[Dev Log] World Planner - Design Your World Before Building It

Dav72

🗺️ World Planner — Design Your World Before Building It

While currently working on my game, I found myself facing a fairly simple problem: how do you efficiently organize a large terrain before you start placing 3D elements?

With a 2048 × 2048 terrain, it quickly becomes difficult to maintain a clear overall vision of how the world should be organized. You may know where certain things should go, but it can be difficult to determine how they should connect, how much space they should occupy, or simply where to start.

This is where a new feature I am preparing for Realm-Crafting Editor 3.4.0 comes from: the World Planner.

✏️ A Plan Before Construction

The concept is quite simple: the World Planner will allow you to take an area of your terrain and create a 2D workspace from it.

The idea is similar to the way an architect works: before building a house, you start by drawing its plans.

With the World Planner, you can first think about how an area should be organized before moving on to actually building it in 3D.

A city could have its own overall plan, followed by more detailed plans for specific districts, a central square, or even its underground network.

A beach could have its own plan, independently from the city located nearby.

This means you can create as many plans as needed, with different levels of detail.

🎨 Draw and Organize Your Spaces

The plan can be annotated using simple shapes:

rectangles;
squares;
circles;
lines;
customizable colors;
text;
images and accessories.

Colors can be used to represent different types of areas: forests, urban areas, buildings, roads, water, industrial zones, and so on.

References can be completely customized so that every creator can use their own visual organization system.

Images can also be used to add recognizable elements directly to the plan: top-down trees, cars, buildings, cameras, characters, or any other useful graphical element.

📍 Important Locations

The World Planner will also allow you to add interactive markers to identify important locations or elements.

A marker could represent, for example:

📍 a hotel
📍 a laboratory
📍 a train station
📍 a secret entrance
📍 a mission objective
📍 an important story location

These markers can contain additional information that can be viewed directly from the plan.

It will also be possible to add simple text labels to name different areas.

📐 Keep a Sense of Scale

A visual reference can be added to the plan to maintain an approximate sense of scale.

For example, a character or a car can be used as a reference to estimate the size of a street, a square, or a building.

The goal is not to create a perfectly accurate architectural plan, but to have a clear enough representation to make good decisions before starting construction.

🖨️ And Once the Plan Is Finished...

The plan can be saved, reopened, and printed.

This will make it possible to keep the plan in front of you while building the area in the 3D editor.

Why This Feature?

The World Planner is not intended to replace the 3D editor.

It simply fills a step that is often missing between having an idea and building it.

Think → Plan → Build

Instead of placing elements directly into the scene and gradually discovering what works and what doesn't, the World Planner will provide a way to take some time to think about how the world should be organized before construction begins.

It is deliberately designed to remain simple, but it can potentially save a lot of time when working on large areas.

And most importantly, it introduces a new way of designing your game in Realm-Crafting: think about your world before you build it.

🚀 World Planner is currently in development for Realm-Crafting Editor 3.4.0.

Dav72

World Planner Editor – V1 Completed!

I have finished the World Planner Editor! Here is what it looks like:

This first interface displays the terrain in 3D from a top-down view. You can zoom in and out and move the camera to prepare the exact area you want to capture and use for your plan.

You can also create your own references and colors. For example, you can define a color for vegetation, roads, water, buildings, cities, industrial areas, etc.

It is also possible to add images to a graphic library. These images can then be placed on the plan to add more details.

Once the area is ready, you simply capture it. The World Planner generates the image and switches to the drawing editor:

I made an example on this image to show what can be done.

Drawing tools

You can draw squares and circles using the selected color.
You can use a freehand pencil to draw things such as roads or paths.
You can use an eraser to remove parts of your drawing. The brush size can be adjusted to control precisely how much is erased.
The brush size is defined in meters, using the real-world scale of the captured 3D area.

You can also place images from your graphic library directly onto the plan.

Markers

There are currently two types of markers:

Thumbtack — a fixed-size pin that can contain additional information. Clicking it allows you to edit its text, while hovering over it displays the information as a tooltip. This is useful for adding specific information to a precise location.
Title — a simple label with a title, useful for identifying areas or important locations.

You can add as many markers as you need.

Saving and printing

Once your plan is finished, you can save everything and come back to it later. You can also reset the plan if you are not satisfied with your work, or delete it completely.

And when your plan is ready, you can print it and have a physical copy in front of you when you move on to the 3D construction phase in the Level Editor.

I will release Realm-Crafting Editor 3.4.0 once I have finished adding the World Planner to the manual and updating the website. This should probably be within the next 2 or 3 days.

I hope this new tool will be useful to you.

The goal of the World Planner is to help you think about the layout of your 3D world before actually building it in 3D.

Most game editors focus heavily on the actual construction of the game. But I don't know of many tools that also help with all the work that comes before construction: thinking, planning, organizing, defining proportions, deciding where things should go, and creating a visual blueprint of the world.

This is what I wanted the World Planner to provide in Realm-Crafting: a simple tool to turn an idea into a concrete plan before starting the 3D work.

See you soon!