level editor?

[the_cX]

i submitted a proposal for a level editor project for the soc 2006. please read the thread here first: http://www.ogre3d.org/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=20279

it seemed to be received pretty okay by some members of the forum, but alas it was not accepted.

which i think is sad. i think we could have had THE ogre level editor right now - a great one.

anyways, im reticent to bring this up. i felt like this was such an obvious necessity and i feel silly 'begging' ogre to let me do it - someones bitter! of course if i had nothing to do, thats fine, but i have to make money over the summer to live, you understand. ive come into this forum many times about to post something, but end up just saying 'ahhh, forget it.' but its the middle of the night right now and im high on caffeine so ill throw it out there ffs.

id be overwhelmingly motivated to work on such a project, but i am not very motivated at all to go start this process again.

so if i see 'enough' people respond with interest, ill write a proposal. if i dont, then meh, i dont care.

the editor i would suggest would sound very close to the one in the old thread, especially the stuff about the plugin architecture.

however, some extra points/changes id like to make are:

• i would use wxwidgets and straight c++. c# is beautiful and i love it the most, especially for tools. but really we need an editor that isnt dependant on an 'unsupported' c# ogre wrapper. there were times when OgreDotNet and MOGRE felt like they would never stop being worked on. but now we know that this is a very inevitable reality. so wxwidgets + c++, you win by default. cross compatibility will be maintained.
  
  i have very extensive hci background. ive been working under an hci professor for the last year doing intensive user centered design while constructing a new tool to facilitate low fidelity user interface prototype construction and deployment. i am coauthored on a paper that has made it into sig chi conference this year (less than 5% of submissions accepted). blah, anyways, whats significant here is that i would make it absolutely certain that all parties within the ogre community interested in such a tool would be very much involved in the design process. the feature set and user interface of such a tool would be derived from the suggestions of these concerned parties, the ogre team, mentors, and myself. usability evaluation would be completed on early prototypes of the software to identify and correct usability issues so that they dont come back to haunt users later (when theyre more expensive to fix!).
  
  completion. simple as that. agree to this project, and come end of august, you have a completed, ingame, cross compatible level editor that everyone has helped design and is happy with, PERIOD. no really...this is a huge point...PERIOD!

like i said...interested? say something. and ill write a proposal and explain more about this tool, why im qualified, and make you have confidence in me to come through.

if not,

kthxbai

[syedhs]

Have you submitted the application? The application has been closed already - 26 March 2007.

[gazzell]

I think its a great idea.
Ogre is a great engine, fast, easy to use and have a lot of ports and so on...
But althougt the engine itself is AAA+, the existing tools (with some exceptions like oFusion) are little usable. Most of them are unfinished/deprecated, which makes them unusable in a real project.
In other words, Ogre is a great engine, but what it really need are more and better tools to support data-driven designs from the point of view of application designer.
What i think its needed in a editor:
- Create and manage scenes (.scene, .osm or any format which can hold user data)
- Add/remove/edit individual objects in scene and scene parameters.
- Show and edit scene tree
- Other capabilities (material editor, shader editor, etc) via plugins, so anyone colud program a plugin and add it to a repository. This could make possible to have plugins that could handle physics, path edition, scripting languaje for IA, etc.
- Export scenes with user data provided by these plugins
- Any way of increasing scene performance and edit it (octree /bsp editor or whatever)

Actually, OgreStudio looks very promissing, but its still too unfinished for using it (did you consider helping to develop it instead of making your own editor??)

J.

[sinbad]

Bear in mind that we had 20 times the number of applications we could actually accept last year - not being accepted doesn't mean we didn't want to do it, just there were other applications that were more highly rated.

I'm afraid you've missed the SoC 2007 deadline, Google closed student applications yesterday.

[the_cX]

op
im silly.

well, gl to the applicants.

[hagenkaiser]

whats up now?
dou you want to revive the project now for 08?

[nanocell]

It will be great if we can have the Level Editor + OgreCollada developed in SoC this year. (BTW, xavier's OgreCollada viewer is written in wxWidgets and C++ so taking that and developing a fully fledged editor would be good, or starting from scratch wouldn't be too bad either).

I'll cast a vote for this project too .