Re: Standard Brush Format

Alex R. Moon (odin@mdn.com)
Thu, 27 Jun 1996 19:23:49 -0500

Message-Id: <199606280018.TAA28967@decker.mdn.com>
From: "Alex R. Moon" <odin@mdn.com>
To: <quake-dev@gamers.org>
Subject: Re: Standard Brush Format
Date: Thu, 27 Jun 1996 19:23:49 -0500

Matt Houser wrote:
> > Why not save brushes in the .map format?
> >
> Please note that the .map format does not contain only brushes but they
> must be encabsulated within entities...
> But if we follow the same format just kind of ignoring the entity stuff
> then it could work...

Well what we're really talking about here is a kind of super-brush. A single
convex polyhedron is not very exciting and doesn't really deserve an editor
of its own, but editing a small group of brushes into a super-brush in a
dedicated editor which could then be imported into a map editor could be very
useful and is what we're talking about here. What we essentially need then a
format which can group a bunch of brushes together. We could either do this
by have a format which just lists the brushes one by one by their map-style
descriptions for a single super-brush, or we could use the existing concept
of entities (which do an excellent job of grouping brushes already) to do the
grouping for us. Carmack mentioned in one of the info's that he was going to
add a special entity class of "submodel" for brush grouping to the map
format. If we used that for brush-type files, it would have many advantages.
First, the brush files would be syntactically identical to the map files --
the same parsing would work for both. Secondly, using entity-style grouping
would allow for many super-brushes to be stored in a single brush file, so
you could have a "stairs.bsh" file which could contian a normal staircase, a
spiral staircase, and perhaps many other kinds of stair templates in a single
place. Finally, using an entity-based format would allow brush templates to
have default entity classes assigned to them. Say you have a "doors.bsh"
file with various kinds of doors in it with their classnames already set to
the appropriate kind of door class.

-- 
Alex R. Moon       | "If you explain something so clearly that
odin@mdn.com       |  no one can misunderstand, someone will."
amoon@odin.mdn.com |