Entity creator screencast

Erik has created a demo that shows current abilities of entity creator: streaming, original.

It would be great to see it integrated and released with next version of Ember.

The End

Today was the last day of coding phase of GSoC, so here is the summary of what’s done through second part of the program. During this month, entity creator starting from basic tool gained the following:

• preview of entity that has to be created,
• placing of entities using mouse-to-terrain feature,
• more user-friendly GUI: recipe description, adapters labels, help blurb with note about usage,
• expanded documentation in code and on wiki page.

I think, development of entity creator shown directions of what need to be improved and refactored in Ember to ease making of authoring tools. This is things that were difficult when implementing entity preview—detached entities and initialization of them using model mapping with all things like proper scaling and rotation. Would be good be to have this as some generic reusable interface.

I would like to thank Erik and all WorldForge community for help during the program and I hope we will work together in future, as there is many things to do for mature authoring tools and in Ember itself.

Final week

On last week, I’ve made some tweaks that are improving user interface. In particular, I added help text when entering to create mode that says how to exit from it. Next, I implemented suggested “Random” list element that allows to select random list item without need of implementing some Lua function. Also added is ability to add custom text that is different from item value, i. e. you can add item “Boulder style A” with value “a”.

This week is final. I will try to make real-time update of entity with new adapter values. Though without this feature entity creator is already usable—I currently tweaked UI to be consistent for the case if I’ll not find what prevents CEGUI to pass event back to my application.

Also, I need to finish documentation on wiki page—there is some things that, for example, are useful when writing Lua scripts and should be documented.

And two things are left in Lua scripting provider: first is handling any number of results and second is calling functions with dots in name. There is probably not much work, but they are not needed right now and I’m thinking that I’ll better would not distract from my application and leave them for the future.

Polishing user interface

On last week I’ve made a lot of fixes that are improving user interface much. First, this is correct preview of entity. And also a bunch of smaller things:

• Labels for adapters,
• Staying in “create” mode after creating first entity,
• Rotation of an entity with mouse wheel,
• Fixing a bug when switching recipes.

Also, I tried make to preview (and entity that is to be created) reflect changes of adapter values in real time. I wrote a code that should do the task. It uses standard signal of an adapter. That signal should be emitted on text change event from CEGUI, but that event is never called and therefore signal is not emitted. I don’t know well what can I do with this, but I’ll try to debug it or find alternative way to get that event.

Next two weeks are final. I’ve left only a few tasks:

• Real-time update of entity with new adapter values,
• Add “random” element for drop-down lists and handle it programmatically,
• Small tweaks in user interface,
• Improving wiki page with documentation,
• Make Lua scripting provider handle any number of results.

This probably will left some time to do some other small things. Anything that would not be finished could go to todo, ideas or wishlists.