Forum posts

Another question regarding your geometry representation - how do you deal with the fact that none of your faces share common vertices? I mean, implicitly they do, but each face stores its own vertices as far as I can see from your code, which means that translating one vertex of the brush would correspond to translating multiple vertex locations (one for each neighbour face). Also, how do you deal with vertex manipulations possibly causing the vertices of a face to become non-coplanar?

Additionally, in relation to the plugin discussions, the way I was intending Crowbar's toolkit to work was to have everything as a plugin - all tools right down to selection being a module located at runtime, with the possibility of inter-plugin dependencies and of utilising Qt's native support for JS scripts for the less performance-critical plugins. I've also so far implemented a clone of the console from the Source engine, complete with console variables and commands and support for command piping Unix-style, in order to help expose as much of the application to external configuration as possible. I don't know how realistic design choices in this direction would be for Sledge at this stage, considering you've got a fair amount of the core framework done already, but absolutely feel free to re-use any of the console code concepts (albeit physically written in C++) if you feel they'd be helpful.

I'd be interested in learning how you structured the brush objects in order to make it easy to apply geometric operations. The implementation I'd considered was having brushes contain "faces", which contain coplanar triangles, which in turn contain three vertices each. This would make it easy to group triangles by face, aiding in face picking, texture manipulation, etc., but would make things like vertex manipulation very difficult as the neighbours of the triangles being changed by the vertex manipulation would constantly need to have their normals checked to see whether the changing triangle was still coplanar, and if not new faces would need to be added, or the triangle merged with a different face if it became coplanar, and so on.

Someone pointed me to the FPSBanana release of this and I found my way here. The software looks pretty impressive from what I've seen so far (though I need to install HL1 to test it out properly :P).

The main reason I'm posting here is that I'm also in the process of building a custom cross-platform Hammer-style editor with the Qt framework. It's called Crowbar and is something I've been doing bits and pieces on around uni since last summer. From the looks of Sledge I'd guess I'm not quite as proficient a programmer as you are, but I figured it might be useful to let you know that there's another person out there with a similar vision, in case we could co-operate further down the line.

In case you're interested, GitHub page is here and the thread I've been using at TF2Maps.net is here.