Icarus Studios News

Once the outdoor terrain and basic life-forms of a virtual world have been created, coming up with visually interesting (and challenging) interior areas for entertaining game-play becomes vitally important for a game designer. Icarus’ Level Editor creates interior environments in our 3D game engine; it allows for quick rendering of optimized performance levels. We can create all sorts of interior spaces and lay them out in a variety of ways. For example, if I want to make a room, I go into Level Editor and drag my mouse around the viewport to create a box, or “brush.” I adjust the height and width of the brush, then I click on the “hollow” button, and the tool literally hollows out the indicated space to create a room. I create another brush in Level Editor, this time the size of a doorway. I click the “subtract” button, and the doorway’s space is cut away from one of the walls in my room. Then, I define and hollow out another room and doorway—this area being a little smaller than the first. I place that tiny room next to the first room, leaving a little bit of a gap between them on the grid. Using my mouse, I can create a hallway between the rooms; now they are connected. I can make brushes of floors, walls, and ceilings, and apply textures to every surface, so each interior area looks unique and realistic.

Level Editor has thousands of choices for different patterns and textures. Depending on the prefix of the level and the needs of the game, you can select multiple options from the compile window’s menu—meaning you can create a room that boasts a marble floor with slated wooden walls, limestone support beams, and a glass-tiled ceiling (if you wanted to go for an Eddie Izzard-meets-Graham Norton sort of look). Once textures are applied to all the surfaces, it’s really easy to use your arrow keys to scale brushes up or down, align them with other architectural elements, and shift them around. Plus, brushes can be manipulated into shapes way more interesting than a mere box. Level Editor has a “clipper” function, which enables designers to make all sorts of things, like, smooth round columns with trapezoid bases that have chamfered edges, for example. Pretty much any architectural style can be simulated for a virtual 3D environment, thanks to Level Editor.

Aside from the architecture, one of the key features that define the mood and challenge of an area’s interior design is the lighting. Level Editor lets designers drag and drop various icons that represent different lighting elements (torches, florescent lights, strobe lights, etc.) anywhere within an interior space. Designers can manually adjust the range and color of the lights, as well as the lengths of the shadows the lighting fixtures cast. Once all the elements within Level Editor meet with the designer’s satisfaction, they can then be loaded into Level Prep.

(Continued in Part 2)

-Kara Stambach, Virtual Worlds Team