Another Widget Day

The introduction of the widget has the potential to upset quite a few users as we fundamentally change the interface used to select, place, modify and delete entities. This transformation could be even greater when we consider adding the ability to 'mouse roam' over the terrain in edit mode, which will remove the top down restriction currently present. You could almost call the top-down way of editing a signature feature of FPSC and the potential could be that we make the editor 'more difficult' as we create more of a 'modeller' flavor.  To this end we are being very careful how to re-design the editor controls and taking extra time to do this.

A year ago I would have shown you a current screenshot, but as some users might take offence at programmer art and early design, you will simply have to imagine the state of play from the nuggets written here.  At present the system calls up the widget which allows the entity to be positioned, rotated and scaled, and to call up the properties panel. The right mouse button was being used to extract the entity from the map, and duplicate the entity, and also to delete the entity once finished.  The new suggestion is that we re-purpose the right mouse button for a mouse-look to control the navigation of the camera through the editor, and move the controls over to the widget buttons. Time and testing will tell if this is the right course to take.

Managed to get a few other tweaks sorted today so it was not 'all' widget stuff, including fixing the vertex corruption of the shotgun soldier, and also reducing the size of his weapon a little. As you can see in the shot, the gun is a little too big for him!

Ravey and Simon have performed Stirling work today with the conquest of the Steam SDK and the introduction of layers to the Construction Kit.  Again, too early for screenshots but exciting advances in functionality happening.

My next task over in my last hour of the day is to get the ragdoll system to include hierarchically correct bones for non-standard custom character models, such as those converted from ANIMER so you can bring in more characters without waiting for the core Reloaded team to produce a new set of characters. Expect these improvements to be part of the V1.009 build due later this month (if things go as well as today).