# Preface

This section contains some auxiliary info that most of you won't want to spend the time to read it. However, I feel obliged to include it, at least to anticipate a number of letters with questions like "why you made it? there are a lot around already" and so on.

## A bit of history

The prototype for MazeD was ObjMaker, a 3D editor I wrote about 1993 in Pascal for DOS :-) Since nobody has seen it, I think you don't care about it, but I'm feeling oblige to mention it. It ran in 360x240 and allowed building simple objects (vertices & faces < 2048) with flat, gouraud, phong, texture-mapped, steel (guess what's it? :-) and color-mix shaded faces. It ran very fast even on 386DX/40, not speaking of current Pentiums :-) Here is how it looks like:

## Justification

There are a lot of 3D editors floating around, so why bothering and creating just another one? - you'll ask. The reasons for creating Maze Editor were:

1. Most good 3D editors are not free. I won't say it's a big bargain paying 20 bucks for a good editor, but non-free software always comes without source code, and I hate software without source code. I never seen a program which completely fits my needs, so having the possibility to add a couple of features which makes me feel comfortable is a big win.
2. Most 3D editors are designed for Quake. Since CrystalSpace has its own features (like, for example, mirrors) those editors cannot use all features of CrystalSpace. Besides, you will need some kind of convertor to convert Quake maps which uses BSP into CrystalSpace worlds which uses portals. Any convertor always has its limitations and glitches. So, with a BSP editor you will always get second-hand worlds.
3. All 3D editors I know about are platform-specific. You cannot choose the OS you will run when you know software you need is designed for another OS. MazeD will run (more or less well) on any platform supported by CrystalSpace itself, since it is based on same low-level support as CrystalSpace itself.
4. Like most free and source-code-available software, MazeD have all chances to become the most (I hope) feature-rich editor around. The power of any group of developers simply cannot compare with lots'of'people lurking on the Net :-)

There were as well other reasons, but these are the most important.