After a long search for a good terrain editor I ended up with A.L.E. (advanced landscape editor). I was inspired by its simplicity and the WYSIWYG way of editting. The trouble was that I couldn't display its textures in Ogre correctly (only as one large texture). So, I decided to make may own editor (at least to create the splatting textures). The idea is to create an editor with a non-existent learning curve, for stupid people like me
Textures are applied on the position of the cursor (the long thing in the middle) using one of the brushes. When all is finished, the .material file and the 'alpha masks' can be saved and ready to be used in for instance, the terrain demo. It is still a bit buggy, the save, import and property functions are not implemented yet, but here is a first picture.
It is still very premature and it was only intended to be a supplement to other tools (for example A.L.E. , so no deformation I'm afraid).
I can deliver a first cut version if all my initial requirements are implemented and the code is cleaned up a bit.
After that, I guess I´m ´forced´ to expand it to my own needs (vision an editor that creates terrain, water, sky, wheather, static geometry, fire, smoke and connect it to physics, audio, scripts, etc. etc., ... and of course a sceneloader to load it all). This may take quite some time...
Looks great!!!
When can we download this thing???
I will be happy to use it! And our russian comunity too.
When will you finish it! Please mail me mega-coders@mail.ru ! I will wait !
Last edited by Psih*** on Sat Feb 26, 2005 2:42 pm, edited 1 time in total.
It is far from ready. I have setup a schedule which leads me to june 2005 before I have something useful. It will include terrain texturing, water, sun, moon, wheather effects, misc. effects, static geometry, etc. At a later stage (second half 2005) I will hook it to the Yake platform for audio, physics and event integration. The editor will export to the .scene file format (that´s the plan at least).
Well, another picture then... I´ve used a simple fragment program to simulate the sun blind effect which you get when you look into the sun (call of duty, anyone). The ugly sun is just a placeholder btw.
Nice! I'm still interested in this and it's sort of what I envisioned making myself, even the parts that you call "expanding it" (I was even thinking a cegui editor, etc.). similar to the tools for Torque. I suggested an add-on project because then others could look at it and possibly help out. If the tool was made in a flexible way, then others could "expand it" as well giving the tool even more features.
Otherwise if only you code it then it may be missing some features that I want and then I have to program a whole scene manager myself. I just thought that this sounded like a good project that I could possibly contribute to... well either this or Yake.
It was intended to satisfy my personal requirements, so it is rather specific and will indeed lack certain features. Terrain deformation for instance will not be implemented because I have other tools for that. For the time being I'll keep on developing it on my own (also for the learning experience).
@currentloops
I have tried the terragen demo and I own a (legal) copy of Bryce 5.
I don't intend to create some kind of clone. The editor is for creating realtime rendered terrains which can be exported and loaded into my to-be-developed game.
@Spookyboo - Looking better and better mate, great work;)
I agree with the guys here, there's a few very promising terrain editors in production right now, and it seems absolute madness in this opensource environment not to get some collaboration going. You could all combine forces, share your ideas and existing code, and work on some uber terrain editor together!
You are right. I will abandon this project and going to collaborate with someone else. Currently there are at least 3 other peope doing the same. I´ve already had contact with 2 of them. My opinion is that the editor of psyclonist looks the most promissing to me. That doesn´t mean that Lucky Luciano´s editor isn´t good, but it is dedicated to the PLSM2. If we want to have an uber editor I´m betting on a SceneManager independant editor with an open architecture. So I will:
- stitch the loose ends of my editor and drop it somewhere for downloading (the alpha masks it produces can be used)
- upgrade to VC7
- join psyclonist´s team (if he allows me to)
