Editor additional functionality add-in

[Rick]

wchris's request and mac's response gave me an idea that I wonder if anyone would find value in and if Josh wouldn't mind if I did. Also if maybe someone thinks I'm over-thinking it.

 

Some people want to add some functionality to the editor. Generally your only option is Lua scripts. This can be slightly awkward for functionality that makes sense to run when a button is pressed since we don't really have that option.

 

My idea was to create 1 model script that acts as a network server but only listening locally on a specific port. You would drag this into your scenes when building your scene., and it generally would be removed when you are 100% complete. Inside this script you would connect commands to functions. These functions would do the editor functionality you are looking for.

 

There would also be an external windows application. This application on startup would connect locally to the same port your lua script is listening on. This program can have anything on it. Buttons, drop downs, whatever helps give and support the kind of functionality someone would want. This would send commands and parameters for those commands to the Lua server script which would in turn fire the Lua functions you've defined in the editor and at that point anything you can do in Lua can be done.

 

The lua script could inventory all objects in the scene and send them to the client so the client can have the names of all the objects as well to support some functionality around that.

 

Just wondering if anyone else would have ideas around some functionality they could add if this was setup.

[Gabriel]

Hi, yes I have an idea for the convenience and my laziness ^ ^.

 

do not we say that the first quality of a informatician is laziness?

 

well then I suggest one menu item "Pack resources", this menu pack only what is used in the scene (sandbox) or they zip the files or copy them to a directory.

 

I think it would save hours of maintenance.

 

Gabriel

[Rick]

That's a really good idea! I wonder if all that information is available from the scene itself from inside Lua. Note that with this process this application would only have access to the stuff Lua has access to and nothing more. So it would need model names, and material and texture files to go along. Will have to see if that's all available via the object table in Lua or if it can be retrieved by LE functions from the entities. I would think it's possible as you could get the material(s) attached to an entity, and then get the texture files inside the materials.