As for many games, ours will also ship with an own editor. It’s not as that trivial, but easy to use after a few minutes of watching whats going on there. We decided to make the map design as easy and intuitive as possible, without BSPs or octrees. We came up with the idea of using puzzle pieces. This is something like.. eh.. ya.. 3D tiles. You can choose between the availble puzzle pieces within the editor and simply drag and drop them into the world. There also is a raster system which perfectly fits the puzzle pieces for easier and symmetric placement.

You can’t imagine what can be done with a small set of pieces! This is our first test set:

And thats what you actually can do with it:

So this kinda rocks!

But I have to admit that ChimpED is only a What-You-See-Is-What-You-Might-Get editor, cause there are no shadows. After a few secs of compiling that babe (grouping meshs, welding vertices, calculating better normals etc.), its ready for the game:

Et voilà, there are shadows! Compare that screenshot with the one of ChimpED. Its hard to difference the heights of the platforms without shadows, isn’t it?

If you wanna try out this editor, feel free to drop me a line

PS: While writing this post, the impossible happened:

At least there is no “Send debugging shit to Microsoft”.. lol