I'd like to add to Esenthel some innovative functionality, and I don't mean a specific technological feature, but rather some new method of making games, something like an integrated editor which allows to make games without much need/knowledge of programming.
If you have any interesting ideas (even crazy ones) please let me know.

http://scratch.mit.edu/ xD

Why do you want to add such a feature? Are you planning to make the engine noob friendly? For making games... good ones are in c++ only. If i want it easy i will go for FPS creator or something like that. I like EE because it is in pure c++ programming and i think there are others that feels the same about it.

he only gave that as an example, I suppose.

I'm thinking over it. As of now, I can't come up with anything innovative. :/

I must agree with Dynad... Making click&play engine doesn't go well with advanced options and flexibility. Personally I'd prefer to focus on existing things (or adding new: voxel terrain, AI development etc.) to make engine capable of making technically advanced game (in C++), instead of some kind of "game creator". It's not the way the "serious" game are made, it's just a fun application then, which also won't bring much profit in long-term.

I agree with Dynad and kulesz.

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Edit: I think EE needs an easy way to build gameplay for your games, perhaps some tool inside of WE.

For instance, with Advocate I had to make my own editor for this very purpose. I needed to have a way to say on this event, run this function on this target.

Took me 2-3 weeks on and off to finish this editor before I could fully start working on the gameplay portion of the game. It would have been very cool if I didn't have to worry about make an editor for this purpose and could have saved me a few weeks of time, which would have allowed me to get more gameplay into the game and test it properly before I had to present it to my class.

I can say that same and add that, the list on roadmap is long enough for some time.

Although you are all very correct, I dó believe Esenthel is looking for some cool new and innovative feature which he can show off with (in a good way ^^). Standing out from other engines is key here.

Yes, better features and improvements are very welcome, but so are more investors. The only thing is: If you can't come up with a good new feature, I'd just carry on doing what are you doing now. It'll work fine in the long run anyway.

P.S. Just my 2 cents, trying to place myself in Esenthel's shoes. ^^

P.P.S. Still no good idea. Thinking about Esenthel does not go well with working for school.

One of the things that would really help in world building is to have a means of tracking what is put into the world. It is tough to find objects when you have a couple hundred on the map and impossible when there are over a 1000. Just having something like this in the editor would be a BIG plus.

With the above functional one could edit game play functions from the editor and run them for testing and compilation. maybe the only way to really stand out is to have a built in compiler.

Heh, this isnt really much innovative suggestion, although I say this because I am lazy, auto project setup with a main cpp.

Tutorials on how to make certain functions are cool and very helpful. just to get a finger pointing somewhere to start. But as Dynad I dont want a click and create game tool.

Driklyn, implementing gameplay features through the world editor would be the same as creating a click and play of sorts.

You already got some features that are very useful for many people on the roadmap.

Special effects editor, object shaders, fullscreen shaders editor.
Also Dynad, didnt you say something about the particle editor in mesheditor? you wanted it to be able to create multiple emitters etc? what about a more extensive particle editor?

Demi, are you thinking about being able to create object groups and then browse through them for easier finding(world object browser), like
Trees->sub group tree-> ?
Characters->sub group characters like
Characters->Farmer group-> list of all farmers in this type and group
Characters-> guards-> guardtype1->list all guards of type1 in the guards group
Characters-> guards-> guardtype2->list all guards of type2 in the guards group?

If so this would be very helpful.

(10-27-2010 06:38 AM)Zervox Wrote:  Driklyn, implementing gameplay features through the world editor would be the same as creating a click and play of sorts.

Sort of, but not quite. You'd still have to program each function manually. This is just a visual way of being able say I need this function to be called on this target when this event happens. Much better and easier to understand than doing it purely through coding.

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Edit: What about integrating a physics editor inside of WE? So, for example, if you need to create a door, you simply load in a door mesh, click a "Create Hinge Joint" button, then adjust the anchor for it by using the mouse. You could also test the joint by using your mouse to swing the door back and forth to make sure it works the way you want it to. This could also be done for all things physics-related like vehicles and ragdolls.

Or what about a 1-click (or so) publish button that is perhaps integrated inside of Visual Studio. You would click it and it would automatically package your game (like perhaps save your data folder into a .pak file and adjust source code to load from it), remove any unnecessary files (even ones that are in the data folder but are never being loaded), and creates an installer for you so end up with a single .exe file. Then you can easily just hand this off to beta testers or publisher and you're good to go.

(10-27-2010 06:58 AM)Driklyn Wrote:  Sort of, but not quite. You'd still have to program each function manually. This is just a visual way of being able say I need this function to be called on this target when this event happens. Much better and easier to understand than doing it purely through coding.

A event handler is what you are thinking of able to load the function you insert to it?

