"Customising the Editor"
(5 Ways to Customise the Sandbox Editor Setup)
1. Customising Windows (Creating Tabs)
First, bring up three commonly used windows.
To bring up the Material Editor, press "m" on your keyboard or click on the checkered circle icon on the second toolbar at the top. To bring up the Database View, click on the second icon to the left of the Material Editor icon (DB). To bring up the Flow Graph, click on the icon to the right of the Database View icon (FG).
Drag and drop one window on top of another to create tabs (this will enable a less chaotic interface). Instead of having to work with three open windows; one open window with tabs is easier to use. To detach them, pull one window out of the window with tabs and close them.
2. Customising Windows (Attaching Panels)
You can attach panels to the side of your panel. To attach the Material Editor to the left; drag the window, and you will see four arrow icons (top, left, bottom and right). Hover your mouse onto the left icon and drop your window. Your window will now be connected to the left of the interface window. You can resize the window. To detach, drag and drop it back into the middle of the screen. You can do the same with the Rollup Bar and the Console; you can attach and detach them, and alter their positions on the main window.
The toolbars can be turned on and off.
3. Customising the Editor
Go to "Tools", then "Customising Keyboard..", it will open up a Customise window. You can customise the toolbars, you can add comments to your toolbars. You can also create your own toolbar by clicking "New..", and dragging and dropping certain comments. Another way to access the Customise window is to right click on an empty area and click "Customise..".
Also in the "Customise" window, go to the "Options" tab and check the "Show shortcut keys in the ScreenTips" box. I find this particularly useful. It will be useful to those who don't know the shortcuts to CryEngine. For example, if you hover over the top of an icon, a small box will appear identifying what the icon is, and next to the text in brackets is the shortcut key (e.g. Select and Move (I); meaning the shortcut button is "I").
Lastly in the "Customise" window, go into the last tab, the "Keyboard" tab where you can create your own hotkeys.
4. Preferences Panel
Go into "Tools", and "Preferences" and "General Settings". E.g. Console background, you can change the colour of the console background.
Recommended to turn off "Enable Surface Control" to "False".
"Back up Unsafe should be on" to "True", the more back ups you have, the better it is. If you do not have the habit of constantly saving you work, it is recommended that you enable "Auto Backup" and you can set up an interval of a backup each 5 or 10 minutes. So if you turn it on, every 5 or 10 minutes, there will be backed up files of the level you are working on.
4.1 "Viewports" in the Preferences Panel
The following two viewport settings seem pretty useful: "Highlight Selected Geometry" and "Highlight Geometry on Mouse Over", turn both on to "True". And so now when the mouse hovers over the object, there are yellow lines and a pinkish shader on top of the shader. It is useful in pre-visualising the object you are about to select. If the object is selected, it gets tinted as a white shader. If you don't like the white shader, you can turn of "Highlight selected Geometry".
You can also customise the "Selection Preview Colour". E.g. "Geometry Color", you can change that pinkish shade to whatever colour you want.
5. Configure User Commands
You can have a panel on the left or the right with your most used commands. This is particularly useful is you have to turn any sounds, music render settings etc on and off.
Go to "Tools", to "Configure User Commands". Macros, create a new one e.g. "Turn off sounds and music". Commands, (MusicEnable 0, SoundEnable 0), and press "Ok". Then when you go into "Tools", "User Commands", you have a button now that says "Turn off sounds and music". You can drag this command into your Viewport, you can attach it to the side, and you can put it in your toolbars.
E.g. (Type "r_DisplayInfo 0" to turn off all the statistics on the top right hand side of the Viewport, or you can make another Macro, Command for this).
Instead of putting 0, you can check the "Toggle Variable C" box, and so that each time you click on the button, you will toggle between 0 and 1 (so on and off).
"Viewports"
(3 Ways to Move Around)
1. Keyboard
"W" You move forwards, "S" You move backwards, "A" You move left, and "D" You move right.
When you are moving forward, you can press "Shift" to move slightly faster.
2. Mouse
Press right mouse button on your Viewport, to look around.
Press middle mouse button on your Viewport, to pan around.
Press middle mouse button and right mouse button at the same time; move the mouse up and down; the faster you move it, the faster you will fly around forwards and backwards in your scene.
Another way to move forwards and backwards, you can use your mouse scroll for that (mouse middle button).
Press Alt and middle mouse button to rotate your camera (like 3DS Max).
3. Speed
The default is 0.1.
There are three standard values (0.1, 1 and 10).
The higher the value, the faster the camera moves. The lower the value, the slower the camera moves.
_ Extra Tip. (Useful!)
4. Clipping with Terrain
Button on the bottom toolbar, to the right of the Speed standard values.
Enabling means you are unable to go through the terrain (you can still go through objects but not the terrain).
Disabling mean you are able to go through everything, including the terrain.
"User Interface Panels - Overview"
(5 Shortcuts or Buttons)
1. Select Objects Panel
First toolbar, next to the white input box on the right (left of the input box)
Control + T to bring up the window. It shows a list of all the objects in your scene. You can search an object in your scene and choose to select it. In the editor, you always have the name of the entity. You can find it in the rollup bar, in the "Create" tab, in an input field below. You can edit the input box to rename entities.
2. Asset Browser
"Open Asset Browser" can be found on the second toolbar in text. It can be used to browse for assets, brushes, sounds and also textures. Say if you want to browse for Brushes, you'd have to un-tick the "Sounds" and "Textures" boxes. And so then on the right, you will get a list displaying all the brushes present in your build. You can increase the size of the thumbnail for a closer preview of the brush ("Thumb size", change input box value), or you can decrease the size. It also allows you to drag and drop brushes into the editor. Or you can use the "Brush" browser to bring things into the scene.
3. Database View
In the toolbar, the icon "DB" is for the Database View window.
You have the entity library; there are a lot of entities you can use and drop onto your level. Entities are like an advanced brush, they have physics. This is where you will tweak all those values and parameters, you can change values, e.g. if it is pickable or not, mass (how heavy it is), if it can be blown up etc. You can choose to make it physicalised (e.g. if you enable pickable then it means when you go into the game, the character is able to pick up the entity and throw it).
There is also the Prefabs library (where all your prefabs are loaded), Vegetation (there are a number of options which are not present in the Vegetation tab on the Rollup bar), Particles (where you load your particle images e.g. Water particles to create a waterfall), Music (managing the music in your level e.g. you can specify action music if enemies are nearby), Revert Presets (e.g. if you shoot inside a tunnel, there will be echoes), Sound Moods, and Game Tokens.
Shift + Space to turn helpers on.
4. Lighting
Lighting panel, second toolbar with the sun icon and text "Lighting". You can change time of day. E.g. If you change the time of the day to around 4.P.M, there is a sunset.
You can also check and change the direction of the sun. Also you can alter what hour the sun sets and the time of dawn as well.
4.1 Time of Day
You can make a custom toolbar for this command (refer to my previous post in "Customising the Editor", post 5. Customising User Commands). You can also find this in the "View" tab, then "Open View Pane", then "Time of Day". You can change the time of your level, e.g. If you want 4.P.M, you'd type 16.
You can also change ocean fog colour, the colour of your level, saturation and more.
5. Flow Graph
The "FG" icon on the second toolbar will open the Flow Graph window. This is where you will script your level e.g. Moving an entity from Point A to Point B (moving entities).
You can add nodes to other nodes (a visual scripting, no comments or commands needed).
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