Hi,
I was discussing editors with some friends of mine, and we were all very stupified with the current situation whereby 3 very good editors are being made in parallel…why?!
It would be very cool if you all got together and made just ONE awsome editor. Im sure if you did this earlier, you would have made it by now…
Ive played around with tGiants, and ive seen screenshots from OutRunner’s. And OMG, the two are so similar and both equally cool.
So please, if you want to help the users of jME (and the developers in turn), please get together and discuss something.
OutRunner is making his in SWT, and I know tGiant wants his to be SWT too. Im not sure about Badmi’s.
Ive heard that tGiant wants a terrain editor in his, well OutRunner has one…so you can see alot of similarities between the three!
Badmi, you have a “Run” option whereby the scene made in your editor can be run as an application, well OutRunner wants that too.
Anyways, that was my rant… 
DP
Sorry to bring this up (might be wrong place) but what’s the state of the current scene editors in production? I noticed tGiants editor is not available anymore. Have they been merged? Have some of them died out? I’ll be needing a simple scene editor soon to put together some 2d top down levels and it looks like people have been putting together quality work and I wanted to get the current state.
Having a single editor being developed by 4 coders each taking portions of a feature list would definitely be the most productive option. It certainly beats 3 or 4 competing editors. I was looking into writing my own editor but feel that would be wasted time. I strongly believe that now is the time to unify to keep us, as a community from wasting individual effort.
Would a new section in the forum for Level Editor be appropriate? This would encourage the collaboration.
Four Java monkeys working together is better than one.
I just wonder:
- Are they gonna merge? And if so, is there any plans of a sourceforge project or the like?
- Otherwise, is any of them opensource so one could continue work on it?
And, if I may ask so: how do you write a level editor without a level format? Things like bsp and portals are on the list for 0.10 IIRC, so make sure you consider this in your plannings 
Hmm, this is good for BSP, but not for portals, so... well you're true :)
Chman
My levels are small enough polygon wise you could just load the whole thing at once. THey aren’t like Half Life 2 levels or anything like that. Maybe instead of level I should call it a board since that’s more of what it is. (Think subspace map if you ever placed that game) I just needed an easy way to place stuff around the scene. I guess I could just fire up milkshape and and do it in there and export the whole thing as a model. I could even just do it by hand at this point. I’m not quite there yet so I’ll deal with it when I get to it.
I just ordered a WD 74 gb Raptor drive that should be coming in today as my primary drive so I’ll be spending the day reinstalling, reformatting and getting jME back up and running
Hi there to all jME users and developers.
I did some thinking the last couple of weeks and thought it was about time that someone start writing a decent jME scene editor. Because I already have a jMe Editor out there it might as well be me. My question to you now is, what would you as community like to see in such an advanced peace of sofware ?
- Scene creation, which include all spatial type of entities.
- RenderStates. Adding render states to a spatial.
- Selecting and transforming spatials in runtime.
- Selecting a spatial with some sort of tree component.
- Navigating the scene with some sort of controller.
- Adding controllers to a spatial.
- Removing any of the above object.
- Saving the scene to some format. Incase this format is going to be .jme format then we will have to look into extending the format to cater for the whole scene and all type associated with the scene, for example the renderstates and controllers!
Another question I have is, should this editor be completely in jme code or should the GUI be writen in some sort of GUI system example, Swing, SWT, etc?
I want to make this editor exactly what the community want! Please help me with any ideas that comes to mind?
Thanks
tGiant
A very appreciated initiative! A powerful scene editor would be useful for most of us.
I’d really like to be able to:
- Create a scene and attach geometry, terrain and models.
- Edit properties of the sptatials, such as renderstates, scale and position.
- Attach light states.
- Attach skybox, skydome, lensflare, particle system.
- Then save it all to the jme format.
And maybe a way to integrate the physics system to it all, e.g. a way to set the gravity, and apply mass to geometry.
Spatial controllers doesn’t feel that important to me, as that falls more into the pure logic of the game.
