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Overview of Purpose: T.Ed is a complete solution for making huge outdoor worlds:The technique behind designing and using terrain objects can be a minefield of choices, as there are so many different ways of doing it! T.Ed is designed primarily for games programmers and 3D artists to make those choices easier. There are 2 main categories regarding terrains in games, 'Mesh' and 'Dynamic/LOD'. T.Ed can help in the development of both! T,Ed is a dedicated terrain tool to allow the creation of small to large mesh landscapes, either as a series of blocks, or as a single terrain. It allows for superb blended textures either by using vertex alpha or by rendering a 'Supertexture' for each terrain block. T.Ed Can be used as a stand alone world editor or as a wraparound for your favorite level creation software: On it's own, it can now process props like buildings, trees, bridges and even 3d sprites or simple animated meshes like swaying trees! Using the supplied code (darkbasic and blitzbasic formats) you can reload everything from the suns angle to the script on a prop, (ie the key number required to open a door!) If using as a wraparound, you can load in a building/level from say.. CS4, self lightmapped with it's own properties, place it on the terrain, lightmap it to the terrain, and then put trees around it etc. The best thing about the way T.Ed uses the meshes means you can keep the building/level's internal properties all the way to your game world. Also, because ted's save file simply references the mesh, any updates to the original mesh will flow through, without the need for re importing into TED! Through an easy to use and learn interface, featuring mouse look and game walk controls, you will be walking around your virtual lanscape in minutes. The software and exports also take into account the problems of using entity/texture alpha with vertex alpha, and has features designed in to eliminate those dreaded problems.
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