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VisGroups: Worldcraft's Most Misunderstood Feature

Part I

By Imaginos

One of the most powerful features that Worldcraft has to offer the Quake level designer is the ability to combine objects into VISible GROUPS or VisGroups.

The major effect of this is that VisGroups allows the designer to see (in the 2D and 3D Views) only those objects that he has assigned to a certain group or groups.

But for all its power and elegance, VisGroups is rarely used by the novice and not all that often by the advanced level designer. Why is this?

I believe one reason is that there hasn't been anything like this in level editing before. Of course nowadays, nearly all the Quake level editors out there have the feature in one form or another, but it still isn't being used all that much.

Unfamiliarity is another reason. I was intimidated by VisGroups for a long time. I didn't understand the concept and Worldcraft (at the time VisGroups came into being) didn't have much information on the feature. Also, Worldcraft didn't have a Help file for a long time - and even after it did, it only described VisGroups in a very 'bare bones' fashion.

Finally, there's the arguement that it takes too much time.

True and False. Using VisGroups is something that has to be decided from the get-go. It would be entirely unadvisable to get 3/4 the way through a project and then decide to go back and add VisGroups to what has already been created. There is also the 'plane factor'. That is, if your whole map exists on one plane (no rooms beneath rooms beneath other rooms) then VisGroups would be of no consequence. All brushes and items in the level could be selected without a lot of trouble.

To illustrate this, let's take a look at a recent TeamFortress effort of mine called Death In A Flash.

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