Groups and VisGroups are useful features, that ease working with big maps or objects which are made of many brushes.

Grouping allows you to combine two or more selected objects into a group, while VisGrouping allows you to toggle the visibility of object groups with one click. These grouped objects can then be managed using a groupname and actions on a group will be performed on all objects in the group.

If you want to select more than one object usually you have to click on them individually by pressing CTRL to get a selection of all objects (see The Selection Tool).

Grouping combines selected objects into a group, which means, that they can be selected by selecting only one member of the group. This is very useful if you have for example a complex object made of many brushes and want to select the whole object to move it or rescale it. If all brushes of this object are part of a group, you just have to select one brush and the whole object is selected instead of CTRL clicking all of them.

The example screens show 4 brushes that are part of a group (displayed in the same edge color) and how they are selected all at once by clicking on the lower right brush.

VisGroups on the other hand allow you to combine objects into a visibility group that can be turned invisible or visible. You can for example put all object in the right corner of a room into one VisGroup and then make them invisible and visible again with one click. This is used to ease creation of big maps, where a lot of objects aren't needed to be displayed for the currently created map part, but lower performance or block your view.

The main difference between the two groups is that objects that are part of a VisGroup are not selected as a group, so if you select one object of this VisGroup by clicking on it in a 2D view only this object is selected. Grouped objects on the other hand can't be turned visible or invisible by one click.

It is of course possible to combine VisGrouping and Grouping to use the advantages of both groups.

Note that Grouping or VisGrouping objects has no effect on the treatment of these objects in the engine. Groups are only handled in CaWE to make mapping easier.

First you have to select two or more objects using The Selection Tool. Now you can combine these objects to a group by clicking on the Group button in The Selection Tool options bar or selecting Group from The Tools Menu. The objects edges are now displayed in the same color in the 2D views and clicking one object selects the whole group.

To ungroup these objects, you have to select the group and press the Ungroup button in The Selection Tool options bar or selecting Ungroup from The Tools Menu.

Like Grouping, VisGrouping requires objects to be selected first. To add them to a VisGroup you have to click on the Hide button in The Selection Tool options bar or selecting Hide from The View Menu. The objects will be immediately turned invisible and added to the VisGroup list in the lower left corner of the screen.

Here you can see all VisGroups and their visibility is marked by a checkbox. If a checkbox is selected the related VisGroup is visible and otherwise it is invisible. It is also possible to click on a VisGroup in the list to turn it active and edit its properties (groupname, color) by using editvisgroups.

The Select button incorporates a feature from Grouping. You can select all the objects from the currently active VisGroup by clicking on it.