I have been playing around with Away3D 4.0 and gotten the basics down, and i thought i could be fun a make a game, however one snag i have run into is how to best approach level/map construction

i see 2 ways to approach it right now, either i export a entire scene somehow from blender, or i roll my own editor in flash and then save each level as a JSON file that references meshes, bitmaps, etc

I have started to create a editor in flex for the easy interfaces, so far i am going for these features:

spawn 3D objects, that i can assign behavior-class, material, animations to
editable height-map

my question is, what do you think is the best approach to making levels?

I guess it depends on the size of the level and the style of the graphics.
If you could use “3D tiles”, you could probably adapt one of the [url=http://www.emanueleferonato.com/2010/02/23/11-flash-isometric-engines-you-can-use-in-your-games/] many Isometric
engines[/url] out there to handle all the game logic, and use it to power a 3D view with perspective.

Performance wise, having the level as one big mesh might actually be an advantage (read this article whatever you decide), on the other hand employing some smart object culling would be better in semi-infinite worlds. Another consideration is, how similar are the levels? How many resources can be re-used? It’s no fun to have to wait for a new level to load every 5 minutes.

I know that’s more questions than answers, and I admit I haven’t had chance to cut my teeth on a large Flash 3D game yet. Personally I would develop the level editor together with the game. Seemed to work well for Minecraft…

I look forward to seeing what you come up with

Cheers!

Hey sebbdk

with blender, the best thing to use is the awd exporter which you can access from here:

http://code.google.com/p/awd/

it is a python lib but has some core c++ libs that you have to compile for your own system, although we are planning to simplify the distributable files soon. you can use awd to export geometry and animation, but also custom attributes that you set on 3d objects from within a blender scene. we should be posting more about the best way to do this for a game level in the next few weeks, otherwise you should get in contact with Richard Olsson if you have questions that can’t wait

Rob

@theMightyAtom,
thanks for the links, it’s good reading, you are right when you asume im going for a isometric ish top down look.
Tho i think i will roll my own editor, because i can see the graphics as it is gonne apear ingame

As for level size, im using the assetlibrary, and alot of the media will be reused between each level.

So depending on how much it ends up in memory i might just let it stay in the library and then do a clean up once in a while

@Rob Bateman,
Year awd might be it, so far i have been using md5 format, but i have been reading about awd briefly and also i noticed there’s second version coming up still under developement last i checked the git repo
The extra data and functionality is gonne come in handy

Il post back with my result as soon as i have something worth showing

In the game I’m working on, we’re using blocks that are used in every level. As such I think it makes sense to load these blocks once. Although some blocks are only used in later levels which the player may not play and as such we’re downloading too much content which influences the loading time of course.

We’re using 3DS Max to create the levels. I will then write a script to export the level data which I load into Flash and then start building the level.

“we should be posting more about the best way to do this for a game level in the next few weeks”
Looking forward to this!

—Apprentice