About WalkAbout

WalkAbout is designed to be a simple method of testing your landscapes, buildings and textures for 3D programs and games.  It is part of a suite of tools that help design 3D environments.  The suite comprises:

	Texture Manager - Manages and manipulates textures [Beta test]
	World - Creates and edits landscapes and splats [Beta test]
	Edifice - Constructs buildings [Beta test]
	WalkAbout - Allows you to walk full scale across your landscape and buildings [Beta test]
	Scene - Edits complete scenes with textures, landscapes, buildings, things and actors [under development]

See our downloads page to test our apps for free.

Purpose

The purpose of WalkAbout is to provide a simple interface to the worlds you create without having to write a full game program.  It reads an XML based files that contains information to run a 3D world game environment.

Features

• XML based input files, these can be:
  • Edited by notepad to change parameters
  • Generated from the World and Edifice editors
• Specified screen size on start and adjustable at run time
• Keyboard or mouse motion input.
• Avatar movement about the landscape and buildings.
• Camera control with follow-me.

 

Concepts

The aim of the 3D world is to be as realistic as possible.  That does not mean that you cannot have an imaginary landscape made with yellow grass and a purple sky.  It means that if you do that it still looks real and behaves correctly when you walk about it.

WalkAbout uses the 3D engine capabilities to do this and assembles the elements from the landscapes, constructs and textures you have supplied.

Your 3D world is made up from triangles.   WalkAbout translates the height map and construct information into triangles in the 3D world and applies textures to them using the 3D engine.  The trick is to keep the number of triangles to a minimum to keep speed high but still maintain a realistic high-definition world.

Your Avatar can move around the landscape, walk up stairs, bump into walls.  It will slow down going up hills and slip on cliffs.  You can change Avatar parameters such as weight and strength to speed it up or slow it down.

The camera will follow your Avatar and obey similar laws.  You can swing the camera around your Avatar to get different views.

Gallery

WalkAbout gives you a full screen or windowed experience with your landscapes or constructs.  This gallery shows you a few views from our demonstration suite that can be downloaded.

You can also watch the video on YouTube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTGfngs46fk&feature=youtu.be