As a member of Flatland's beta tester group, I will try to do a summary of all the information you'll need to use the new EditBset tool, make your own blocksets with textures, sounds, even how you can build your own blocks and how EditBset helps you with that.

1. About old restrictions

Starting with Rover 1.5.2 there's no more restriction for blocksets having to be hosted on Flatland's server. This means, blocksets can be hosted wherever you want! Just put your blockset on your server and define the according URL in the BLOCKSET tag in your 3DML file.

Your blockset will be cached by Rover the same way like the official one from Flatland. Once downloaded, you will find it beneath the Flatland folder on your harddisk in a folder named after your server's domain name. So, if your blockset is hosted on www.yourserver.com/yourdirectory/blocksets, the blockset will be downloaded to: Flatland\www.yourserver.com\yourdirectory\blocksets.

2. About new restrictions

Where's light, there's shadow... Rover will reject blocksets that are larger than 300 KB if they don't come from blocksets.flatland. com. This was done to ensure that people don't go crazy creating huge blocksets that nobody will want to wait for to download.

3. What you can do with EditBset

With EditBset, you can open any blocksets, edit all blockset parameters like version, placeholder, sky, ground and orb settings. You can also create new blocksets, load textures and sounds into it. And last but not least, you can even load your very own block definition files (*.block) into the blockset and let EditBset calculate those nasty BSP trees!

4. Creating texture/sound blocksets

One cool purpose of EditBset is to create blocksets containing all the textures and/or sounds needed for your spot. This is now a very simple task. You just have to create a new blockset with EditBset and load all your textures and sounds into it. Then save your work, upload the blockset to your server and note a BLOCKSET tag in your 3DML file with the URL leading to your new blockset. Now you can use the textures and sounds of your blockset by referencing them the same way you do with standard blocksets:

"@yourblockset:yourtexture.gif"
"@yourblockset:yourtexture.jpg"
"@yourblockset:yoursound.wav"

Tip: As for version 1.0 of EditBset, you can load your textures and sounds only one by one into your blockset. If you find this annoying and you have WinZip, there's an easier way: create an empty folder with the name of your new blockset, then create a subfolder "textures" and/or a subfolder "sounds". Now put all your files into the subfolders and zip up the whole folder using WinZip's context menu function in explorer. Rename the .zip file to a .bset suffix and load it into EditBset. The tool will come up with an error message cause it couldn't find the .style file. Click on ok and edit at least the blockset's version parameter. Then save the finished blockset.

5. Conscientious usage of blocksets

Please remember the 300kb limit! Of course you can do more than one blockset to load more than 300 kb of textures and sounds into your spot, but please remember: your visitor will not see anything of your spot until the last blockset has been downloaded and I doubt if he will be patient enough to wait that long!

So, you should take your time to organize your sources and keep the usage of custom blocksets in reasonable limits.

Speaking of reasonable things... it would be great if you could use speaking names for your blocksets, so people have an idea of what is in the set when they're cleaning up their blockset cache. So, please don't get cryptic, even if the blockset names will get a little longer.

6. The expert task: Create your own blocks!

Of course, blocksets wouldn't be blocksets, if they could only contain textures and sounds. You can add your very own blocks too! Unfortunately, one thing EditBset is NOT is a block editor. You will have to code your blocks in an editor before loading them into a blockset. Fortunately, on the other hand, EditBset will make the task much easier, since it will add the nasty parts of block creating automatically: the BSP trees and even the texture coordinates! So, all you have to do is to define vertices, polygons and parts.

Next - Part II