DESEDIT

Welcome to the DesEdit on-line manual.



The View in DesEdit

In DesEdit, you see the level you are editing through a camera. This camera has a particular location and orientation in the world. The camera rides on an invisible cylinder, and you can rotate the camera around the surface of the cylinder. The point at the center of the cylinder is referred to as the camera cylinder origin. The distance the camera is from that point is the camera cylinder radius. These four variables (location, orientation, origin, & radius) defined not only where the camera is, but how it moves when the view is "scrolled". The combination of these four variables will be referred to as the camera position from now on.

There are three basic ways to move the camera: by scrolling around the cylinder surface using right-button drag with the mouse; by moving the cylinder origin up, down, in, out, left, and right using entries in the Camera -> Move submenu (or their key equivalents); and by zooming the camera in or out.

Additionally, you move the camera cylinder origin to the center of whatever's selected by pressing the 'Center' button. The camera will maintain its orientation and current cylinder radius, but the cylinder origin will move to the average point of all the selected cubes or verticies. This is very useful -- if you want to work on a specific cube, just get it in sight, select it, press 'Center', and you can now rotate the camera around that cube.

A pair of additional useful features are named camera save points, and the ability to 'push' and 'pop' the camera position. On the toolbar you can see a drop-down list. This contains the named camera save points. At any time, you can go into Camera -> Save and add the current camera position to the list, giving it an appropriate label. Selecting an entry from this list will immediately put the camera in the same position as when the entry was added to the list.

You can also, at any time, 'push' the camera position onto a stack. You can then freely move the camera about, doing whatever you want. When you 'pop' the camera position, it moves back to the position it was in when you pushed it.

The camera also has a number of different rendering modes, found under the Camera -> Render submenu. These modes include wireframe, solid, and depth shaded. Each has strengths and weaknesses, and you can switch back and forth at any time. The current render mode has no effect on what operations are available.

The default setting, solid, is probably the most useful. It gives you a very good feel for the structure of the mine, and how cubes, hallways, and rooms are related. Wireframe is sometimes useful for close-up work, where you need to see all the verticies in a cube, or when the thing you need to get at is behind something else. Depth shaded looks really cool (especially if you have 16 bit color), and is good for static views of the level (it's a lot slower than flat-shaded...)

Finally, you can choose to display or hide the orientation of the selected cubes with the Camera -> View submenu. We'll get into cube orientation in a later section.

Next Section: The World Coordinate System in DesEdit.