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. · The 3D Gamemaker is a Windows "AutoPlay" CD-ROM. This means that by putting the CD into the drive for the first time, the installation program should start automatically. [. . . ] 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. You can then "paint" with this new rotated tile. To erase a tile simply click with the right mouse button. 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. It would be perfectly possible to create a scene 4 squares wide by 16 tall. When you are dealing with scenes larger than 8x5 you need to be able to move around the grid easily and quickly. You can scroll around the grid by pressing the cursor keys on their own in all 4 directions. However if you hold down the CONTROL (CTRL) key and then press the cursor keys you'll jump in steps of 10 squares, this provides you with a much faster way of moving around a large scene. Here is an example of a more complex scene that is 8x10 in size and features tiles from multiple game types, you can see War (blue), Jungle (green) and Space (purple) in use here, also notice the End and Boss tiles ­ you'd have to battle your way through that boss before being able to reach the end of the level!: Another useful key for when you're dealing with scenes larger than the viewable area is the `Z' key. It will produce a reduced version of the scene compressed so that the entire scene fits onto the screen at once. By clicking on a tile within the reduced scene you're taken to that point within the scene. NOTE: One thing to remember when building your scene is that the diagonally striped area of the tiles will appear "solid" to the player and function like a wall. TESTING YOUR SCENE IN 3D Now you've placed your tiles and added the required start, boss and end points you are ready to test your scene in full 3D!Simply click on the "View In 3D" button and after loading the textures the scene will appear. Use the cursor keys to move around the scene and check that everything is built the way you imagined it to be. [. . . ] The thumbnail must be a 16-bit BMP file (or higher). The thumbnail file must be called "thumb. bmp" Once created, copy the thumb. bmp into the folder containing your model. You can now launch The 3D Gamemaker and when you click on the "Enemy" button and then "User" your thumbnail will appear. Clicking on the thumbnail will load your object and you can then modify it's properties just as if it was any other 3D Gamemaker supplied object. [. . . ]