Hello again! One of the main areas I have been focusing development on recently is the Voxel Editor. I was never really happy with the usability of the Voxel Editor, which is one of the reasons I added support for importing from MagicaVoxel early on. I decided it was time to put some more attention on it and have reworked it to be more user-friendly and efficient (with inspiration from some of the popular editors like MagicaVoxel and Qubicle).
The original drawing mode was replaced by three new tools: Attach, Paint, and Erase.
The Attach tool adds new voxels either onto the base grid or adjacent to existing voxels by placing the mouse over the face of an existing voxel and left-clicking. A transparent voxel will indicate the position of the new voxel.
The Paint tool will change the color of existing voxels by left-clicking. Hovering over a voxel will temporarily change the color as a preview.
Finally, the Erase tool, as its name implies, removes existing voxels by left-clicking. A red box will indicate the currently selected voxel that will be deleted.
As seen in the images above, I also added outlines to the voxels. This should make editing and working with the model a bit easier. This is optional, however, and can be toggled on and off using the Toggle Voxel Outlines button on the toolbar if you wish to view the model without the outlines.
Finally, the camera was improved to allow for complete rotation around all six sides of the model. Zooming and moving the camera up and down is possible now as well. I plan to add much more functionality to the Voxel Editor, such as a selection tool for copying and moving specific voxels, but I think this is a good base for going forward. The original method of manually placing voxels using the scroll wheel to adjust depth could become very tedious, so hopefully these new tools will make model creation simpler and more enjoyable!
A nice convenience feature that I added to the Voxel Editor’s color picker is support for persistent palettes. There is now a dropdown in the color picker (as shown in the image below) which can be used to store multiple palettes. When a palette is added or modified it will be automatically saved in the application’s settings file.
Another new feature worth mentioning is the Put Player scripting function. This is used in situations where you want the player to instantly move to another tile within the current map. The function takes two parameters: the unique ID of the tile that the player should be moved to and the direction the player should be facing once moved.
The script above was created for the orange portal in the animation below. It checks to see if the portal’s property of “open” is true, and if so then it puts the player on the tile with an ID of “tile_portal02”, in this case the tile in front of the blue portal on the small island.
In addition to everything above, I also have started adding in some keyboard shortcuts to the Map Editor and Voxel Editor. These keyboard shortcuts are listed in the changelog below.
As usual, thanks for reading and for your interest in my project! 🙂
New Features:
Changes:
Bug Fixes: