Dungeon Builder 1.0 and OpenZone 4.1

[Windcatcher]

Here are a couple more goodies for you zone-builders:

Dungeon Builder 1.0

I've been working on this program for just over a month, and development progressed far more quickly than I had anticipated. It is a program designed to fill in one of OpenZone's major weaknesses: Dungeon Builder, as its name imples, is specifically designed to help you create dungeon zones.

Dungeon Builder is meant to be used in conjunction with OpenZone (though it technically isn't tied to EQ in particular). The idea is to use Dungeon Builder to assemble dungeon rooms and corridors, export the dungeon to a 3D Studio Max (.3DS) file, and then import that file with OpenZone 4.1. Then you should use OpenZone to add the finishing touches to your dungeon.

I've done my best to make Dungeon Builder easy to learn and use, and I'm pretty confident that you'll find that building dungeons is *dead easy* with this program. The central concept in Dungeon Builder is "drag-and-snap": you drop in corridors and rooms and drag their handles until they snap together. Dungeon Builder is smart enough to maintain connections, so, for instance, if you drag a corridor until it snaps against a room then moving the room will also move the end of the corridor so they stay connected.

Here's a quick list of features in Dungeon Builder:
- ten levels of undo and redo
- tip-of-the-day
- many different kinds of handles for manipulating rooms and corridors, and the ability to turn any of them on or off
- isometric view of your dungeon with view switchable between looking northwest and looking northeast
- overview of your entire dungeon that is visible at all times. You can click on it to instantly change the area you're working on
- ability to set all ceiling, wall, and floor textures for the entire dungeon all at once
- "dungeon walkthrough" mode where you can walk through your dungeon and change the texture of any ceiling, wall, or floor you're facing. Walkthrough mode knows about collisions and won't let you walk through walls
- automatic "cutting out" of any parts of walls where you've made objects intersect.
- automatically adds landings where corridors ascend or descend to avoid "twisting" of ceilings and floors
- displayed grid with optional snap-to-grid
- online help with context-sensitive help for sub-windows. USE THE ONLINE HELP!!!

I'm really anxious to get some feedback on this, so I'd really appreciate it if people could try it out and post here to let me know what you think. The program is pretty mature at this point, but there's always room for improvement, of course.

OpenZone 4.1

This is another bugfix release and is necessary for those of you who want to use Dungeon Builder to make dungeon zones. It has further improvements to the .3DS import code, as well as some minor cosmetic improvements to the main menu. Anyone who is making zones in other 3D tools should also download this version, since it is the first version that will make use of your texture coordinates.


Enjoy,

WC