After weeks of tuning, the final release of gametools 1.0 is now available. The biggest difference with the release candidate is the addition of a UI layout editor. I’d like to thank particularly Michael Deforge for his work (icons, design).
More info about the projects, and download links on this page
I was asked several times to update GXView to support XNA 3.1. And these days, I’ve a little more time, so I decided to check/update the tools I made and to release a package of those.
Gametools 1.0 should come in a couple of weeks now, and will contain:
More about it soon.
Things are going a bit slower on the project, but I’m glad to say the dev didn’t stop. On the contrary, I could work on the side editors, and really improved the heightmap editor.
Now, aside from the common features (such as raise/lower, add noise/smooth), the editor can compile your map directly into an XNA 3.1 asset (.xnb), generate a TeapotWare compatible world (xml), and run the world player to give you a better idea of what you’re designing. The UI also changed a lot, and it’s now much easier to use the tool.
There are still things I need to fix, but I’m now considering to sell it online. There will be a fully functionnal trial version, and the price should not be higher than 10 euros, so it could be affordable for any indie.
However, I’d like to run a beta before the first official release. If you’re interested, let me know and I’ll send you a version. Of course, every beta-tester will get their own licence key.
In order to create the landscapes of Aerial Heroes, we had to search for heightmap generators. And oddly, there isn’t that many editors freely available out these.
So here is the one I made for the project. It is fairly simple, and will be improved soon, but it can be enough if you’re looking for the same thing.
Here below are the first skyboxes we made for aerial. I used terragen (definitely have to buy myself a license for terragen 2), to generate the 6 textures of a cubemap, and the ATI CubeMapGen tool to create a single DDS cubemap, which should be easier to deal with as a resource than 6 png textures per skybox.
 Plain blue |
 Above clouds |
More about the project soon.