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1.4 A Guide to This Documentation

In this section we guide you through some of the more useful sections in the documentation related to writing your own game using Crystal Space. It is recommended that you at least browse through the entire documentation (just browse the table of contents) so that you have an idea of what is explained where, but even so this guide can help you to find the information you want more quickly.

One of the most useful sections for writing your own game is of course the tutorial section (see section 5. Tutorials and HOWTO's). Here you will find three tutorials which can help you to write your own Crystal Space game and also the very important tutorial introduction (see section 5.1 Developing a Crystal Space Application). You should certainly read this if you want to have a good idea on some of the basic concepts in Crystal Space.

The tutorial section also contains the HOWTO section (see section 5.8 HOWTO). The howto's are small documents explaining how to solve small problems. They usually contain example code. Most of the howto's are related to solving problems with the Crystal Space engine (like collision detection, mesh lighting and animation, mesh movement, loading a level, ...). But there are also two howto's that explain how you can set up your own application outside the Crystal Space application tree (one for Unix/Mingw and another for Microsoft Visual C++).

The section in the manual on the engine (see section 7.6 The 3D Engine (csEngine)) is also very important. If you want to know how the 3D engine works internally (which is important if you want to build your own 3D worlds) then you should read the section explaining the world components (see section 7.6.1 Components of a World) and also the section explaining portals (see section 7.6.2 Portal Engine). There is also a howto about render priorities (see section 5.8.8 Render Priorities and Objects in Sectors) which is also very helpful here.

The section about the Map File Parser (see section 7.7 The Map File Parser (csParser)) is useful if you want to create your map files manually.

A very important section is the mesh object section (see section 7.8 Mesh Object Plug-In System). Mesh objects are objects that represent geometry in Crystal Space. If you want to show something in your world you will have to use them. The tutorials and howto's also contain information about mesh object but this section contains the complete documentation.


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