I’m adding a new feature into LevelEd for the next release called “layers”. Layers allow you to group entities/brushes together into meaningful groups so you can quickly select or hide them all at once. What’s really interesting is the concept of “Smart Layers” which will automatically include all entities/brushes that meet specific criteria. Here’s a shot of the very early, unfinished layer inspector:
All that is currently supported is a set of LevelEd provided smart layers (smart layers have the purple folder icon beside them). In this case, this is a default set of smart layers that filter off of the entity class name. So, for example, if I toggle off the layer titled “trigger” then all of the trigger entities in the level will hide themselves.
Eventually I want to allow the user to create their own smart layers with basic filtering statements like “all lights with a brightness > 200″ and “all entities with a targetname of ‘blargh’” and things like that.
Of course, aside from smart layers there will be basic layers as well which you will be able to freely add and remove entities from as you see fit.
With every post of this nature, I just want to say “Windows port please!”
Other filters that would be nice to see are by skill setting, and by secret area (if its within the secret area trigger).
The skill settings are a good idea and should be easy to add.
You know the buggest feature I want to add to ToeTag is proper texture locking but I’ll be damned if I can find a good resource for that. All the source code I find seems specific to that editors data structures and assumptions (which is understandable) and I can’t get a return email from Carmack on the topic. It seems like it’s a black art of some kind…
Well Carmack is one person, you might also want to hit up anyone who has worked on Radiant or BSP recently… SPoG comes to mind, LordHavoc might know maybe… By texture lock I assume you mean preserving the texture’s alignment on faces of a brush while moving and rotating that brush in the editor?
Yeah, basically what I would want is a way to convert backwards from 0-1 texture coordinates to the Quake eqivalents (pan/rotate/scale). That would allow me to do so many cool things. I’ll try Lord Havoc or one of the other engine coders I guess, that’s a good suggestion, thanks!