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Getting Started
By: Sandcrawler| Bitmap Converter |
1. A quick look at the diferences between Polygon, and Voxel
2. Voxed
3. Slab6
4. bildramer's Bitmap Converter
AND
5. PySpades Map Editor
1. This tutorial is an introduction to modding, and mapping for Ace of Spades. While it won't answer any questions, it should help you understand the concepts and tools. Ace of Spades runs on Ken Silverman's Voxlap Engine, this engine differs from popular engine like Source, Unreal Engine, and even Minecraft in the fact that the models and world is made up of voxels instead of polygons.
A polygon is is a flat plane with at least three straight edges, more polygons can be added to make a surface look smoother.
A Voxel is a volumetric Pixel, basically a block or a 3D square, they can also be added or subtracted to make a surface smoother or more jagged.
One of the biggest differences is the lack of textures in a voxel based game, where polygon games are overran by textures. In Ace of Spades you create the textures by coloring the Voxels.
2. Now lets move onto Voxed. If you have Ace of Spades installed, then you should have Voxed installed. It can be found inside of the Ace of Spades folder (default location: C:\Ace of Spades) Go ahead and run the program and you should get a screen like this:
Voxed is the Editor for Voxlap, and is were you can place objects, change colors, and a host of other features you'd expect a map editor to have.
3. Slab6 is the modelling program to support Voxlap, you will have to download it from Ken Silverman's page. Just unzip the package to a location of your choosing. Now run the program and you should see a screen like this:
This is were you can model trees, or other objects to place into your world. You can also create weapons and other tools that are held by the player.
4. bildramer's Bitmap Converter is a community created commandline tool, that is extremely helpful. You can download it from here, once downloaded just unzip to a location of your choosing. The tool is commandline only, so you will need to pass it parameters for it to do anything. We will be going over the usage of this tool in the next tutorial. But in a nutshell you pass it a bitmap (colors) and a heightmap (Grayscale) and it will generate the terrain for you.
5. PySpades Map Editor is a community created tool that can be download on the PySpades website. You can use it to create a map from scratch, or for touchups on a map you generated with the Bitmap Converter.
That's all for this tutorial, in the next one we will create our first map using bildramer's Bitmap Converter, and just a tiny bit of Voxed.
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