3D Scene Editor

[Isak Andersson]

Hello fellows!

As I briefly mentioned in my introductory post I'm considering spending some time getting at least the start of a 3d scene editor into the Polycode IDE.

I wanted to know a little bit more about what's the plan so far and what's the relevant source files to look at. A few initial questions:

1. What is the desired file extension for a 3d scene (.entity3d?) and what kind of format should it be. It appears that the current 2D format is some kind of binary format.

2. Is the plan to have a separate 3d editor or some spooky combination of 2d and 3d?

Please provide some feedback and suggestion so that we can find a clear and shared vision of where the project should go!

Cheers,

Isak Andersson

[Ivan Safrin]

Hello!

That's great.

The idea is to have a completely separate 3D editor. I would advise delving into the 2d editor first, as it is currently the main focus and it still needs a lot of polish. The 3D editor would also re-use a lot of the controls, patterns and ideas from the 2d editor and for me it has been a kind of experimenting ground for how to approach the 3d editor. The 2d entity format is just Polycode's Object file, which can save and read XML files or my own "binary XML", which tries to save on space, but really is just the same tree. Most file types in Polycode use this system for saving and loading data (except for heavily binary data files like meshes, skeletons and animations).

So yeah, I would really advise getting familiar with the IDE and the editor system and look into the 2d editor. The code is kind of a mess in a lot of places as this was all written under fairly strict self-imposed deadlines, but I'm going to try to clean it up as much as I am able. Let me know if you have any questions about any parts of the code!

- Ivan

[Isak Andersson]

Apparently my reply didn't get posted, here we go again!

As we talked about in the IRC I'll work on the 3D editor first as that's what I currently need. I don't think it will be much of a problem though, since initially I'm just going to add the basics (adding objects, translate, scale, rotate and what ever is necessary, like multiple instances of an object entity or something). As it's just simple stuff it shouldn't be a problem to have both the 2d and 3d editors benefit from each others progress if I/we code it properly! But first i'm going to add the ability to change the default text editor to get familiar with the source.

One thing though, is there any documentation on the xml object format? Like what tags it has and stuff like that. If not, what is the relevant source files to look at?

Cheers,
Isak Andersson

[Lithium]

Sorry to revive an old thread, but I was wondering if anyone had made progress on a scene format. If not, I've already started working on a spec for a simplistic xml scene format to support placement of meshes and collision entities. I'd be happy to continue working on a scene format, but don't want to duplicate anyone's work.