This week, Dan and I spent about 10 hours trying to fix a bug in MonoGame that caused Dan to be unable to build the project. We finally figured it out and we’ve submitted a patch, though so far no one at MonoGame is interested in our patch… Oh well, I’ll keep it as a local change for now.
Once everything was working, Dan and I actually were able to get some work done today. We improved shader support to properly read data from the BlueFox file format this way we can actually see our changes in the world. Not sure its working correctly yet, but its definitely a step in the right direction. In addition we finally added support for selecting objects using the multi-object selection director. This is the same system we used in the Fiz Engine back in the day, it’s come a long way! Its now scene graph friendly, and considerably easier to read. While there were steps forward, I still haven’t hooked in movement responses to dragging objects. That will hopefully be soon, though Dan is requesting the ability to edit the shader and material properties in the editor, and that is a fun segway into a potential 2nd video… so that might be next on the list.
For today, you can see our non-final control handles: Selected items have a nice box around them, as well as an axis arrow system to faciliate graphical movement. The movement part isn’t ready, but it shouldn’t actually be that hard to do! Probably just a few more days of work. Our shader has extra color settings built in, so that we can give useful and meaninful responses when you mouse over the various handles. Also, we finally have a todo list as well!
Lastly, Katie has made awesome progress on the Contour Character Concept art. She will hopefully be posting that soon as well having her first write up on the blog!