Editor Stuff

I've gotten a bit more work on the editor done. I'm still trying to think about how exactly I want to hook the "gizmos" in. I want a customizable interface so plugins can add their own gizmos and they function like the built in ones. I am currently implementing the 3 basic gizmos (translate, rotate, scale) through my test plugin before I build them in to the editor so that I can get a good idea of how I'll implement other ones. I'd be great for a real-time UV mapper to be able to put a gizmo right in the editor for you. Hopefully that'll be easy to do.

In the included shot, you can see a few new things. I added a "resource browser" to test how easy it is to plug a 3D viewport onto another window. I don't have it hooked up to show what I want but the viewport is there for me to do what I want and it has full camera controls. The materials are listed as well as the currently registered entities at the bottom.

The gizmo currently visible is my attempt at a transform gizmo. I am going to obviously replace that with some arrows and what not later but for the most part, it functions correctly. You can left click it and rotate the object, middle click to translate, and right click to scale (I know.. ass backwards controls). I'm currently just using bounding boxes for hit detection so that'll have to be replaced eventually with polygon selection which I'll most likely use a 3rd party collision detection library for, like Bullet.

Editor Advances

I've been a little busy with my home life lately but I have managed to squeak in some time to work on the editor. So far, I'm very pleased with where it's going. The plugin system is very easy to create thanks to .NET. I'm trying to keep things as exposed in as generic of a way as I can. There are easy to use hooks on object selection as well as populating the scene graph which will allow for game specific plugins to add their own types as the graph is being built. I am designing everything with extensions in mind so that games can plug in various dll's and enhance the editor beyond it's base without having to touch the editors code. Any plugin can be loaded or unloaded without bring the rest of the system down. Don't want a feature? Simply delete the dll and it won't get loaded anymore. There is an options page in the editor to specify which plugins to load on startup.

I'm going to work on some property wrappers around scene nodes as well as introducing an axis widget that will be placed in the editor to allow for things to be dragged around hopefully.

I've also got a nice docking suite going on. Plugins can register a "ToolWindow" with the editor and it will dock it somewhere. The suite provides saving/loading functionality so the positions will be saved across sessions which is very awesome.