Blender as a Level Editor

[esuvs]

Hi,
I am developing a 3D game engine (currently in early stages) and as part of this I have started to write a level editor. This is no simple task, and am considering stopping it and using blender as the level editor. Do you think this will be possible? I have considered thi before and have had some problems using modelers as level editors. I appoligise if the following are obvious, but I don’t want to spend too long learning it only to find it doesn’t fit my needs!

1. In Blender I can create a cube which could represent a room, but as far as I can tell the same texture is applied to each face of an object (not good for a room). Can the textures be changed individually?

2. Once I create a room I will need to add markers to represent objects (monsters, weapons, etc). Can I extend blender using python (or by other means) to create dialogs to be displayed which would allow the properties of these objects to be changed?

There are proberly other problems, but those are the ones which spring to mind. Anyone got any thoughts?

Thanks in advance,

David.

[kEinStein]

@esuvs

Hi,
I am developing a 3D game engine (currently in early stages) and as part of this I have started to write a level editor. This is no simple task, and am considering stopping it and using blender as the level editor. Do you think this will be possible? I have considered thi before and have had some problems using modelers as level editors. I appoligise if the following are obvious, but I don’t want to spend too long learning it only to find it doesn’t fit my needs!

1. In Blender I can create a cube which could represent a room, but as far as I can tell the same texture is applied to each face of an object (not good for a room). Can the textures be changed individually?

Yes. You must use the uv editor (f-key) to apply the textures to the faces. There you can select the faces and arrange them in the imagewindow.
See also:
http://www.ingiebee.com/tutorials/Blender%20tutorial%20UV%20Mapping.htm

2. Once I create a room I will need to add markers to represent objects (monsters, weapons, etc). Can I extend blender using python (or by other means) to create dialogs to be displayed which would allow the properties of these objects to be changed?

I don’t really understand what you want to do.

Edit²: I really should take a rest…

[d0pamine]

Norman Lin has done what you are suggesting with Blender as a level editor. He also presented at the Blender Conference:
(http://www.blender.org/modules/bc2002/index.html

Get more info about this line of work here:
http://www.linux3dgraphicsprogramming.org/announce/listdir.php3?top=AllTopics

Cheers,
Tom