User manual GAMES PC THE 3D GAMEMAKER

[. . . ] GETTING STARTED THE MAIN INTERFACE CREATING YOUR FIRST GAME GENERAL PROPERTIES ADDING YOUR OWN SOUNDS AND GRAPHICS SCENE PROPERTIES THE PLACEMENT EDITOR MAKING YOUR OWN SCENES PLAYER PROPERTIES PLAYER WEAPON PROPERTIES ENEMY PROPERTIES ENEMY FLAK PROPERTIES OBSTACLE PROPERTIES BOSS PROPERTIES ITEM PROPERTIES GLOBAL GAME SETTINGS UPDATING VIA THE INTERNET IMPORTING 3D MODELS CREDITS 2 4 8 19 21 26 29 33 37 41 43 47 49 52 54 57 62 64 66 System Requirements Minimum Spec Processor DirectX Version Ram CD-ROM Drive Graphics Card Sound Card 400 MHz Pentium II 7. 0a 64 MB of RAM 4x Speed CD-ROM Direct X compatible 3D Accelerator required (8MB+) Direct X compatible Sound Card Operating System Windows 95/98/2000/ME Recommended Spec 600 MHz Pentium III Windows 95/98/2000/ME 8. 0a 128 MB of RAM 16x Speed CD-ROM 600 MB of hard disk space Direct X compatible 3D Accelerator required (16MB+) Direct X compatible Sound Card Hard Drive Space 600 MB of hard disk space 1 1. GETTING STARTED INSTALL INSTRUCTIONS · After turning on your computer, place The 3D Gamemaker CD into your CD-Rom drive. This means that by putting the CD into the drive for the first time, the installation program should start automatically. · If the AutoPlay feature does not work when you put the CD into the drive, do the following: · Double-click your "My Computer" desktop icon · In the window that opens, double-click your CD-ROM drive (it is usually the D: drive) · In the list that appears, find the file called setup. exe and double-click it. [. . . ] Also notice that the 3D cursor changes colour to reflect the type of object being placed. In this picture you can see an 8x5 grid. Each square of the grid represents an area of the scene and can be filled with a tile of your choice. Please note that one grid square is actually larger than you first might think. Within one square you could fit a couple of objects and enemies, so the default layout shown would actually give you a healthy sized playing area. There are 6 tiles with which you can build your scene, however most of the tiles can also be rotated (in 90 degree steps) providing a total of 14 different combinations. The colour of the tile dictates from which type of scene you are working. At the top of the screen you will notice the other category types (horror, war, space, etc) each with their own colour. You can mix and match as many of these as you like when building your scene. This means it's perfectly possible to have a jungle-style walkway leading out into an open "cartoon" area. The top right corner of the screen provides you with the current tile and the scene size (in this case 8x5). Finally the bottom three buttons let you view your scene in 3D mode, OK (save the scene) or Cancel back to the main editor. At any time you can press the F1 key to display the integrated help screen. 32 33 BUILDING A SCENE Use the mouse and click on a tile to select it. Pressing the left mouse button with a tile selected anywhere on the grid will place that tile. If you then click the left mouse button a second time it will place the same tile again, but it will automatically rotate it for you by 90 degrees. You can continue this process until the tile is the correct way around. However you don't have to use this method to rotate a tile, although useful it's quite slow work if you need to place a lot of "rotated" tiles. Instead after selecting the tile you can press the < and > keys on your keyboard to rotate the tile in the desired direction. This change remains no matter how many tiles (of that type) you wish to place. For example if you wished to create a scene with a road running horizontally across the grid, you'd select the 2nd tile from the top and press the > key to rotate it. With some clever rotation and planning you could easily build a scene such as the following. In this scene you can see we've used the "Driving" scene tiles to create a city block style layout: MODIFYING THE SCENE DIMENSIONS Although you begin with an 8x5 scene you are not restricted to this. By holding down the SHIFT key and pressing the cursor keys you can modify the size of the scene both horizontally and vertically. [. . . ] IMPORTING 3D MODELS HOW TO USE YOUR OWN 3D MODELS This section is for advanced users only. Although the models that come with The 3D Gamemaker are great, and new ones are provided free of charge on the web site, you will also want to expand your own games in the future by using your own custom models. The 3D Gamemaker allows for this. CREATING A THUMBNAIL So you've got your model in . X format, you've created the folder and copied everything across ­ the only thing left to do is create a thumbnail to appear within The 3D Gamemaker window. How you create the thumbnail is up to you, perhaps you might like to render a small version of it or screen grab from your 3D package. [. . . ]