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Release Notes
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www.UnderwareDesign.Com



What Is Visible Worlds ??
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Visible Worlds is an alternative Portal / Visibility pre calculation compiler, designed for use with a various game development tools like Dark Basic, Dark Basic Pro and Blitz Basic 3D.

The process of building a portal for your own world is done through a custom ASCII MAP format. This file may have been created from by your level editing package, or by you. Once you've created your world and VW Map file representing this world, you can easily compile the object visibility for your game.

Rather than try and replace the popular BSP format, Visible Worlds acts as an alternative. By simplifying the rules of world creation, this makes producing legal worlds much simpler for users and designers alike, while still gaining a solid performance boost across the board. There are no limits on the geometry than can be used, as the compiler only considers regions and not polygons, so your levels can be made of anything.


The end result is that you can produce faster, more complex scene's for your games/demos, with very minimal effort from you.


That's what it's all about ! Better Games the easy way




Supported Features (V1.05):
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* Static + Rotated boxes.

* Solid + Transparent + None Object related (blocking visibility) spatial regions

* Pre-calced object L.O.D (levels of Detail)

* Dynamic Repositioning (object caches)

* Dynamic Repositioning With Precalced L.O.D(object caches)

* Visibility Importance Culling

* Way Point Map Generation

* Terrain Support (height maps)

* Portal Compression

* Compiler Features Inbuilt Preview For Easy Validation.

* Package comes with Source Libraries for both developers to create
VWMap files and users to Load compiled portals with ease.



Support:
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Anybody developing a World Editors ( DB / Dbpro / Blitz Basic) or VWMap conversion/export functions for popular modelers/world editors, should contact me.

Kohai is in the final stages of his UWmax scene exporter package. This will hopefully be release later this coming week.




Download:
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Visible Worlds

edit: very old link removed

More General Info


For starters, the GUI works a little differently than most. To access the function menus, hold use the right button when hovering over the main window title bar. Pretty much everything else works as per any windows emulation.. There are some key board short cuts.. "ESC" is generally a quit out of operation option...

Visible Worlds doesn't support maps (aka plane base geometry such as BSP compilers) files, rather it use a custom VWmap format designed for use with DB/DBP object system. So it's designed to optimize object level usage, rather than polygon level usage.

So worlds are built from components objects / blocks if you will, of objects. So it's similar to using static objects to build your worlds. The benefit is that the format includes visibility and various added bonus effects like object caches. So we can pre-compute this information and thus speed up our games rendering.. Well hopefully

Sadly though at this very moment there are NO World Editing tools that export VWmap files that I know of at least, so users would have to either incorporate an export routine into their own world editing tools (since most of us are using custom tools anyway) or write a converter for an existing tool..

Kohai is writing a Max scene exporter for it at this very minute. Also, If anybody has an example loader from a world editor they use (publicly available one) i'd be more than happy to write some snippets to build VWmaps from these formats (I'd need some level examples too) to make the whole process easier on you guys..


www.UnderwareDesign.Com

Visible Worlds - 3D Map Editor Exporter V0.01
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Note: This code is loosely based on the 3D Map Editor load function By: Cordier frédéric (Freddix)




So What does this do ?:
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This simple function kit is designed for use with Freddix13's 3DMapEditor V2.30 package and Visible Worlds V1.05 or above. It's purpose is to create compatible Visible Worlds MAP files (VWMAP) from the created world in 3DMapEditor. These maps can then be compiled into portals, using the Visible Worlds package.


After compiling a portal for your world, you'll be able to make your game/demo run faster, as it will only render objects/part of the world that can be seen. If your familar with BSP systems basically the same advantage as BSP. Expect you can use it with DARK BASIC classic and Dark Basic Pro


This function is compatible with 3DMapEditor V2.30. At the moment it only supports your Worlds OBJECTS. So it won't export and terrain/ matrix's into VWMAP map format as yet. But it's start.. Your welcome to add to it if you like !


Visible Worlds Home Page




www.UnderwareDesign.Com