Spectre Editor – Blue Fox Models, Auto Complete, RelativePaths

So the last few days, I have been working on a variety of important features.  As a level editor, its always important that art be easily re-usable across many different working environments.  For example, lets say that on my computer the model is at

"C:/Users/Mark/Contour/Content/Model/Deer.fbx"

But on your computer its:

"C:/Users/YourName/Contour/Content/Model/Deer.fbx"

How do we find the right file??  Well the key is to make everything relative to something we all know.  Its harder than you’d think it should be, but it can be done!  Some programs use a “work space” but I find that can be annoying to configure, and what happens if you have multiple projects…  Also want the data to be in the same format that the game is going to be loading it! In XNA / MonoGame the proper path is Model/Deer.fbx.  But that isn’t remotely enough information for an editor.

So what I end up doing is storing the Content Folder location Relative to the Project File, and then storing the model data relative to one of the Content Folders. This is actually working nicely.

Finding content to load though is difficult without Intellisense / Autocomplete and makes life difficult.  So why not add it =)

2013-06-21-AutoComplete

 

Here you can see that by typing into the SubClass box, I get a list of all available models inside the objectLibrary.xml file.  This makes selecting the model in the library so much easier.  In addition, I show a list of possible files given the location of the data file, allowing you to see the data available to you as you type.

Also you can see on the right, I now populate and allow you to edit the extra properties with ease.  I plan on adding more editors in the future ( color pickers, directional vector selectors, etc )  but in the mean type, you can just type the value you want and it will properly parse it into the variable type.

Lastly that brings us to Blue Fox models… Ya, one of my friends has been writing his own 3D model format and its quite convenient to be able to load his art so I added a parser that loads his art into the Spectre engine.  Of course I can still also load XNB files from the XNA content pipeline as well as FBX files directly using a little native wrapper I wrote around Autodesk’s FBX SDK.  Too bad its like 40 megs bigger than I like and it doesn’t work on iOS or Droid… otherwise I’d totally have used it as my main format.

A little peak at some of his models.

2013-06-21-FoxModels

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