FlowED for FLOW
Community Forums/Showcase/FlowED for FLOW
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| In the last 4 days Cygnus and I have been starting on our .OSM editor called FlowED. (FLOW being our Ogre Wrapper) Pretty exciting stuff :) It's to make the transition to Ogre easier for blitz Users, and a tool for those that don't have the Ofusion 3DSmax Exporter. You can load one or more .OSM scene files, or create new ones from scratch from mesh files and save out new scenes. At the moment it follows closely to how 3dsmax works, so those of you familiar with max will appreciate the simple heirarchy linking of scene nodes and meshes allowing you to do simple rigging. Rigging mount nodes, camera setups, attaching particles weapons etc are all straigh forward. It also has 3dsmax like gizmo navigation for rotation, movement , shift clone instancing etc. Still a long way to go, but this is one of the tools that will come with Flow to make Ogre a lot more intuitive to use and set up. This will most likely be avaliable with source for FLOW users and may become an open source project.  For more info about Ofusion and the OSM format you can check out: http://www.ofusiontechnologies.com/ Currently supported in FlowED Lights Omni Free Spot Free Direct Target Spot Target Direct Color On/Off attribute Cast Shadows On attribute Hotspot/Beam (Spot lights) Falloff/Field (Spot lights) Intensity multiplier Attenuation Cameras Free Camera Target Camera FOV Near clip plane Far clip plane Custom Reflection plane Custom Near Clip plane Nodes Position Rotation Scale Parent node Child Nodes User properties Hierarchy Instanced Objects Custom Data Custom User Object Data User application data |
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| Looks simple, but not necessarily in a bad way. If all it is acting as, there, is a dropper of sorts, then that's probably all you'll need. Should be interesting to see how it works out. |
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| yeah, were keeping it pretty simple. You don't even need a dropper so much since shift dragging an existing item in the world creates an instance that is dropped at the position that you let go of the mouse button. Shift dragging an entity with a heirarchy will create an instance with all its children intact. So if you have many duplicate objects populating a scene that can be done very quickly by cloning a single item that was already in the scene. Especialy with the ability to do multiple selections and clone those. each entity can have user defined properties, which you can type inside the multi line edit box. The OSM scene format is XML based, so you can quickly edit a scene or script for an entity outside of FlowED if you wish. (Notepad anyone? or BLIDE Plus ;P. The same scripts can also be entered from withn 3dsmax by selecting an object, then object properties from within 3dsmax's right click menu. (here you have a tab with a simple text editor for entering your scripts) Later you can load these scripts from within your Bmax game engine if you wish. |
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New screenie of the updated UI which will get hooked up in the next couple of days. The GUI lib used is CEGUI which is XML or LUA script based and is pretty powerful. Has some nice community editors in the works now too :) makes things quite a bit easier and is also able to do HUDS and what have you. If you want a native OS GUIlib you can still use MaxGUI :) IMAGESET EDITOR  LAYOUT EDITOR  |
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| Late night for you, huh! The editor is really coming together now and promises to be a great tool, for Flow, and even Ogre users in general. We worked our fingers off yesterday updating the GUI and getting certain editor behaviors in, and we are quite excited at what it's turning out to be. |
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| This looks exciting. |
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| Yes exciting indeed. Have you released FLOW? Or are you going to when you finish your toolset? |
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| We havent release it yet, We still have a couple of months of development with the wrapper itself, and a month or so of polishing up docs, wiki, tutorials, and demos for the trial version. But were hoping to have everything ready in 3 months time with at least a couple of testers before that. |
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| That looks completly awesome! |
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| thanks for the positive words :) |
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| looks very nice, it solves the game-gui problem, is the GUI fast? any chance of a demo executable with a sample gui and a 3d room in the background? how much will it cost? does it work on windows98? |
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| The Gui system used is CEGUI and used in a lot of engines including Irrlicht and Ogre ,Crystal Space and Open Scene Graph. FLOW has the latest version properly wrapped and and seems quite a bit faster than the last CEGUI release. We haven't tested FLOW in Win98 yet since none of us have an OS installed thats older than WinXP. Ogre and the GUI system work on win98 in both OpenGL and DX9. Also linux, and Mac so hopefully FLOW will too :). Were trying to keep everything cross platform since the plan is to release Flow as a cross platform solution with as broad compatibility as possible. Any libs that aren't cross platform are being largely ignored till a later date when they may eventualy appear as plugins. |
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| i could test it on win98 if you want |
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| We should be ok for testing later on, and will most likely release a runtime demo before the trial version just to see how good the compatibility is whether there is anything to be done on our end to fix problems. |
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| This looks super. How will it handle big outdoor environments? |
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| Our C++ coder wants to use the Paging Landscape scene manager for realtime editing heighmap terrains with texture splatting. There are several terrain managers avaliable for ogre, PLSM is the most popular. There's also a nice new portal scene manager with seamless interior/exterior transitions that is due for release shortly, looks superb. But we havent tried it yetjust been following the thread and WIP video demonstration. At the moment were using the basic scene managers that come with the ogre3D SDK. But I know that PLSM is definately planned. |
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| Wow this looks awesome! Just wondering if there's any news on flow? ETA and the estimated cost? |
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| interesting - how is this coming along? |
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| We're Still moving along. I opened my mouth too soon about the release date though- There's a lot of thought going into the code structure right now, though we are working on a demo for you all. |
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| On a side note, I think the orignal flow logo in blue looked better than the new orangey/brown one, in Evaks sig. ;) |
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