Some more work on my SurgeEd…
The next step on my editor is the decal system… Although Spellbook already supports decals, I want to make the system better for authoring and for resource management.
At the moment, a decal references a decal sheet, which is a structure that defines UV coordinates on multiple textures (for normal mapped decals, etc), but I want to collapse the decal sheet and the image bank into a single structure, since it’s easier to manage.
To do so, I’ve decided to build into the editor a “Image Bank Editor” component, which will enable me to place images in a series of layered “texture sheets”, and after some consideration, I’ve started building a system with support for sub-entities, that is, entities that can only be bound to a specific entity.
Easier said than done… I did some mistakes in the general construction of the base system which made this much harder, specially on the interaction of the Component Explorer (the tree-like view where you can see all the objects and select them, drag them around, etc) and the main component system.
The base system was pretty easy to get up and running, but creating the right hooks for the Component Explorer to work nicely with the overall structure, including the Undo and Clipboard systems proved a challenge…
Fortunately, I got it working, and the future expansion of the system will allow me to create very interesting things, like object properties that reference an entity in the scene.
Tomorrow I’m heading out to the Netherlands for some work (sadly, I have to have one of those to make a living), and hopefully that will enable me to make some blog posts for the future (so I don’t spend so much time “away” from you, my loyal readers!) 