Workspace Setup
From Guild of Writers Wiki
Please note that the example here uses an Ahra Pahts Shell file. However, the methods described herein are useful for any Age workspace.
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What is a workspace?
A workspace is an organized place for all of the necessary files. This includes textures, the blender files, sound files, SDL files, and scripts. Essentially, all of the components of an Age, organized so that they can easily be put together.
Why use a workspace?
When I first started building Ages, I gathered textures from everywhere. Most of those ended up scattered across 3 hard drive partitions. You can imagine how difficult it was to find anything. Ahra Pahts shells include a zipped folder containing textures for the walls, floor, stairs, and lamps. It seemed so much easier and more efficient to me than leaving textures lying unlabelled in random folders. As well, it helps Blender too. Blender can use either relative or absolute paths for textures and sounds. Absolute paths point to a very specific place, and if you accidentally unplug a hard drive or move a folder, Blender will no longer be able to find the data. Using a relative path means that Blender looks for data starting in the same folder as the .blend file. With relative paths, there is less chance of causing problems due to moving a folder or renaming something.
Setting up the workspace
Find a Central Location
Usually a folder somewhere in My Documents, or wherever you prefer to keep all of your Age Creation files. In this example, let's call it "Ages".
A subfolder for each Age
Create a subfolder for each Age. In this example, we're going to create a folder named "Pahts" (for Ahra Pahts).
Download the Shell (Pahts-only)
If you have registered a shell for Ahra Pahts, download it. (You will receive a PM from one of the project coordinators after rgistering. GThis PM will include a link to your shell files and the texture files). Move the .blend file into the Pahts folder. Download the zipped textures file. Extract that into "Pahts/textures" (a subfolder in Pahts named "textures").
Other files
- Create a folder called "sounds" for all of you .ogg files (or use Uru's /sfx/ folder)
- Create a folder named "scripts" for all .py files. This folder can easily be compressed into a .pak file for Uru.
- If you have an SDL file for your Age, put it in the same folder as the .blend file.
- When you create a new texture, put it in the textures folder so that Blender can find it easily.
Exporting in a workspace
You will probably want to create another folder called "Export" for each Age and export all of your data to that folder.
Just a question thrown on the end by a Newbie what is an SDL file?
Answer: An SDL file is basically what Uru uses to keep track of changes in your age. They can be very useful in puzzles. Say that you have a set of buttons, which open a door when pushed in sequence. Now, it would be very frustrating to have to redo the puzzle everytime you reloaded the age and had to go through the door. In this instance, it would be useful to put an SDL reference to the 'door open' animation, so that whenever the age was entered (and the puzzle had already been solved), the door would be open. I don't altogether understand how to use them, but there are some useful pages here on the wiki. .sdl files can be made by PlasmaShop.
