Paul's Comments

I have mentioned here about some of the literally "user hostile" applications dealing with 3-D worlds. All of the world systems created after Duke Nukem have tended to be extremely hard to use. This includes all of the versions of Half-Life and any of the subsequent sequels and offshoots (Half-Life 2, Team Fortress 2, Half-Life 2 Episode One and Two, Portal). Since Quake 3 supposedly uses the same editing system, I can presume it is also as difficult to use.

And I have tried a program called Blender, which is supposedly both a 3D modeling system and a game engine for developing 3-D world systems. From what I've seen from trying the tutorials, the learning curve for Blender is not steep; it is mountainous!

However, there are glimpses of hope. Based on the descriptions and the screen shots, I paid $9.95 for an add-in to Half Life 2 called "Garry's Mod" which allows you to play with the physics engine in Half Life 2 or any of the other offshoot programs. And how you access the object editor is, you press and hold a key, and a pop-up screen shows up. You click on whatever item you want and it adds it to the map. You can then reposition the item and change its location or orientation. You select what you want to do, then you can just "point and click" to act upon it.

And it turns out, just from playing with the program for perhaps an hour, that it's even better than I hoped it would be. Want to create a cute little Antlion that will viciously attack you and try to destroy you? Activate the selector screen, use the mouse to select what you want, click on it and Boom! It's now right there on screen, ready to try to attack you (unless you were smart enough to put something between it and you, like a barrier).

This is the type of capability that these so-called 3-D modeling and world construction systems should offer. I can actually see the kind of power that is available with a tool such as this. It also indicates something interesting: it took a third-party to develop a decent tool to be able to do things with respect to editing a 3-D world without having a doctorate in brain surgery.

I mean, yes, I understand that they provide significant capacity and capability and require more specifications and options in order to exercise that power. But seriously, why is it so hard to do things?

Let's say I want to create a room. I'll skip over DOOM, now it is considered old technology compared to what is being done with 3-D world systems today, but even though the third-party editor (DEU) for it did not provide visualizing of maps, it was trivial to build rooms in that system.

In the Build editor for Duke Nukem 3D, you just mark four (or 3, if you are willing to settle for a triangular room) vertices (or more, if you want a non-rectangular room), connect them together simply by dragging the mouse where you want it and then hit the visual "switch" key and you're presented with a rectangular (or triangular) room of whatever size you created. (The BUILD editor program for Duke Nukem 3D was written for DOS so it didn't support doing 2-D and 3-D views at the same time). Using the Build Editor, you can point at the ceiling or floor and move it up or down. And you can change the appearance of the walls from the rather ugly gray brick into something more attractive.

So now you have a room that can either be the outside container (e.g. a "skybox" which holds the entire world together), or an internal/external "room" connected to another room. And you can do things like put holes in the room (if you wanted, say, the appearance of a post, or you wanted the room to be redesigned, say, as a set of corridors around an inaccessible room) or subdivide a room because you want a different height floor and/or ceiling in that section.

I think that with these 3-D world games, the ability for users to create their own worlds is considered secondary to the capability of building the game that they are selling in the first place. So the tools are written by programmers for programmers, and are "razor sharp and dangerous" such as the way the tools on Unix/Linux are often exceptionally dangerous and have no safety capability.

But actually, they're not really "razor sharp and dangerous" as much as they are exceptionally hard to use and are miserable in terms of being able to figure things out. Again, I understand that for extremely powerful features, you need powerful tools. But for the simple parts of doing things, why aren't there simple ways to do them? How hard is it to be able to specify that I want to put in a room, or I want to connect two rooms together, or other simple things. This is the first and most basic thing you would do in building a 3-D world, design the landscape. Later you'd add things like moving equipment^[1], or NPCs^[2], goodies^[3], or even things like setting wall and floor textures. Those can be done later and possibly using the harder parts of these tools.

But what really needs to be available is a simple method of being able to do the simple parts of the task to be accomplished. The "Garry's Mod" add-in for Half-Life 2 has shown what is possible. More things like this are what should be available if it is intended to be able to make 3-D worlds without needing to have a glacially slow learning process (and glacially steep learning curve.)

My point in writing this article was more toward highly praising this "Garry's Mod" program than doing another column in which I again bash the poor quality tools for creating 3-D worlds (and 3-D models, in the case of Blender).

^[1] Moving equipment would include personal transport or controlled or scripted transport such as subways. In some 3-D worlds they support a personal transport like a car or a boat, you can basically drive or move it anywhere it can fit, it's basically an extension to the player and allows them to move faster than "on foot" or allows the player to avoid deadly or hazardous surfaces. Scripted transport like a subway or monorail requires either you set up a path that the transport can use (a visible one such as a rail, or an invisible one such as a series of "breadcrumbs" or markers telling the monorail where to go).
^[2] An "NPC" is a non-player character, depending on how you define it, includes any allies of the player, enemies of the player, or both allies and enemies. Allies are AI (game elements) that assist the character or fight enemies of the player. Enemies fight the player and allies, if any. Some would define NPCs to only include allies, calling enemies just that. I presume to use NPC to refer to both. Duke Nukem and DOOM I and II, for example, only have enemy NPCs, the player has no one to help them that isn't the player (or another human player if playing in multiplayer cooperative mode.)
^[3] "Goodies" are the supplies the user consumes; health packs, weapons, ammo, etc.