Deconstructing Constructor - Part 4

Welcome to the fourth in a series of frequently infrequent talks about Torque Constructor. This is a continuation of my blog/.plans:

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

You may also want to read Matt's .plans:
Of mice and men and Constructor
When will Constructor ship?

What is Torque Constructor
Torque Constructor is a .map (as in the .map file format) editing and .dif (the Torque interior file format) producing program being developed by Matt Fairfax, John Kabus and myself under the direction of GarageGames. You may have seen the Development Snapshot of the Day posted back in March '05 where the project was first announced. If you're familiar with programs like Valve's Hammer, with a smattering of traditional 3D apps such as NewTek's LightWave or Luxology's Modo, then you'll understand Constructor.

Discussion: Object Selection
In my last .plan I mentioned that I would talk about what I've built into Constructor from my last update at IGC '05 until the end of the year. This won't be an exhaustive discussion -- just the highlights. I'll actually spread this over a couple of .plans and will start off by discussing object selection in Constructor. Specifically I'll talk about what you will find today under the Select menu.

Constructor Select Menu

I've divided the Select menu into five sections of which the bottom four I'll go into detail. The top section just allows the user to choose what types of objects they'll be work on from both the Select menu and the mouse.


General Selection
This section of the Select menu is about what you'd expect. In fact, I've modeled it after Adobe Photoshop so you all should be quite familiar with it. From here you may select and deselect all objects in the scene, as well as invert your selection.

The Reselect menu command will allow you to restore the last selection you made. This is handy if you've accidentally cleared your selection and you'd like to go back to it -- something I've had a lot of personal experience with. :o) It also allows you to add a previous selection to the current one. To do so for brushes, the steps would be:

1. Select some brushes
2. Clear the selection
3. Select a different set of brushes
4. Choose the Select->Reselect menu command to add the brushes from step 1. to step 3.


Object Type Selection
Each of the Geometry, Entities, and Shapes submenus contain All, Deselect and Inverse commands.

Select->Geometry Submenu

These allow you to deal specifically with the given object types. In this context, the Geometry submenu works with the current selection type i.e.: vertices, brushes, etc. The Entities submenu works with point entities in the map, while the Shapes submenu works with scene shapes i.e.: loaded DTS stand-ins.

Another method of limiting what you're selecting is to use the checkboxes in the Selection Form.

Selection Form Checkboxes

With both checkboxes unchecked, the General Selection commands (Select->All, Select->Deselect, etc.) will operate just like the Geometry submenu commands. The other advantage of making use of these checkboxes is that they also affect mouse selection. So if you're working on brushes, you don't need to first hide the map entities to make sure you don't accidentally select them with the mouse.


Expand Based on Properties
The Same submenu allows you to expand your current selection based on the properties of what is already selected. Here's what I've built to date (which I'm sure will continue to expand):

Select->Same Submenu

The Brush Faces menu command works in face selection mode. It will select all faces on a brush that has at least one face already selected.

With a map entity selected, the Entity Classname menu command will select all entities in the map that have the same class name as those currently selected. So if you want to work with all of the "light_omni" entities in the map, select one and then use this menu command.

The Entity Game Type menu command I'll gloss over here as I've not yet talked about the Game Type system I've implemented. A quick summary is that all entities belong to a particular game type to allow for both organization as well as being able to override existing entities with your game specific ones. For example, Torque is a game type. Anyway, this menu command allows you to select all entities that belong to the same game type. I'll delve further into game types in a future article when I discuss the user interface for working with entities.

Finally, the Material menu command will select all geometry whose textures match that of the currently selected geometry. Select a face that has the "floor_stone" texture and use this command to select all faces that use the "floor_stone" texture. Then feel free to change it. :o)


Selection Storage
The last two commands in the Select menu allow you to load and save selection sets. I've modeled this after a few different programs so it should be familiar to many of you. I'll talk about them in reverse order.

The Save Selection menu command allows you to save the current selection as part of the scene. It opens the following modal window:

Window opened from Select->Save Selection...

At the top of the window you may either type in a name for the selection or use the popup to the right to select an already saved selection. If you're creating a new selection or want to overwrite the chosen selection, you'll use the New (replace) selection option.

If you want to add the current selection to the chosen saved selection, the Add to current selection should be highlighted. Finally if you want to remove the objects that are currently selected from the chosen saved selection, you choose Subtract from current selection. These last two are handy as they allow you to expand or contract a selection set.

Once you have some selections saved in the scene, you'll use the Load Selection menu command to bring them back into the scene:

Window opened from Select->Load Selection...

At the top of the window is a popup listing all of the saved selections in the scene. After choosing one you'll need to decide how this selection will interact with the scene. The New selection choice will override the current selection in the scene with the loaded one. The Add to current selection choice will add the loaded selection to what is already selected. And as you'd expect, the Subtract from current selection choice will deselect the objects in the chosen selection set.


And thus ends another edition of Deconstructing Constructor. In the next issue I'll continue to write about what I've built into Constructor up to the end of 2005. And then we can continue with the really juicy stuff! :o)

- LightWave Dave


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Sidebar: What's with the Selection Form Checkboxes -OR- Why Allow Simultaneous Geometry and Entity Selections Anyway?

So really, why would we even want to be able to select geometry (i.e.: brushes, vertices, etc.) and entities at the same time? Why don't you just have another selection type of Entities at the top of the Select menu and do away with those crazy Selection Form checkboxes?

Well, I'm glad you asked. There are actually a number of cases where you'd like to work with entities and brushes at the same time. And having a separate selection mode just for entities wouldn't allow for that.

For example, maybe you've built a wall sconce out of brushes and you've created the perfect "light_omni" entity on top. Now you want to copy all of it and paste in somewhere else. Or you'd like to group the light with the brushes so you can move them together. If you can't select entities and brushes at the same time, then you can't do either of these tasks.

The checkboxes on the Selection Form allow you to decide when entities may be selected with the mouse because most of the time you will just be dealing with brushes, vertices, etc. So if you drag out a selection rectangle with the mouse, you know that you won't accidentally select an entity. But when you want to, you can.

Now maybe we can have both an Entities selection mode and keep the checkboxes for the other modes. That way we'll have the best of both worlds. Sounds like a worthwhile addition... :o)