Josh

We have our design parameters. We know the editor should let the user control every aspect of the engine in a visual manner, without having to use any other tools or do any editing of text files. We have 3D World Studio to serve as inspiration for the design and feel of the program. The sky's the limit. You, the users, have told me that you want to invest in a system that does more for you and makes your life easier. I'm happy to provide the basis for your next projects. Thank you for letting me make this for you, because creating 3D tools is what I really love doing. Look at me, I see a CSG editor grid and I get all sentimental. I like having the scene tree and asset browser in tabs on the right. I tried a couple variations of keeping them both visible at once, and I think it looks silly. The down side of using tabs is you can never drag anything from the asset browser to the scene tree directly. Therefore, it makes the most sense to me to have sounds, scripts, and anything else in the properties editor, so you can drag assets from the asset browser to that. This means scripts, sounds, etc. do not go in the scene tree, and it gets used for only entities and brushes. It seems like a good layout and will support all the drag and drop features we need.

I have been unable to obtain sufficient items to do this properly. We only get one chance to make an impression, so I am looking for more models before it is launched.

Probably because Blender isn't rendering a lot of post effects and lighting each frame. It's not any slower than the redrawing in the current editor, but given the choice I'd like to keep the program feeling light and as responsive as possible. There's a subtle difference you feel when a program starts fast, closes fast, and resizes fast. Not sure why it makes a difference, but it feels better.

That's what I meant by "XOR drawing". GDI has some functions to draw a negative brush, which is what you are probably thinking of.

Once any third party gets involved, the user experience is out of my control. Probably 95% of the potential market for software like this won't accept or understand the need for a third party compiler. Even if they do go for it, coding tools are almost always very difficult to set up and poorly supported. That causes a lot of conflict when I am trying to make a system that's easy to use. A lot of people come here with no coding experience at all, see they have to install Visual Studio, and that's the end of it for them. My guess is that describes maybe 95% of the people who might be interested in designing games.

Another common technique is to overlay an XOR drawing and only resize the stuff when the mouse is let go, but that doesn't work for window resizing, and is Windows-specific. It's not a big thing, but I thought some of the programmers might be interested in what I found.

I implemented resizable viewports this morning. This is so much more fun than fiddling around with compiler settings. You can grab the bars between viewports, or the very center space, and drag it around to resize the four viewports. I usually prefer a smaller perspective view, and like to devote most of my space to the 2D views when doing serious editing: You can also drag the views around to make a single big viewport, or just have two viewports visible: In 3D World Studio, when you resize the window the program instantly redraws, even as you are still moving the window. This is nice looking but it can get slow when you have a large map loaded, and it makes the program feel slow. The problem is even worse with a deferred renderer, because you are constantly creating and deleting those big gbuffers. I don't like hearing the graphics card fan kick up just because I decided to resize a window. I'm getting better results by waiting for the user to let go of the mouse before redrawing viewports, but for window and viewport resizing. This has the effect of displaying "bad"/undefined screen regions while the user is resizing things, but it makes the program very fast and responsive. I used to consider those artifacts to be a sort of amateurish trait, but I think this actually works better. The program feels very fast and light, so I think this is actually a pretty good tradeoff. As soon as you let go of the mouse button, the viewports redraw at their new size. --EDIT-- And now we have grids. Starting to look familiar, but new:

http://www.leadwerks.com/werkspace/blog/1/entry-655-tools-and-stuff/ http://www.leadwerks.com/werkspace/blog/1/entry-658-lua-and-c-debugger/ I intend to focus on Lua for examples in the future. It's a lot easier to work with because you don't have to install compilers and code editors for all the different platforms, and it runs the same on everything.

I should correct that, but yeah, lots of people install it on their laptop and their desktop.

I'm really surprised at the speed of that.

It's possible to just drag the four viewports around as you need, so you can make it 2 views or just one. However, with a complex scene I always find I need three 2D views so I can see what the scene geometry really looks like. This editor is being design to work as a complex level designer, not just a tool to drop some models in a scene, so the rules are a bit different from the last editor.

You can select the top-level directory, enable the recursive option, then enter a search term in the filter box, and the results will be filtered pretty near instantly. If you want to view all materials, for example, type in "*.mat" and hit enter.

You've got to submit that last image as a banner! B)

