Ambiera ForumDiscussions, Help and Support. |
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Hey, Niko. Just wanted to share a few suggestions for you, which will, in my opinion, make the editor more polished and more approachable to users. Lightmapping: Remove the "White" and "Diffuse" options. These really don't have any sort of use cases. Maybe instead, replace those two extraneous options with "Per-Vertex", which bakes the lighting into vertex colors (equivalent to setting the resolution / precision value to 1000000, which in turn sets the material type to "onetexture_blend"). This is a very questionable suggestion that I think will upset some people, but - you should consider dropping support for the WebGL and macOS platforms entirely. I say this because I never see anyone releasing games for either platform, and it's inevitably going to slow down development for you if you have to ensure functionality / parity for those 2 platforms. Just Windows and Android is fine. This would also make the editor smaller, I imagine, not having to include all that extra code. Also, for the ones who like to datamine / look through the editor's installation directory, they'll quickly see a lot of unused files are being needlessly copied in every new installation. It's these: "sounds" directory - it's never, EVER used in any of the demo projects. This would make the installation 304 KB smaller. Not a big difference, but still, it'd be a really quick thing for you to do. Please delete that directory from the source. Maybe consider adding an option to install the prefabs when installing the editor. Same with the example CCB files. It'd be nice to have the option to not copy those over if someone is already familiar with the engine and doesn't want these, and wants a clean slate to work in. Lastly - it'd be really nice to see the "compress scene" ship with the editor. Maybe even rewritten in C++ for faster speeds. If we're going that route, one could suggest adding a feature similar to the "Get Optimal Lightmap Settings" extension, to the lightmapper. A button maybe which does the same type of calculation(s), but again, in C++ (so intrinsically faster than JS) Lots of these are just more my personal preference / what I think the "ultimate" version of the editor would be, so it's more of a wishlist than suggestions, but still. Figured I'd share! |
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Some things are true, thanks for the suggestions! |
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Nikolaus Gebhardt is alive? Your Majesty graces us with their presence. wohoo! |
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wrote: Some things are true, thanks for the suggestions! Of course. Also maybe re-phrase the string "Use own local server for WebGL" to "Use local server for WebGL". Nicer looking, I think. :) also maybe get rid of that strange Viewport resolution feature. It's just needless clutter. |
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On the topic of the lightmapper, it'd be nice to see if CUDA cores could be utilized when making lightmaps, to speed up the process. Or even if it was able to use multiple CPU cores and threads / parallelize the whole process for those who use workstation-type hardware. |
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I noticed the editor extension available here which freezes the rotation and scale of static geometry also does the same for rotation, yet the option built into the editor (introduced in version 6.0) only does this for the scale. Can it be updated to also do the same for rotation? Also, it doesn't work on animated meshes - how hard would it be to allow that to work? |
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I know JIC exposed lots of irrKlang properties like reverb, distortion and other stuff already via scripting, but it'd be nice to see the editor have these as properties (which can be set at runtime). It's cumbersome to enable these things via script. It'd make more sense to have a dropdown list in the editor on sound nodes. |
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One other thing - consider removing the option for software-accelerated lightmap generation. I did a quick step through various releases (1.0.5 / 1.1.0 / 2.2.3 / 5.7.1) and with all of them, a prompt appears which states it's disabled. it seems to not have ever been functional at any point, so it'd make sense to remove it from the interface. Now, it'd be really nice if you looked into porting some of the irrEdit-specific options for the lightmapper, such as: 1. Texture format selection (BMP or PNG, though you could probably make it work with the other supported texture formats like JPG or DDS without much fuss I'm sure) 2. Lightmap packing and optimization. Two options existed. Rudimentary and full. Neither were implemented apparently. 3. Polygons bigger than a lightmap / Polygons smaller than one texel |
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Yes, there is old Irrlicht code on the internet about using the GPU for lightmapping - would be so much faster... and better https://irrlicht.sourceforge.io/forum/viewtopic.php?t=39186 |
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While we are at it - Niko please fix the Editor resetting thing that shoots you back to the top every time you make an edit or change in the Scene Graph Explorer and stop it opening all your folders each time also - this is so frustrating actually and feel like I'm fighting with the Editor to get something done when you have a number of folders with things in them.... |
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