You can change display settings for the panes of a room frame individually or all at once. To change the settings on an individual pane, right-click in the pane and choose a setting from the drop-down menu. To change the settings of all panes in the active room frame, choose a setting from the View menu instead.
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You can open up to 50 ORFs (room files) at a time, and each will open in its own window, but you may only open up one level (D3L) at a time. (Note: If you must open multiple levels, you can run more than one instance of the editor. However, copy/paste functions will not work across editor instances.)
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The current grid setting for an orthographic (2D) room pane determines the distance that marked vertices (or the camera) move with each keypress. Change the setting by either right-clicking on the pane and choosing "Adjust grid size" from the drop-down menu or use the keys 1 to 7. You can also use Page Up and Page Down buttons on your keyboard.
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To display textures and room geometry more accurately in the textured views, make sure the z buffer is in use. Click the "Z Buffer" button in the toolbar to activate it. But beware, this consumes computing power!
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If you have a specific question, if you found a bug or if you just want to share your experiences with D3Edit, you can hop in the discussion forums, online at http://www.descentforum.de/forum/. You must register before you can post to the forums, but registration is 100% free.
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Additional tips & tricks, examples and explanations are available via the Help menu. It leads to various Descent 3 development pages and tutorials.
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D3Edit supports custom object palettes. To add an object to your custom object palette, click the "Available Objects" button in the Object Bar. After specifying a filter, objects of the filter types will be displayed. Now simply click and drag the desired objects onto the custom tab in the Object Bar.
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D3Edit supports custom texture palettes. To add a texture to your custom texture palette, click the "Available Textures" button in the Texture Bar. After specifying a filter, textures of the filter types will be displayed. Now simply click and drag the desired textures onto the custom tab in the Texture Bar.
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To avoid a slip of the pen, switch marked vertices for the 3d-views on: 3d-View->Context Menu->Draw Marked Verts.
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If you are experimenting with extruding choose a texture which is not in the room before you do the extrusion. If the experiment fails, you can easily delete the new faces by marking them by their texture in the k-bar. If it succeeds, use texture propagation to replace them with the correct texture.
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Missing rooms? Try Settings->Display all rooms and check 'Render > 100'.
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Do your texturing and alignment while you are building. You have to check it afterward anyway :)
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Inform yourself about the .gam and .oof files. It will make building easier for you.
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You can use Tab to toggle between vertex and face mode.
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You can mark a face construct (faces that are connected by having one or more verts in common.) by making a face of it current and hitting zero on the numpad.
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To mark all vertices of all marked faces hit Ctrl-M.
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Keep your rooms clean! Do a Verify / Remove Extra Verts / Extra Verts Magnet on a regular base.
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Use Atan's Level Info mod (check.d3m) to further test for errors before release. More info about this here: http://www.prepare4descent.net/descentiapedia/LevelInfo.
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Although portals are allowed to touch each other, it is not a good practice to do so. It may lead to unwanted effects in-game.
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A portal can become broken by moving one or more of the verts, changing the size or shape of the portal or a face adjacent to the portal. Adding another room to a face that is adjacent to the portal. Delete the broken portal and make a new one!
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You can create nice basic figures out of the box: File New-> choose a primitive, enter some values and click OK.
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Learn the Hotkeys for D3Edit, since this will accelerate your work by a factor of 5. To see them, simply click the green button labeled 'Key' in the tool bar.
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To align textures, simply Ctrl-Click a face next to the current one. By that you can walk through the whole room, and even through the level in the World View.
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To combine faces, simply Ctrl-Shift-Click a face next to the current one. The faces get combined, unless the new face would be nonplanar or concave.
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Got lost? Hit C in any view, it brings your room back.
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Make the status bar your friend: it contains a lot of valuable info.
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Use Ctrl and Shift in addition to the mouse to navigate the views.
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To bring the face in which you're working into view, use Ctrl-Shift-C. It brings the current face to the center of view in the 3d pane.
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If you are using .gam files, it may be a good idea to have two of them: one which contains all the extras, and one which gets packed with the level. Remove all unused entries from the final release!
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When planning for textures calculate some time. There are over 2500 Textures in D3 by stock.
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When building a level that may be used in multiplayer mode, stay within the valid multiplayer mine area. Check "Show valid Multiplayer mine area" in room view to see an outline.
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This version of Tips of the Day last updated 10/21/08. To download the latest version of Tips of the Day, or to add your own Tips, visit http://www.prepare4descent.net/descentiapedia/D3EditTipOfTheDay and click the 'Grab' button.
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