Wanton Hubris

Wrote up some new documentation:

Texture Alignment. How to make your level look pretty.

My First Room. A run through of how to easily create a room with a player and a light.

More to come!

The latest version of the editor just went up. Damn, I love Sparkle. Automatic updates are SO nice.

This version adds brush clipping, which was one of the last remaining large-ish features missing from ToeTag. Check out the documentation on it here:

2-Point Clipping

The last few days have been a real experience for me in terms of optimizations and code improvements. It’s great when a code base gets to this state because now it’s less about adding features and more about making what is there better. And easier to use. And faster.

I’ve been using E2M6 as my benchmark level. It was atrocious 2 days ago but now I can work on it and it’s smooth as silk! Well, not quite that smooth, but pretty darn smooth!

Enjoy the new version!

(if you haven’t downloaded ToeTag yet, click here)

ToeTag

I created a new ToeTag build this morning and the Sparkle framework worked great! I tested it out locally and it told me there was a new version, showed me the change list, and downloaded/installed it without a problem. Free libraries like Sparkle are a true benefit to software developers everywhere!

Documentation

I am writing more and more documentation for ToeTag so if you’re using it and are getting stuck, please check this URL regularly:

Tutorials

I am going to strive to get several written each week so the body of work there should grow rather quickly.

Software

Before I go, let me plug 2 pieces of software.

The first is Sparkle. It’s free, it’s easy to implement, and it works. If you’re writing an application for the Mac, you need to incorporate Sparkle. Period.

The other would be Feeder. It makes the publishing of a Sparkle compatible appCast super simple and it works amazingly well. Feeder is not free but it’s well worth the small fee they want.

I’ve started up a small documentation project for ToeTag. It’s barely started but you can take a look at it now if you like. I’m hoping to get a few tutorials up there each week until a decent body of documentation is done.

ToeTag Documentation

Enjoy!

I’ve got a few bugs to fix in ToeTag that came out of the beta. Nothing major but annoying nonetheless.

I’m also starting to write some documentation and tutorials that should get people over the initial learning hump.

I don’t know why I’m so compelled to do all of this work for the 5 people who will ever actually USE ToeTag for anything but it’s fun.

OK, so I have a beta version ready that comes with no documentation whatsoever but I wanted to start testing this Sparkle framework and see how the automatic updates really work.

If you want to download a version, click here:

ToeTag Beta V:0.1
(edit: forgot to mention this before - ToeTag requires Leopard)

It should start up on any modern Mac and once you tell it where to find your Quake directory, you should be golden. I KNOW there are some bugs in this and the icons and such are all defaults. This is just a stability and “does it actually work on someone else’s machine?” type release.

Since I’m using Sparkle, the theory is that you should be able to easily grab any future versions automatically.

Leave feedback in the comment section if you have any. Which I hope you will. Because without it, well, it’s not much of a beta now is it?

Thanks!

Hooray! That was an ass load of work but I’ve got the editor refactored now to nicely handle mods and standard Quake side by side. On the user side of things, to use a mod you just set a key/value in the worldspawn called “_game“. For example:

You can also see a key called “_cmdline” there. That’s for passing extra commands to Quake when running it.

The menus inside the editor dynamically adapt to whatever mod you’ve chosen. You can have standard Quake maps loaded alongside Quoth maps alongside Team Fortress maps. It all works seamlessly! You can even change the mod name in the middle of an editing session and the editor will adapt correctly. Entities that aren’t supported in the current mod will turn into black boxes but will retain their class names. If you switch back to the old mod, they will jump back to looking correct again.

Here’s a look at the standard entity create menu:

And here’s that same menu when you’ve told the editor you’re using Quoth:

I’m pretty happy with this set up!

Just 2 tasks left until I can feel good about letting beta testers at ToeTag. One is small and one may consume a good chunk of a day. Getting close! In closing, here are some Quoth editing shots:

I’m running into a bit of a wall with supporting mods like Quoth so I’m going to need to do some refactoring here. It won’t be exciting enough to post about as it happens so the updates will slow down here for the next few days (or more or less, depending how it goes).

See you on the other side!