The fantastic Fatcow icon set was recommended to me in the comments in a previous blog post. These are very similar to the Silk icon set, but come in 32x32 and 16x16 versions, have more icons, and better coloration. The Silk icon set is sort of a desaturated pastel tone I don't like, and Fat Cow's icons are more saturated and bright. I had actually considered running the Silk icons through a color-correction algorithm, but Fat Cow has already done the work for me. I knew from the start I wanted our editor to have lots of colorful toyish-looking icons. I love Valve's editing utilities as well as Nem's Tools, even though they are both rather dated. What I miss about these programs is that they embedded 3D tools into the standard Windows UI, so it was easier to focus on the task at hand instead of being distracted by a flashy custom UI you had never seen before. I've always considered homemade GUIs to be amateurish, and even if one looks cool at first, I quickly get tired of it. My goal is to capture the utility and ease of use of programs like this and 3D World Studio, while adding more modern features to make it more friendly to artists. The editor is starting to take on its own unique character: Designing the InterfaceWhat you see here is the result of a lot of different approaches to try to determine the best way to design the layout of a modern 3D editor. The asset browser is built into the main window, but can be resized or hidden by clicking the window divider. The user will frequently be accessing the asset browser, and having it in the main window is better than having it in a separate window, and constantly having to move it around to get it out of the way. Additionally, I felt that having child windows open from a child window (windowed asset browser) was too confusing...more on that below. The default layout of the asset browser is a vertical split with the treeview on the far right. After using a horizontal split for a while I felt really cramped for space. The vertical layout gives you a better distribution of space and plenty of room to view thumbnails. Originally, I had the asset files themselves in the tree with small icons, but I found that 16x16 was too small for a meaningful preview of each file. I tried making the tree view icons bigger, but it wasted a lot of space. Folder icons looked ridiculous at 32x32 and above, and took up more room than they needed. I tried using generic 16x16 "texture", "material", and "model" icons in the treeview, but found it was much easier to identify files by thumbnail rather than reading their name. Finally the decision was made to keep folders in the tree view, with small icons, and have a separate thumbnail browser with bigger icons. The user can adjust the thumbnail icon size, from 32 to 512. I also liked this approach because it is similar to the texture browser in 3D World Studio. The folder treeview is on the very right-hand side by default because the white background would cause the dark 2D and 3D viewports to look even darker. Your eye actually will perceive a darker color in an area of high contrast, so keeping the mostly-white treeview off to the side will make your scenes more easily visible. When you double-click on an asset file, a window for viewing and editing the asset is opened. I considered building a preview window and controls into the main window, but it didn't fit the workflow. Sometimes you will want to drag asset files into an asset editor. For example, you can drag a texture into the material editor to assign a texture to the material. In order for this to work, you have to be able to open the material in the material editor, then navigate the asset browser to where the textiure resides, then click and drag that file into the material editor. This wouldn't work with a single preview window. There's also a good case for having multiple asset editors open at the same time. You might be working on a shader and want to see its effect on a material in real-time. In that case, you would keep both assets open in their editors while working. I also considered making the asset editors a separate application the editor opened, but didn't for two reasons. First, drag and drop operations would probably be harder to code, especially across multiple platforms. Second, and most importantly, I wanted the asset editor windows to always appear on top of the main window, and that wouldn't happen if they were external applications. I also like having the asset editors in their own windows because at any time you can maximize the window and get a nice big fullscreen view of the model, texture, or material you are looking at. This is naturally useful for scripts and shaders as well, where you are editing code and need lots of space. The font editor is shown, and supports both .ttf and bitmap fonts. I implemented my own .fnt format (I think this is an old Window 3.0 file extension, but it's mine now) and a .ttf to .fnt converter. As with all the Leadwerks 3 converters, the editor automatically handles the conversion for you, so you just drop your .ttf files into your project folder and you're done. I don't know of any cross-platform font maker programs, but I will publish the specification for our font format so they can add exporters. It always seems to work best when we just make our own optimal file formats and publish the spec for everyone to follow. Bringing Back Level DesignAs I approach our CSG brush implementation, I find myself growing quite excited over something that was originally an annoyance I did not want to deal with, but the users insisted we merge 3D World Studio with Leadwerks 3. When Leadwerks Engine 2 was designed, I thought CSG was obsolete once dynamic lighting became possible, and we no longer needed special geometry for optimal lightmapping. However, with the loss of CSG I think we lost a reference point in our virtual worlds. It was easy to drag out a room in a few minutes for playtesting. CSG is also fantastic for buildings, and can produce results in a fraction of the time it would take with 3ds max or another polygonal modeler. I'm very eager to see what CSG will look like in a modern implementation, especially if I can work hardware tessellation into it. CSG is an area of expertise for Leadwerks as a company, and I am glad to be drawing on that knowledge to bring something new and different to game design tools. I'm looking forward to a return of the lost art of level design, with a modern flair. Finally, here's a song for you that can be vaguely connected to the subject of this blog, from Alice In Chain's album "Facelift". (See what I did there?) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QXPA44Ebg_o

The only thing I know of is to reformat your hard drive, which I doubt you would want to do.

You can also adjust the joint stiffness. Yours is a lot better than my attempt:

That is really cool. Also, if it works in the engine, the same code will work with a real-life robot, if the other physical properties are similar enough, since the same equations are used for reality and our physics sim.

A 4x4 matrix does not contain euler rotations. The easiest way to get these is to call SetEntityMatrix with this matrix, then retrieve the entity's rotation.

I'm not making a poor man's unity. Things like AI, flowgraphs, and CSG are being built into the editor from the start. I don't believe in tacking on functionality after the fact. It never works as well as an integrated solution.

I will strongly consider this, since 2.5d games will be more common in L3. You can however use CalcBodyVelocity() to calculate what force you need to apply to keep bodies on a flat plane.

Lua makes a lot of that unnecessary. You can just load the scene and all Lua code for objects in the scene will be run. As for AI and gameplay mechanics, that's up to the programmer to code for whatever kind of game they are making.

Yes, but the character controller isn't really a physics body. It uses my own simple physics, so I can control it completely.

For character controllers, it's actually perfectly fine to constrain them yourself by just setting the Z position to 0. It won't hurt anything. I don't like having inconsistency like that, but if you want a solution right now, it will work. Don't do this with regular physics bodies.

I don't think I can provide as good of an experience with the editor if I am trying to code it to support a bunch of unspecified behavior. It would always have shortcomings and support less than people request, and the tacked-on functionality would not work as well as having it all built in from the beginning. I want the L3 editor to be more like 3D World Studio, in terms of design style.

Probably not. If I implemented some kind of plugin system, people would probably not be happy with whatever I did. it's easier just to decide what it should do and write it that way from the start, instead of trying to tack on additional functionality after the fact.