Edit My World
I fixed the bugs in the OctreeArea and moved on to the in game editor. I started to work on some of the multi-server features of the OctreeArea, but didn’t really test them. Mostly, I wanted to make sure that it worked in a master/slave server situation. It does now. I definitely have some thoughts on how to divvy up the octree nodes amongst the servers simulating them, but that may not be the hard part of the whole thing. The hard part will be figuring out how to quickly switch an object’s master server because when a node changes servers, all objects in that node need to change servers with it (otherwise, there is little or no performance gain).
The more interesting part of this update follows. I’m working on the user interface that will allow people to put the game worlds together. This is something that has always been planned to exist within the actual game as opposed to having a separate application. I have some fairly well defined ideas on how it’ll be set up, but I want to open it up to any suggestions from people who read this. So if you have any opinions, speak up now.
I’ve written up some basic ideas here, and asked on the forums here. But in simple terms, let me explain what I have in mind.
It’ll sort of be like a paint program. You have a toolbar that contains various icons (like the “pencil”, “paint can” and “air brush” of a paint program). The tools are organized by sections such as: select, object, area, and realm. Select will contain various means of selecting things (by clicking on them in your view, select from a list, and so on). The others will just have editing related to those game elements.
All game elements will also have a “properties” window. This is something very similar to what you get in windows when you right-click and select properties. Except, the purpose is to be able to manually edit all the properties of the item.
The main priorities for this are:
- Ease of use
- Speed of creating things
- Flexibility and extensibility (I should mention that the toolbar uses a plugin architecture)
Anyway, what functions would you like to see? What things do you think would work well? What features would help you creating a 3D virtual world?