MV3D Development Blog

Hopefully, I’ll update this weekend or early next week with some screen shots of the world editor. There still isn’t too much to see really. The toolbar code is more or less finished, and I have a few plugins done– select item from a list and select objects by clicking on them. I also made some button graphics and got them to work. The screenshots are worth it just to see the horrible programmer art on the buttons. I’m starting to work on an object movement plugin and then will do object rotation. At that point, the tools will at least start to be useful because you’ll be able to move objects around and rotate them. It won’t be incredibly useful until there is a “create object” button. For that, I need an asset browser and I’ll need to do some work on associating object code with assets.

One problem that I’ve been trying to solve all week is how to signify which objects are selected. Part of the problem is that not all selectable things have a visual representation or even a position. The other part is that I can’t see an easy way to do it in Ogre. My first idea was to display the object’s bounding box. It would be crude, but it would work on things large and small (though not on invisible things). Unfortunately, it seems the code needed to draw a box on the screen in Ogre is several hundred lines long.. And the example is in C++, so it’s not clear if I can do it in Python. So that’s not worth it. Also, you can turn on drawing bounding boxes, but it’s either for all objects or none.

The next thought was to make the selected object brighter or semi-transparent. I can find no way to do that within Ogre. I briefly considered attaching some sort of particle effect to whatever you selected, but if you are selecting 500 things in an area, that could get a little slow. So it looks like I’ll have to resort to making some sort of semitransparent image that I’ll stick on things that are selected.

In any case, showing what objects are selected is fairly important. I’m considering making each object in charge of figuring out how to select and deselect itself– as in it’ll have to put up the image to show it is selected. That way, things without a position can show their selected status in some other way.

As a fun aside, I recently ordered some brand new servers from HP. They just came out with a new “generation” of servers, so this was my first time seeing them. One of the features of the new generation is that you can stuff more drives into them. 6 drives in a 1U (1 3/4″) high server is very impressive, and I’ve been wondering how they pull that off. Today, some of the hard drives came in. They are freaking laptop hard drives! I’m not so sure I like that idea as I usually end up with a big stack of laptop hard drives on my desk that have failed. I guess that’s what RAID is for though.