Forum archive
What is Groudraw?
- Hello there. Here's a quote from "buildhlp.txt"
G = Make the floor of the given sector have a Groudraw
I don't quite understand the meaning of this function in build...
(floor with height mapping). I do not recommend using this
attribute very extensively yet. (See the H key for selecting
the height map) - Think of Groudraw as sort of like a voxel floor. It used a height map to displace the pixels to give it a roughness kind of texture.
Jonathon - O_O OMG. Never saw this in game, are there any maps using this?
- The feature never made it into the later engine versions. I think one of Ken's demos of historic Build milestones demonstrates it.
Jonathon - JonoF is correct. Old versions of the Build Engine allowed sector floors to have voxel heightmapping. You can see an early version of the "groudraws" in some of the maps included with BUILGRID.ZIP I even had "groudraws" working in the sector-based engine for a while. They were even rendered as cubes (like in Voxlap), but I never solved a problem with spurious divide overflows. Because of this, the map designers avoided them like the plague. It's a shame really, because if I had gotten around to fixing the problems, it would have been quite an innovative feature : )
Groudraws were removed when I added slopes to the engine in August of 1995. To save myself from writing another map converter, I redefined the "heinum" fields in the sector structure to be used for slopes instead. Nobody complained. - http://jonof.edgenetwork.org/misc/groudraw.png
There's an example screenshot from MABOARDS.DAT in Ken's builgrid.zip file from his site.
http://jonof.edgenetwork.org/misc/groudraw2.png
And another, this time from from BOARDS.DAT.
Jonathon - Jonof, does heightmapping work in your port right now?
- No, the code doesn't exist in the engine anymore.
Jonathon