- Joined
- Sep 18, 2010
- Messages
- 427
It's been a while since my last update. Despite continuing to work on SWG, the past few years have been busy for me with completing university and moving into full-time work. However, working from home this year has afforded me some extra time to really start making a push on getting the new tools in a releasable state.
The state of tools
Since its release, SIE has become the de-facto tool for most client-side editing, but has remained mostly unchanged since 2015. I actually first made SIE over a decade ago when I was only starting to get into development. As such its design does not scale to support creating the remaining tools we need and I have since been working on the new tool, SWB.
This tool addresses the gaps in functionality in SIE, and also supports some non-client tools to help those running servers. There has been too much progress to fully detail here, but I wanted to show some highlights from the year:
FBX mesh tools
Adding new content to SWG has been limited for a long time due to incomplete mesh tools. In particular it has not been possible to export/import skeletal meshes with new animations. With the FBX tools I've been working on both are now possible - we can import entirely novel models or export an existing model to tweak/add to its animations. The tool using FBX means that all of the popular 3D software (Blender,Max,Maya) are supported.
Importing:
Exporting:
The remaining support gap in these tools is for portals (buildings and their interiors).
Terrain editing
Terrain editing is mostly complete. The remaining work is UI related and I also need to re-create the tool that enabled me to generate the satelitte maps. One area this part of the tool progressed this year is providing faster real-time previews:
Snapshot/buildout editing
Snapshots are the files which determine object placement in the scene. This tool can also generate buildout files or scripts for Core3 servers:
Region editor
This editor is for editing the Core3 region files:
Renderer progress
A key part to making the editor usable is having it able to render the various kinds of objects in-game accurately (and I have a bit of fun trying to make it look better than SWG too
). This year I've improved the support for particles and added more complete skeletal mesh support (for the benefit of the FBX tools).
You can check out these improvements and more on Youtube:
Release when?
Some time this year.
The state of tools
Since its release, SIE has become the de-facto tool for most client-side editing, but has remained mostly unchanged since 2015. I actually first made SIE over a decade ago when I was only starting to get into development. As such its design does not scale to support creating the remaining tools we need and I have since been working on the new tool, SWB.
This tool addresses the gaps in functionality in SIE, and also supports some non-client tools to help those running servers. There has been too much progress to fully detail here, but I wanted to show some highlights from the year:
FBX mesh tools
Adding new content to SWG has been limited for a long time due to incomplete mesh tools. In particular it has not been possible to export/import skeletal meshes with new animations. With the FBX tools I've been working on both are now possible - we can import entirely novel models or export an existing model to tweak/add to its animations. The tool using FBX means that all of the popular 3D software (Blender,Max,Maya) are supported.
Importing:
Exporting:
The remaining support gap in these tools is for portals (buildings and their interiors).
Terrain editing
Terrain editing is mostly complete. The remaining work is UI related and I also need to re-create the tool that enabled me to generate the satelitte maps. One area this part of the tool progressed this year is providing faster real-time previews:
Snapshot/buildout editing
Snapshots are the files which determine object placement in the scene. This tool can also generate buildout files or scripts for Core3 servers:
Region editor
This editor is for editing the Core3 region files:
Renderer progress
A key part to making the editor usable is having it able to render the various kinds of objects in-game accurately (and I have a bit of fun trying to make it look better than SWG too
). This year I've improved the support for particles and added more complete skeletal mesh support (for the benefit of the FBX tools).You can check out these improvements and more on Youtube:
Release when?
Some time this year.
Last edited:
