New WED: Features

Dear JCL,

I`m a long-term Gamestudio user and working on various commercial products that use Gamestudio A8 as engine at the moment. As allrounder concentrated on modelling and level design tasks as core competence (example) : I`m wondering how the new WED is doing, because the current WED without the feature to display in real time while not being too exact with models hampers my work. I remember that you asked the community about important features that should be in the new WED. Is there a feature list where we can take a look on to give you some feedback?

Many people in the community changed their workflow from MED modeling to Blender to get better results and the better tool. For us it would be really nice if the new WED could handle Blender files directly or with a special importer. A good and working direct FBX import into WED could be a nice middle way here.

Are you able to give some news about the new WED`s features and a potential timeframe? It shouldn`t be too exact, but is it about six months, a year or two years? Are you planning to release the new WED with Gamestudio A9 (which would make sense in my eyes)?

It would be really nice to know some more facts about future plans regarding the editors.

Thanks a lot for your time.

Best regards,
- Robin Kindler

I second the import of Blender Files, but FBX would be ok, caus Blender can export FBX that are small than native Blender files.

For WED, i would see lot more the abilty to simply and quickly create our own panel in WED that we could activate / de actiavte or install/remove (somewhat like in Unity 3D) !
For example some people could create their own panel inside Wed for their game tools (special AI management, special Dungeon kit pieces alignment , own custom entities and attributes management etc ... etc ...)

It's just some idea !

On the fly material editor!

+1. Very important.

+2

+3

if new WED is based on engine dll as mentioned in forecast, and will be really a WYSIWYG editor, it will be an easy thing. (even my stupid MB editor has this feature, unfortunately without material effects because of version limits)

On the fly material editor!

You mean select an object, than see properties on a right panel and
a button to change the material ?
I would say better : a simple shader selector and skins selectors
for a model ( instead of programming this each time ) !

Shaders can be a part of a material, yes. But I really mean "material" which is more than just shaders.

And not a button alone... I want some menu with sliders for all the fixed stuff, and some selector for .fx files.

When I'm fine I want to be able to store the new material in some sort of material list where I can later choose the material again in case I need it for anoter object.

There was a great material editor made in a 3DGS contest some time ago that could do what you want.

But i agree,
having it on WED, would be lot more friendly and fast in terms of workflow.
This applies to shaders also , we could have some shader list with the most common shaders and just click to assign it to a model
Perhaps MDL7 ould need some little improvments ?

do you mean MatsEd by fogman?


+4

How about a new lighting engine? One similar to the (amazing) lightfrog system we saw a while ago? I look at some of the competition and the lighting systems are just spot on. Unity, Leadwerks, and other game engines have great looking lighting systems in place which are far more than capable of being considered "professional" quality.

Yes you are 100% right.
A level looks with the right light so much fucking better, you cant imgaine what I tried to get this quality like in unity but never got more than 40 FPS and my pc is just awesome....

i7 4X3,4GHz, 8GB Ram, ATI HD 6850....

- will the new WED be able to be extended using plugins?
- will it be possible to hook plugins written in Lite-C?
- will we be able to write WED plugins using engine functions?
- which langauges will be supported?
- will WED include on the fly physics, particle and material editors?
- will it be possible to access/extend WED directly from Lite-C/C++ script without writing a plugin DLL? (see also #2)

Unity, Leadwerks, and other game engines have great looking lighting systems in place which are far more than capable of being considered "professional" quality.

For lightening, indeed , it's very very outdated.
But the strenght i find is the script to do lot of things ,and that you can produce any little type of game easily, all the documentation and examples

If you target visual lightening, you'll have ot work on yourself, it's not part of the package.
Like WED that is an outdated world editor, but depending on the game size you plan, you can make a game indeed !

Some people just make their own editor like the game SuperCan, but i can't imagine making some sort of world editor like that, i would prefer to make a game than putting 2 or 3 years for such editor, and within 3 years i could get borred, or let down game making to mobile ?
So i wouldn't take the risk and would switch to another engine giving me right now what i need.

It's only a matter of what you really need right now, not tomorrow
(because tomorrow , is always tomorrow ...)