LevelEditor Features and Benefits

Table of Contents General LevelEditor Features New Features for LevelEditor 3.7 New Features for LevelEditor 3.6 New Features for LevelEditor 3.5

General LevelEditor Features

Features	Benefits
Design View	The Design View shows the rendered 3D game world. The Design View can show the world from one of seven projections, including perspective, top, bottom, front, back, left, and right. You can also split the Design View into two or four independent views of the world.
Zooming, rotating, and panning using the keyboard and mouse	You can use the mouse and keyboard to manually zoom in and out, rotate, and pan the world. The LevelEditor has several different navigation modes available so that you can select the set of controls that are best for you.
Quick and precise game object placement	The LevelEditor lets you place an object anywhere in space, or snap to a specific point on the grid or on another game object. For example, you can stack a group of boxes on top of each other, lay out a road over a curving hillside, or position one object within another.
Moving, rotating, and scaling objects	Using the LevelEditor, you can move, rotate, and scale objects by dragging manipulators or editing properties in the Property Editor or the Grid Property Editor.
Resource Lister	All of the art resources (game assets) that are available for placement are shown as a detailed file list or as thumbnails. (Thumbnails of supported model types are generated automatically.)
Easy generation of multiple object instances	Prototypes can serve as templates for sets of identical game objects.
Polylines, Curves	You can create, extend, and position polylines and curves. You can edit curves as Bezier curves or Catmull-Rom curves, open or closed.
Proxy Objects	Create cubes, spheres, cones, cylinders, planes, and billboards to represent trigger volumes or to act as placeholders for more complicated objects.
Object property locking	You can lock and unlock object properties to ensure that properties are not unintentionally edited.
File format flexibility for a wide range of file types	An XML programmer can extend the LevelEditor to support any file type, which allows the designer to work with a broad range of files.
Subdocuments for distributing work	Creating subdocuments (sublevels) lets you separate a project into smaller sections and distribute work among team members.
Decluttering features	The LevelEditor can display and hide individual game objects, or use layers to set up ongoing groups of game objects that you can hide and display together. You can also use sublevels to group game objects so that you can hide and display them together.
Cross-team asset management	The LevelEditor refers to assets by paths that are relative to the resource root directory. Thus, the LevelEditor can locate assets regardless of the asset folder's position on a specific computer.
Bookmarks for frequently used views	Bookmarks let you save your favorite views of the world so that you can return to them quickly. When you click a bookmark in the Bookmarks window, the Design View displays the world from the direction and distance saved in the bookmark.
Script support	The LevelEditor supports the IronPython language for scripting. You can use scripts to implement new commands or macros within the LevelEditor.
Fully customizable interface	You can customize the workspace in a variety of ways, including dragging tabs to reorder them, dragging a tab out into the workspace to create a floating window, and dragging palettes to any location you prefer.

New Features for LevelEditor 3.7

See the LevelEditor Roadmap for an extended list of new features.

• Terrain Editor. You can edit terrain features. For details, see the Terrain Editor page.
• Prefab assets. You can save one or more game objects as a prefab asset that you can then reuse in any game level. You can define both prefab assets and prototype assets.
• Visual Studio solution. The solution for the rendering engine is now included in the base LevelEditor solution, and is no longer a standalone solution.

New Features for LevelEditor 3.6

• Prototype assets. You can save one or more game objects as a prototype asset that you can then reuse in any game level. This feature replaces the previous version's Prototypes feature.
• Rendering normals. You can render game object normal vectors to help debug an object's geometry.
• Pick-cycling for overlapped objects. You can easily select objects that overlap or are visually obscured by other objects.
• Extension manipulator. You can extend or stretch an object along a single axis.
• Move pivot point command. You can quickly move an object's pivot point to one of several predefined locations.
• Pick filter. You can apply a simple filter to control which objects can be selected in the Design View.
• Sublevel object placement. You can easily drag objects to the Design View and have them appear within a particular sublevel, rather than at the top main level hierarchy.
• Bezier spline linear. You can define a linear as a Polyline, a CatmullRom spline, or a Bezier spline.

New Features for LevelEditor 3.5

• Support for 64-bit Windows® operating systems.
• Native rendering (the rendering is done in C++ with DirectX® 11).
• Integration with GameEngine through a bridge API.
• Level resources are loaded using a background thread.
• Support for different types of light sources that can be placed anywhere in the level.
• Dynamic shadows to help object placement.
• Can fully or partially use game engine code for rendering.
• Can easily add new shaders.
• Faster level loading.
• Can easily add new file format using native API (Collada DOM, Atgi lib, in-house binary format).
• Realtime render loop (coming soon).