(10-27-2010 06:58 AM)Driklyn Wrote:  Edit: What about integrating a physics editor inside of WE? So, for example, if you need to create a door, you simply load in a door mesh, click a "Create Hinge Joint" button, then adjust the anchor for it by using the mouse. You could also test the joint by using your mouse to swing the door back and forth to make sure it works the way you want it to. This could also be done for all things physics-related like vehicles and ragdolls.

Could prove useful. But then I would like a different control(or choice of control) even more in mesh editor to a more standard rotation/move control as I've requested before. : p

Thank you all, there are some interesting ideas.

First of, I want to combine the ability of klik&play with the power of c++, so you still have access to c++, but you can also use klik&play on top of it, for example manually write some commands with c++, and then be able to run those commands through the editor, something like Driklyn's script editor but much more advanced.

Some more physics control in the editor is also nice.

Automatic packaging the game to pak and deleting files which aren't needed is great, but the problem is how to detect which files are used and which aren't. (for example accessing a resource from file name string S+"sound/attack/"+Random(5)+".wav" or through some other method makes things complicated)

Integrating the EE with visual studio, so you can write c++ in editor, and somehow autocompile scripts, to dll's, is nice idea, but it's not portable, I'd like to keep the engine cross-platform.

Also what I want here is to generally simplify the process of creating games, and by that I mean, resource files management, importing resources, sharing it across multiple computers between multiple developers, writing codes, writing visual scripts, deploying, make this more automated, through some tool(s)/editors to make things much easier/faster.

Well regarding package sharing, one thing perhaps some could find pretty useful, as first mentioned auto packaging, a options of packaging the map and all the resources(materials,meshes etc) it references and pack them. and as said as an option for fast map sharing and is not a must, keeping the old way of handling world directory as well. (this should be possible?)

For resource management in the world editor a object tree browser would be nice, as mentioned in my previous post, able to have multiple sub groups of objects for easier reference and in the options menu allow to make it take the entire world or split the objects into the same way world area parts are handled for finding objects inside WE.

Driklyns script editor is actually a event sequence handler(A text version of unreal kismet of sorts ). but would indeed be a nice feature for fast prototyping. Would the "scripts" be saved in the world file? Sounds like it will end up sort of the same as unreal kismet is just more advanced because you can use
c++ freely in it instead of predefined nodes for everything.

(10-27-2010 12:02 PM)Esenthel Wrote:  Also what I want here is to generally simplify the process of creating games, and by that I mean, resource files management, importing resources, sharing it across multiple computers between multiple developers, writing codes, writing visual scripts, deploying, make this more automated, through some tool(s)/editors to make things much easier/faster.

This. Do all of this. It all sounds very good.

(10-27-2010 12:02 PM)Esenthel Wrote:  Automatic packaging the game to pak and deleting files which aren't needed is great, but the problem is how to detect which files are used and which aren't. (for example accessing a resource from file name string S+"sound/attack/"+Random(5)+".wav" or through some other method makes things complicated)

Good point. Wasn't sure if this would even be possible, just through something crazy out there. It would be cool if this was somehow possible, but, if not, I'm sure most developers would be capable of removing non-used files on their own.

(10-27-2010 12:02 PM)Esenthel Wrote:  Integrating the EE with visual studio, so you can write c++ in editor, and somehow autocompile scripts, to dll's, is nice idea, but it's not portable, I'd like to keep the engine cross-platform.

Didn't think about that. You could look into using a scripting language like Lua for this purpose I believe.

However, the way my so-called "script" editor (more like an event sequence handler like Zervox said) worked was similar to the way you create custom obj types to use in WE, using enums. The functions themselves were written inside of Visual Studio like a regular function, then I used a switch statement to assign the correct function to a function pointer depending on which action was selected (FRY_FUSE, PLAY, UNLOCK in the screenshot above), and finally called them when needed based on which event was selected (ON_SUCCESS, ON_ACTIVATE, ON_TELEPORT).

Overall, this worked okay for me but could definitely be much improved. Perhaps something like this could be done:


OBJ_DOOR is one of the types in obj_type.enum, ON_ACTIVATE is one of the events you created in something like obj_evt.enum, and openOrClose is function you've created that either opens or closes the door depending on whether it is already opened or closed.

You would have to somehow define when ON_ACTIVATE is called, so that you might require the need for another function to be created as well or something. So maybe something like:


onDoorActivate would be a function you've created that tests to see if you are facing the door, within a certain distance, and have pressed the 'E' key. If all is true, then it would automatically called the openOrClose function and the door would open/close.

However, having typed all this I realize that this idea isn't good enough. It wouldn't provide the ability to assign multiple functions to be called on a single event or the ability to target other objects, which are both necessary. So you can pretty much just scrap most of what I said above. I'll just leave it there in case it sparks some other better ideas for how this could be accomplished.