Friday 15 August 2014

Widget Day

I spent the day integrating and repairing the new Editor Widget system which will add additional controls for entity manipulation.  Getting the rotation widget to behave itself in a real-world setting was pretty tough, but it is settled now and working fine.  No previews at this stage, due to severe programmer art.  Showed the internal team and the feedback was to add four new buttons on the widget to quickly switch between Position, Rotation, Scale and Entity Properties. 

The last one is a hint that we are changing around how the left and right mouse buttons work, so I will be curious how many users I can upset with this one! That is, I will be curious of the feedback when we release this enhancement to the editing capabilities.

At the end of the day it was integrated, but for some baffling and foggy reason the mouse pointer is not lining up with the widget, making gadget selection very horrible. At it's the end of a 9 hour stint with only a salad for company, I will leave this one for a new day when my fresh brain can solve it in five minutes.

I did manage some quick light mapping work somehow, and got textures and shadows to cooperate so here is a very early sneak peek of ambient occlusion with a low quality texture and no special shading effects.  You will notice however the creases are properly shaded to create nice inter-object lighting.
 

The next step on this module would be to add normals, specular, illumination and perhaps even metallic cube map reflection, depending on time and final shader performance.  Not sure whether the occlusion map texture needs to be carried into the pre-bake process but I have a spare texture slot so it's no big deal if the answer is yes.

In other news we have started our researches into Steam multiplayer and general SDK, and have made some great construction kit progress too. Both too early to show shots, but getting closer! Until Monday, have a great weekend and happy creatin!

7 comments:

  1. I for one will rejoice in mouse button changes. The current mouse button functionality is just counter-productive. Having a proper widget and new mouse controls would be great. My only question is are we going to be getting the widget in normal editor mode? If so, are we also getting a perspective editor view? Having a widget is great, but if we can only use it in top-down editor mode then we are still not quite there. And I really despise the test-mode f( editor setting so please tell me we don't have to go all the way in to that mode to get perspective editing. Oh, pretty please.

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  2. no offense, but those rocks look kinda soft, like putty. nice otherwise

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  3. How do I get the single stage undo feature to work?

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  4. I'm not sure what you mean by metallic cube map reflection, but I would love to see a metallic channel in the engine. I'm trying to create metal objects, and diffuse+specular just doesn't look right.

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  5. Looks like things are coming along nicely. Keep up the awesome work Lee and co. Regarding the widget, it's amazing how a 'simple' thing that we take for granted, can involve such mind melting mathematics in the 3D world; I certainly know I wouldn't be able to do it. You have my admiration Lee. =)

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  6. any chance of a visible grid ? thx

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