RED

The information in this article pertains to Red Faction 1 only.

RED is the Red Faction Level Editor. RED is usually assumed to mean "Red EDitor".

Levels in Red Faction are comprised of BSP brushes and meshes exported from 3D Studio Max 4.2 or 5.0.

Purpose
RED is used to produce levels (maps) for the PC and Playstation 2 game Red Faction. It should be noted however that while all maps for the PS2 version of the game were originally developed using RED, there is currently no known way to play custom RED levels on the PS2 version of the game.

RED can also be used to test various edits when developing mods for the PC version of the game.

Functionality

 * Brushes: BSP Brushes make up the bulk of a Red Faction level. They define rooms and objects within those rooms. Brushes are often used in custom levels as a substitute for static meshes because RED does not support adding additional meshes without developing a seperate mod. Brushes can be edited in several ways. The 2 most useful ways are vertex editing and face editing. Brush sizing is measured in realistic meters, while playermodels such as Parker is rougly 1.90 meters tall.
 * Shapes:
 * Box
 * Cone
 * Cylinder
 * Face
 * Mesh
 * Sphere
 * Wedge


 * Textures: Textures are what you see on the polygons (faces) in a level. Textures are applied to all surfaces of a polygon in RED editor. When calculating/adding lightmaps, another texture map (called a lightmap) is added to each surface of your level (except for "Full Bright" faces). This is done by baked grayscale images which tells the surfaces how illuminated they should be. RED supports "Smoothing Groups" for the lightmaps to make lighting appear seamless on rounded surfaces.
 * Tools:
 * UV Unwrap (TODO)


 * Objects: There are many objects available to be used inside of RED. All objects in RED can be classified into the following categories:
 * Regions
 * Clutter
 * Events
 * Triggers
 * Entities
 * Effects
 * Items
 * Decals
 * Emitters
 * Points
 * Lights
 * Cutscene Objects

User Friendliness
RED drew on elements from all the other level editors and 3D applications that Volition's level designers had used in the past. They had RED designed the way they wanted.

Customization

 * REDPF - Bundled with Pure Faction since version 3.0 comes REDPF. REDPF is an upgraded version of the stock editor. It features new and useful buttons added just to the top of the viewport area, new options added to the trigger properties window (for new trigger features introduced in Pure Faction), and the addition of very useful help strings.


 * RED-Optimized - A few years ago, community member RED-FROG released his own custom modified version of RED, called RED-Optimized. This version saw enlarged important buttons, removed help strings and removal of the splash screen.

RED Command-line switches
NOTE: All RED command-line switches are undocumented by Volition Inc. with the exception of -mod.
 * -sound - Only known function is allowing the preview button in the Ambient Sound object properties to play the wave file specified.
 * -mod - Runs a mod. The parameter must match the name of the mod's folder in /mods/. Levels saved while this switch is active will be playable only when that mod is loaded.
 * -win32 - No known functions besides making all of RED's viewports displaying as flat white.
 * -opengl - No known functions besides making all of RED's viewports displaying as flat white. It can be assumed that the original intent of this command-line switch was to run RED using the OpenGL renderer as opposed to the standard Direct3D renderer, however it was left unfunctional in the shipped game.
 * -update - Assumed to update .rfl files in some unknown way.

Related Pages

 * RED v2