Don't you like my idea?

Trikko · Post by **Trikko** » Mon Mar 19, 2007 11:13 am

I've make a proposal but mentors don't like it... If you ever used ogre to do some apps or game i bet you know you have to use a lot of command line tools. Every time you need to convert a mesh you need to use exporters and upgraders, and as far as i know they doesn't works for multiple files. This is very frustranting for me. My idea is to write a cross-platform visual application with plugin support to integrate all tools needed by ogre. A sort of Ogre Toolbox. It should make more confortable, easy and fast too (many command line tools take a lot of time to load/unload ogre itself every time...) and we can have a single framework that support all operations you need. We can add more useful function (for example preview meshes too see result immediatly). Moreover if you want to write a new plugin (to support a new 3d file format for example) you just need to implement a small interface... I know this seems to be a useless app, but i think it can increment a lot ogre productivity.

What do you think about it? Is it a real useful or useless app?

Thanks in advance for replies...

Post by **Wolfmanfx** » Mon Mar 19, 2007 11:53 am

I think the rejected cause that is no competion cause to make a GUI Frontend even with mesh preview is not the aim of SoC its a way too simple and there was already a guy that make a gui for the mesh converter.

Trikko · Post by **Trikko** » Mon Mar 19, 2007 12:44 pm

Wolfmanfx wrote:I think the rejected cause that is no competion cause to make a GUI Frontend even with mesh preview is not the aim of SoC its a way too simple and there was already a guy that make a gui for the mesh converter.

I won't write a frontend to already existing tool! But a framework... By the way, no problems probably i'm wrong about its usefulness

stoneCold · Post by **stoneCold** » Mon Mar 19, 2007 12:58 pm

I agree with Wolfmanfx, that this project might not fit as an gSoC project, but I'd like to add that you are not tied to gSoC.
Simply start your project nonetheless, you'll see if it comes out handy and useful so you can share it back to the community.

greetings

Trikko · Post by **Trikko** » Mon Mar 19, 2007 1:19 pm

stoneCold wrote:I agree with Wolfmanfx, that this project might not fit as an gSoC project, but I'd like to add that you are not tied to gSoC.
Simply start your project nonetheless, you'll see if it comes out handy and useful so you can share it back to the community.

greetings

Probably i'll do, but obviusly there is a priority on payed works

On my spare time i'll work on it...

syedhs · Post by **syedhs** » Mon Mar 19, 2007 1:29 pm

Command line can actually be more powerful because you can put them in a shell script/batch file.

Aladrin · Post by **Aladrin** » Mon Mar 19, 2007 1:48 pm

syedhs wrote:Command line can actually be more powerful because you can put them in a shell script/batch file.

For anything that doesn't require human interference to work, I definitely prefer command line tools. Even if I'm not doing batch conversions. I don't know about "can be more powerful", though, because they have different strengths. There's nothing stopping someone from making a batch-convert tool GUI, and the same for making manual modifications in command-line mode. It's just not nearly as quick and easy.

Trikko · Post by **Trikko** » Mon Mar 19, 2007 1:52 pm

syedhs wrote:Command line can actually be more powerful because you can put them in a shell script/batch file.

They are slow on batch. If app is well done you need no more command line. By the way we have not to drop command line support. If this app will be plugin-driver there will be a small plugin "sdk" to interface converters with app. We can use the same "sdk" to build a generic command line tool (or we can add a switch to run the whole app as commandline or guibased), that will be more easy to integrate in script/batch file that current one becouse it will be an all-in-one commandline tool... Mantainance of this tool in this case should be more easy too that mantain many different command tools.

Post by **pjcast** » Mon Mar 19, 2007 3:07 pm

You should take a look at one of the other framework GUI editors that have been started.. GOOF Editor, Ogre Studio, etc. And look at contributing, too many tool projects, and nothing completed has always been a problem

Trikko · Post by **Trikko** » Mon Mar 19, 2007 3:13 pm

pjcast wrote:You should take a look at one of the other framework GUI editors that have been started.. GOOF Editor, Ogre Studio, etc. And look at contributing, too many tool projects, and nothing completed has always been a problem

They are editors, it's not what i mean to do

Post by **haffax** » Mon Mar 19, 2007 3:15 pm

To add to this: A versatile pluggable command line tool is already in the making and will soon be published. It has tranform, info, reorganise and merge tools built-in already and provides the tool plugins with command line parsing and all the tedious things that usually gets in the way of the actual work.

To me a GUI is unimportant for this kind of tools. Imho find and xargs does a better and more versatile job at batching, than a GUI ever can.

Trikko · Post by **Trikko** » Mon Mar 19, 2007 3:26 pm

haffax wrote:To add to this: A versatile pluggable command line tool is already in the making and will soon be published. It has tranform, info, reorganise and merge tools built-in already and provides the tool plugins with command line parsing and all the tedious things that usually gets in the way of the actual work.

Ok then! Good to know, i was waiting for it

syedhs · Post by **syedhs** » Mon Mar 19, 2007 3:55 pm

Trikko wrote:
syedhs wrote:Command line can actually be more powerful because you can put them in a shell script/batch file.
They are slow on batch.

How slow is slow? The only real cost is forking (and closing) the process and most of the command line job is not done in tight rendering loop, rather it is used to prepare or bake or something like that. So speed is not critical, feature is.

If app is well done you need no more command line.

Well GUI application which accomplish the same task as command line is a lot harder to code. Of course you will have to make it user friendly (and not slow), otherwise it does not give the clear advantage over command line tool.

By the way we have not to drop command line support. If this app will be plugin-driver there will be a small plugin "sdk" to interface converters with app. We can use the same "sdk" to build a generic command line tool (or we can add a switch to run the whole app as commandline or guibased), that will be more easy to integrate in script/batch file that current one becouse it will be an all-in-one commandline tool... Mantainance of this tool in this case should be more easy too that mantain many different command tools.

That is a good thought but I am not convinced

IMHO, GUI is more appropriate for other jobs like browsing for Ogre mesh and subsequently display it. Or in Windows, you may do some shell programming which enable the special context menu for .mesh file. You right click on a mesh file, there is an option to:-
1) view
2) upgrade
3) show some useful stats such as animation state, tris # etc.

Trikko · Post by **Trikko** » Mon Mar 19, 2007 4:02 pm

syedhs wrote:...

We can close this forum thread, project is aborted!