3D Mud Client

Models of towns can be loaded into a freeform and displayed in the mud client. Freeform's can load many model formats such as Milkshape, 3d Studio and Openbsp. A good tool for building towns is Quark since it is designed to build maps in the game Quake and its free. The mud client package includes Quark with all maps and textures in Shattered World for the towns of Sanom, Sengoku and the demon summoners guild. This discussion is about using Quark to build a town but you can use whatever modelling tool you like to build a town.

Quark has folders so you can have one building per folder. For example:

You can copy individual folders and also exclude folders from compilation therefore you can compile different models from the one map. This is useful if you split up your model so that collisions can be calculated more efficiently as described at the end of this document.

A good feature of Quark is that it can hollow out cubes (menu 'commands' then 'make hollow') thus can make buildings with an interior. There is also a tool for hollowing out walls to make windows and doors (menu 'commands' then 'brush subtraction').

The following is quick description on how to edit a sanom map:

1. Load Quark from mud client package

2. Load the sanom map (go to 'file' then 'sanom.qkm' at the bottom of the menu). You should see something like:

3. Edit the map. For some help click on the '?' in the menu for help on editing. You can try moving a block around by clicking on it and dragging it. You can view the map in 3D like in the first screenshot by clicking on the following button:

4. Compile the map. Click on 'OpenBSP (no lightmapping)' in the 'GLScene menu'. This will put the compiled map at

c:\program files\mudclient\quark\tmpquark\sanom.obsp

5. Move this map into your mud client model directory ie

c:\program files\mudclient\client\models

Good idea to make a backup of your original sanom.obsp file.

6. Run your mud client and you should see the change in your sanom map.

You can add new towns to the client by adding new models to the mudclient/client/models directory and include the model in the config file (add a new object to objectlist and include reference to it in parentmaps). Look at the reference to sanom.obsp in the config file.

The Quark install includes only the textures for sanom, sengoku and the demon summoners guild.

To add your own check out the section about adding textures to Quark in http://www.skinhat.com/Quark. After adding the textures to Quark you will need to put the texture in the directory:

c:\program files\mudclient\client\textures\sanom
so that the mud client can find the texture.

Excluding parts of town from a map

It is often necessary to split towns up. An example is when using proxying where you use a low poly representation of your town when a player is a long way away but draw the high poly town when the player moves closer. Another case where you might split up a town is to make collision detection more efficient with one model for height calculation and another for horizontal collisions. To split a town you can put parts of the town that are part of the ground in one folder and the other in another folder as shown in the following picture:

Here the 'use' folder is for the walls while the other is for the ground.

If you right click on the folder you can exclude the map from the compilation:

by clicking on 'ignore in build maps'. When you compile it it will save as:

c:\program files\mudclient\quark\tmpquark\sanom.obsp

If it is a ground model and the object references 'sanomground.obsp' you might want to rename it:

c:\program files\mudclient\quark\tmpquark\sanomground.obsp

and then copy it to:

c:\program files\mudclient\client\models