Key/Values
So anyone who has done Quake level editing before knows that entities need to have key/values assigned to them in order to customize their appearance and/or behavior. A key/value is a set of strings so something like: “light” ” 400″, would change a light in the game to have an intensity of 400 instead of the default 200.
To replicate this functionality within Cheetah I’ve come up with a hacky scheme where you can add a “Text” modifier to your light object and set the key/value in it’s name field. This modifier is set to not draw in the editor so it is completely harmless except for the memory it consumes (and I’m not caring a lot about that right now). It looks like this in Cheetah’s Object Browser:
So you can see the “style” and “light” key values right there in the Cheetah UI which will be great for editing/reviewing later on when the levels get larger. As an added bonus, the cube object can be collapsed so that you don’t have to look at the key/values if you don’t want to.
BTW, that picture gives you some insight into how I’m handling Quake classnames as well. What I’m doing is adding folders called “worldspawn”, “light”, “info_player_start”, and so on. Every object added inside of those folders gets the classname assigned to it of the top most folder. So those 2 cubes inside of the “light” folder will be exported as individual “light” classes in the Quake MAP file. Kind of cool, I thought!
Here’s a quick shot of what a light looks like in the level right now:
The yellow cubes are lights!