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:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.