Good navigation is important, but since I havn’t used a lot of modelling software I can’t refer to anything or give any tips
Even though it looks like jME is going to get a moster GUI soon, I still think you should go with Swing or SWT, because the jME GUI will probably always lack a few of the features a scene editor needs, e.g. a file chooser.
Thanks!
/Per
How would the applying mass thing work? My objects have mass right now but only because I have a class which extends trimesh and I added those physical attributes.
Is there some standard way of adding mass to spatials that I missed??
hehe, yes, use the physicsSystem! (shameless plug!)
Instead of dealing with spatials all over the place, use PhysicsObjects which have a mass. Or an even better option would be to create an "Entity" class.
Spatials are rather "low" level things. I know quite a few people here have been mixing things, but a spatial is purely meant to represent a graphical object in space. Nothing more, nothing less. So mass, health, abilities…etc should never be put in Spatial.
There are two reasons for this:
- So that you can keep logically seperate things really seperate.
- Future additions like BSP nodes require that each triangleStrip be a Node and node extends Spatial. If spatial contains a hashmap or properties or an extra arraylist. The memory usage is going to go through the roof.
DP
Only for me to learn about your intentions, tGiantLabs: is there a difference between a scene editor and a level editor (aka map editor)?
hehe, yes, use the physicsSystem! (shameless plug!)
I was actually thinking of moving to the new physicsSystem but not sure how easy it would be to get it to do what I need.
I have a ship which I fly around in the xz plane (it can only move in two dimensions) and it has a terminal velocity. Can I do this using the physicsSystem you put together?
Right now when you hit the 'W' key it applies a force in the direction the ship is facing, the 'S' key a force opposite to that and the 'A' and 'D' key just rotate the ship.
yes, this is very trivial to do in the current physics system.
Terminal velocity is automatically determined by the force applied. However, for rotation, your going to have to do that by hand as we dont support interia…yet!
But definetly, convert it, its very easy to use and the collision system/response…well, enough said!
DP
Just one more question. Do you use the collision detection built into jME or does ODE do the collision detection and collision reponse??
Regardless … I think you convinced me to switch over.
I’ll give it a shot tonight. Although it is friday … i should probably go out and do something other than code … 8-O
it uses ODE’s own. However, in my game i use a combination of both.
You see, ode doesn’t do triangle accurate collision detection, but jme does. So i see if a collision has occured on the ode level, and then follow it up by a jme collision detection. If both are successful, the i let ode continue with the physical response. If jme isn’t, then i cancel the ode response using the CollisionAction class in the physics system.
Anyway, i want to impress you by something:
PhysicsSystem ship;
public void initPhysics() {
PhysicsWorld.create();
ship = new PhysicsObject(shipGeom, 50f);
PhysicsWorld.getInstance().addObject(ship);
}
public void update(float time) {
PhysicsWorld.getInstance().update();
}
This is how easy it is to create an object with full collision detection/response (ofcourse this is very simple and you probably want more control).
and to add a force in a particular direction:
Vector3f forceDir = new Vector3f(0, 0, -1);
forceDir.mult(1000);
ship.addForce(forceDir);
It really is very simple and very powerful! I dont leave home without it! ;)
Hehe, you think you have it bad! i have to work from 5pm till 10pm on a friday and saturday! Go see a movie or somethin, "Meet the Fockers" is supposed to be helarious. Or team america, thats a good one!
DP
You’ve convinced me I’m working on adding it in now. How does ODE do proper collision response if it doesn’t do triangle level collision detection? Don’t you need to know the triangle you hit so you can get the proper normal to compute where you bounce and stuff?
Hi batman.ac
Sorry for replying only now, but I don’t have internet access over
the weekends.
In my eyes I would say a scene editor and level are the same thing.
Scene is just the way spatial object are organized in a form of a tree.
You can have one scene for every level.
I think we should think of a way to save a scene as a level for jME!
So is some sort of bsp compiler planned to be part of the editor?
I’m asking this since I still think that we should try to keep the various threads together. Maps/Levels/Scenes may use technologies which have impact on the render engine, the scene format, the map editor…
Oops, that was me!
tGiant