For years I have been working with various level editors, mostly in the brush-based world. Sometimes, an editor provided a really outstanding feature, but it was always specific to a certain game. For instance, Call of Duty (1) Radiant brought a paint selection feature with it that was really nice to use.
Over time, I became really bothered by software that makes you have to use complicated means of interfacing for the most common tasks, software that makes you have to aim at everything precisely with your mouse pointer. Such traditional interfaces can help the mapper waste a lot of time in their daily work. A slow workflow can cause frustration and a total lack of motivation, so levels are begun but never finished.
Naturally, game companies can usually not dedicate a great amount of time to the development of their editors. As a hobbyist, with my focus being the editor itself, I can. I've had a lot of ideas which all materalized in this piece of software. A lot of people already tested it and gave feedback, and to my surprise their opinion about this was rather positive: Most of them said that this editor is rather intuitive to use and fun to mess around with. This program runs more stable and can cope with a lot more things than your average industrial level editor.
Forget everything you know from other editors, as Microbrush 2 delivers a completely different editing experience...
Features
- Licensing and compatibility
- FREE for non-commercial use
- Runs on Windows XP to Windows 7 and on UNIX with WINE
- This is a portable application: no installation required
- All-3D immersive editing experience
- Fullscreen support
- No toolbars or menus cluttering your view
- Edit where you are, manipulate your world without any limitations
- Turn thought to architecture on the fly, work as fast as your ideas flow in
- For training, there is an easy to use "newbie menu" with help and shortcuts
- Scalability
- Edit tens of thousands of primitives at once, work with hundreds of thousands in your scene
- No matter the count of objects, selection and manipulation of individual ones will always be extremely fast
- Modability - easy Customization of...
- Key configs
- Color schemes
- The font
- Help texts
- And many more things...
- Cutting-edge editing tools
- Face-drag: difficult to explain, very comfortable to use
- Arbitrary clipping and merging: re-organize how your brushes are subdivided
- Nudging, copy-moving, proper visual 3D aids: don't just get the work done - get it done fast
- Paint selection, paint property application
- No matter what you do, the tools will always behave in a consistent manner: there are no special cases
- The unique 3D grid will follow and assist you everywhere you go/fly to
- Universality of your work - Working on your own game engine? Mb2 could become your level editor of choice!
- Binary model format, convert to and from a human-readable XML interchange format
- Generic property system for brush faces and brushes
- Extremely powerful hierarchy system
- Clean file format APIs, specifications and conversion utilities publicly available in source
- A polygonal mesh export is easy to realize with this
- As volumes are associated with the brushes, a voxel conversion, e.g. for fluid dynamics simulation, can be derived too
- Using all these features, an Mb2 scene is extremely expressive, you can leverage that for the most complex applications
- Sample Application: Source engine map support
- Edit VMF worlds swiftly with Mb2, gain even more control via the APIs
- The powerful utilities parse and understand VMF files entirely, there are no nasty obstacles in the way
- Features which there are no fancy editors for in Mb2, such as displacements, are still exposed and manipulatable through the property system
- There is no texture preview in Mb2, but texturing in it with the property system, based on a few "seed faces" created in Hammer, has proven to be extremely efficient
