Worldcraft 2.0 represents the largest jump in feature enhancements and additions to date. Below are a list of the new things along with links to more information about them.
There are a few new features on the toolbars.
• (MapTools) the Decal tool allows you to take advantage of Half-life's decal feature, which allows you to lay an image ontop of a texture.
• (MapTools) the Path tool lets you easily and quickly create paths for objects and monsters to follow.
• (MapTools) the Vertex tool has been enhanced; it now allows you to merge vertices by dragging one ontop of another.
• (MapOperations) the Ignore Groups button allows you to edit an object independant of whatever group it might be a part of. This is useful if you want to edit a single piece of a multi-brush entity, or if you'd rather not ungroup a set of structural brushes to work on a single part of it.
• (MapOperations) the Cordoning tools allow you to cordon off an area of your map and do quick test compiling without having to wait for the whole level to compile.
• (MapViews) a set of buttons control the loading and saving of independant window configurations. Independant window configurations allow you to customize the views of worldcraft to your liking.
The Texture Application mode (Face Properties dialog) has been enhanced with several new features. A smooth groups feature allows you to specify an angle at which qrad will consider an object "rounded" and will smooth the lighting accordingly. Any angles at or under the value specified will be smoothed. The material feature shows what material type the currently selected texture is. Material type will effect sounds made directly on the surface of a brush with that texture (footsteps, bullet ricochets, etc). Last, the Quake II surface parameters are available to you, letting you control things like surface lighting and detail brushes.
There are several new options available to you through the menus as well.
• (File) export to dxf - this allows you to export a 3D scene to 3DS format to create a scripted sequence
• (Map) entity report - this can be used to manage your entities and do quick searches for specific entities, providing an easy alternative to searching through your map manually.
• (Map) load/unload pointfile - this lets you load a leak file generated by the compile tools directly into Worldcraft. A thick red line will lead you directly to the source of the leak.
• (View) hide paths - this acts much like the hide items command. It will hide any path made with the Path map tool.
• (Tools) options - the options dialogs have almost all been modified in some way. As well, there are two new dialogs - game configurations and build programs.
• general
• 2D views
• 3D views
• textures
The game configurations dialog contains all the information for setuping up multiple game configurations. This lets you specify what entity set and map format to use, as well as palette and default entity information.
The build programs dialog allows you to specify which compile tools to use with which game configuration. As well, all values entered here are easily referenced in the expert compile dialog by a series of static variables ($game_exe, $bsp_exe, etc).
The compile tools included for Half-life are somewhat different than previous games, but operate in a very similiar manner. The tools are as follows:
You should say that qcsg analyzes all the geometry, textures, and entities in your map. qbsp2 divides that map up into visible areas, and then vis determines more rigorously which polygons are visible and which ones aren't.
You can invent a word "visable", meaning "a level which can be vised" as opposed to "visible", "that which can be seen"
You should explain that ahead of time so people don't think it's a typo
• QCSG analyzes all the geometry, textures, and entities in your map.
• QBSP2 divides that map up into visable areas.
• VIS determines more rigorously which polygons are visible and which ones aren't.
• QRAD performs all the lighting calculations. This can easily take as long as VIS, depending on the complexity of the lighting calculations it must perform.