I definitely plan to support them eventually.

Right now I have Collada / Blender support, letting levels be created in a DCC package and then directly imported into Fiat Lux to add things like entities (enemies, triggers, etc), scripts and the like.

How would you ideally want it to work? Once you've imported your 3D level's mesh from your DCC app, what tasks do you want to do to get to the final output you want?

And as for file formats I plan to have an export API using Lua - thoughts?

I already have a basic version working and I'd love to hear other people's thoughts before I focus on one direction or the other for development.

I already have a basic version working and I'd love to hear other people's thoughts before I focus on one direction or the other for development.

Well, a good editor is a fulltime job. Why not use blender as editor ? You can assign game properties to entities/models and write a little export script to export these additional data.

This way you save a lot of time.

Isn't that kind of like editing word-processing documents in Photoshop?

Isn't that kind of like editing word-processing documents in Photoshop?

Not really - DCC applications are generally designed with this usage in mind.

Blender in particular allows you to attach arbitrary data to any node, and since it's fully Python-scriptable, you can make a very streamlined editing experience (well, streamlined by Blender UI standards, at any rate).

What if I wanted to do something that's streamlined by general streamlined standards?..

Blender in particular allows you to attach arbitrary data to any node, and since it's fully Python-scriptable, you can make a very streamlined editing experience (well, streamlined by Blender UI standards, at any rate).

So the custom property collada export now works? That would save me quite some trouble...

So the custom property collada export now works? That would save me quite some trouble...

Never tried it, and I would guess not - the Collada exporter was a complete mess last time I tried to use it.

However, it only took me a day to roll a very nice custom exporter script.

Then I suppose I should look into this... thank you very much.

a cool way to make a map is to make a library of pieces, then fit them together however you like, thats the direction im going with my editor, itll output to a triangle mesh on export.