basic sandbox tutorial Thread - FarCry Operation Clearing mod for Far Cry

this little tutorial is for those who asking "why we have different categories with same objects in editor?"

whats about the
Brush
Simple Entities
Entities
Archetype Entities
and why many (nearly all) objects are have entrie's in those categories ?

the idea behind:

there is a pool of objects, like stones, houses, barracks, crates and so on.
from the sight of the engine, a interactive object costs much more resources than a non interactive, static object. a static object is called "Brush". so, if you place a object from the pool which is listed in the Brush category, it's a "death", static object.
that is the ideal behaviuor for the engine.

if you need that object for some world interaction, lets say it should be physicalized, you can choose the object from the pool
"simple entity". (or convert a brush to simple entity).

it refers to the same object pool like brush, but the world can interact with the object, the leveldesigner also can choose trigger events from this object to connect it with something other (events or objects).

than we have "Entity", in that pool we have things which can handled/interacted by the player, for example Doors, Lights, Ladders, Pickups, Drivable Vehicles and so on.
you can find such objects also in brushes or simple entities, but the player cannot use them if they placed as brush or as simple entities.

and last but not least we have "Archetype Entity".

if you start the editor its empty, by openeing the DataBaseView you can load predefined Packages into the EntityLibrary, things like Physicalized_Objects, Pickups, Destroyable objects and so on. this packages are now availible in "Archetype Entity".

you can create the same for example with entity / others / destroyable object and choose there what you need. but if you simple
load in database a predefined package, you will find nearly all destroyable things complete setted up with all intresting parameters and
sounds and objects.

note, that for example 100 brushes need less CPU time than 2 simple entities (both, brush and s.entity, with identical object).

ofcourse all vegetation objects can also be found in that categories, that is not a mistake in a database or something like that, its because that the brush and simple entities categories are just plain directory folders from your harddisc! just hardmapped to farcry/objects/ as root folder!
if you create a own object (the ending for such objects is *.cgf) , and copy it to farcry/objects/outdoor/myownobject.cgf,
you can find it in
brushes/outdoor/myownobject.cgf and
simple entity/outdoor/myownobject.cgf

but back to vegetation:
you may have noticed that vegetation can bend in the wind. that is only possible, if the engine "know" that they should do this to the object. the engine needs two things to detect this: the object have to be placed as vegetation AND the object itself have to be designed with a special shader, which reacts to the windforce (the shadername is TemplePlants1).

if you import stones in vegetation and place those stones as vegetation, they never will bend because they use a other shader (mostly TempleBumpDiffuse).

and last but not least we have some strange special, animated textures in some bushes and some (very rare) trees; they also look
like they bend due to windforce even if you have placed them as Brush.
this is a constant animation with textures, they dont will react to wind and you dont can set the bending force in vegetation
painter.

i hope this helps to break "in"
pvcf