Artemis Chronicle Tools
During the first semester of working on NitroX and Artemis Chronicle, our design and content pipeline was very slow. Simple things like creating a level and placing a box were arduous tasks. Placing an item involved flying the camera around the level, writing down it’s rough coordinates, hard coding the coordinates, and then tweak these values until the box is in the desired position. (Thankfully, we were using C# which pretty much eliminated any compile time. Doing this in C++ would have been impossible).
This created a situation where we were unable to prototype levels quickly, and time that could be better used somewhere else was being wasted.
Because of this, I devoted the first few weeks of the second semester to full-time tool development. Two of the more useful tools created are described below. These tools, once created, were continuously used and refined throughout the entire life of the project.
Level Editor:
Artemis Chronicle and the NitroX engine have a completely integrated level editor. The editor allows 3D navigation through the world (using Maya camera controls), object placement (translation, rotation, scale), object property exposure (including physics volumes), trigger volumes (used for scripted events), and interactive camera sequencing (allows us to create cut-scenes and cinematics in a point-and-click fashion instead of in code).
The editor runs on Windows and is written in C#, allowing for close integration into the XNA content pipeline. The editor data is serialized out to an XML format (which is later compressed for application deployment), sent through the content pipeline, and imported directly into the NitroX engine for use on both Windows and Xbox 360.
Mesh Viewer:
The Mesh Viewer is a tool that lets our artists quickly preview their work before sending it off to be integrated into the latest build of the game. As anyone who’s used the FBX exporter knows, exporting from Maya does not always go smoothly, so this tool allows the artist to catch any errors early, thus saving time for the entire team.
Animations can be chained together to create sequences, and then previewed in a real-time manner. Playback speed, blending parameters, and looping can also be adjusted via the user interface.
