Ogre Forums

So I just wanted to showcase my new project based on Ogre: Bloom Editor!

Many people spend hours and days of their life writing texts. And before bloom, everybody did it using basically the same interface which was created all the way back in 1967: some letters of 1 color (usually black) on a background of another color (usually white). Sure, it gets the job done, but hey, it's 2011 goddamnit! We make games that look better than the real world, why not make a REALLY beautiful text editor, which will use the latest advancements in 3D technology to put the fun back in writing? (well you get what I mean). Sure there are a couple of "mood" editors out there, but they just basically make the editor fullscreen and sometimes add a background image. That's nothing compared to an actual 3d rendering- based editor!

So, behold: http://www.bloomeditor.com

The first page contains a short film that shows exactly what it's about, and under downloads there are binaries that should work on any latest computer.

(Might as well embed the movie here also)
[youtube]ZcMntzn46Ds[/youtube]

Waiting for your comments and (hopefully not, but who are we kidding?) bug reports!

Wow, the video looks nice! I'm downloading right now! Will be back when I've tinkered with it a bit.

Edit: It's a lot of fun to play with, and I think it would be an amazing effect for videos! But it needs a lot of functionality before it can be a good text editor (my main thoughts are cursor control and shortcut keys.

All in all, looks very promising. I especially love some of the themes!

You are very right about it having too few functions right now. My experiences from the beta testing show that it needs a lot of functions, and not only because people use a lot of functions all the time, but apparently, they have different habbits. For example some may use Ctrl+Arrow keys to move around the text, some never even heard of them. Some are using tabs to indent everything, others use mouse to move the indent-setting of the text. Some select text in a special way, some use Ctrl+D all the time to copy the whole line.. (doesn't work everywhere)... A lot of work left to do, but I appreciate your support!

And the themes, oh, the themes are just the beginning! When I think about that the editor is based on ogre and actually any 3D scenes/materials/shaders can be used to create a good theme, I start jiggling like Craig Ferguson when Secretariat comes out For exmaple, think water effects, fire effects, foliage scenes, nice space scenes, beams, well in fact, everything! This is gonna be amazing...

Interesting. If you create hooks on scintilla (popular text editor control) and render the glyphs from the information based off on that library, i think it could easily be integrated as a view in notepad++ with all of its functionality

I will check it out, but it seems that integrating into scintilla can take more time than just implementing all the basic features, primarily because Scintilla (I assume) uses the standard api for rendering text, which is redraw-based. Since Bloom is based on Ogre, it is object-based, objects are moved only when needed, and redrawing is done every frame anyway... Plus all the per/letter effects

Cool... I Like It. Would be it source opened?

This looks awesome!

will it feature code completion?

Awesome! I've always wanted something like this.

Thanks!
Do you think it should have code completion? I was originally thinking that this was for sort of "creative" writing. Because a code editor should most of the time be embedded in some IDE, and really have A LOT of features. (Which will take a long time to implement )
So do you consider writing code in this, or is it better left just for writers?

I would say what you have now would be best for creative writing. I've once imagined a 3D editor for coding as well, but that would have to be specific to a certain environment and not generic like yours. Do add lots of customization, though. Different kinds of backgrounds and animations would be nice, since you want the mood to match the contents of your writing. Be careful not to make the backgrounds too flashy, because that will distract the writer.

Couple this with a good music randomizer with good sound samples... and you're done. If you manage to create a nice atmosphere for creative writing, this will totally rock.

Your Bloom text editor is a nice looking project

It's an original concept, and I like the visuals. They are really beautiful.
How is it going to work, are you getting a random background each time you start the editor, is it going to change every now and then, or do you choose your theme yourself?
It might stimulate peoples imagination, but I think you also have to be careful that people aren't distracted from their writing. Otherwise it could work counter productive.
Also, I think you need enough varied scenes. It won't stay very inspiring for long if it shows you the same 5 scenes over and over again, or will it? Actually I'm not sure.

Yeah, this is really innovative! And I think it does give you a lot more inspiration to write!! Will follow this project!

This is what the future is all about!!!

Hi there,
I’m using your 3d text from file script in conjunction with the cinematic opening title sequence tutorial on aetuts.com and I seem to be having the problem of the text documents reading from right to left. All of my text comes in backwards, even though the layer names do display the text in the proper direction.
I tried putting a camera in and rotating it 180 degrees around to the back, but the layers are not just flipped in a 3d space, they are reading in reverse. I don’t see a control in the script for text direction, so hopefully there’s some obvious explanation for this.
Thanks

Just to keep you guys updated, new version is out!
Many new themes, featuring for example a Hydrax/SkyX theme
More text editor features are there, like text selecting, scrollbar, etc. It is still very basic, but has almost all Notepad functionality.
Full Unicode support is there as well.
A less obnoxious video is coming soon, as well as more advertisement, beta-testing and some bugfixes on the website, but I wanted to give you guys the first look.
This is now a commercial project (with a free demo), but PM me here and if you have a reasonably old (3 months at least) account here (on ogre forums) with some useful posts, I'll send you the license with the "Ogre-developer-discount" (for free, that is ). (Just register on the bloomeditor.com first and tell me your e-mail there, licenses are added to accounts there.)