I’m sorry if this is a known/obvious thing (i haven’t been following Overgrowth’s development for more than a few years, and 1.0 caught me off guard), but when/how/why did the editor become ugly and lost a bunch of features?
The ability to load and preview skeleton rigs has gone missing, as did in-editor animation editing. I’d also swear that some of the things now only editable by messing with the nodes through the scene graph, used to be editable in a more user friendly manner.
What happened? What did i miss? Is this the final state of things?
What happened to the editor?
Re: What happened to the editor?
Some of this happened a few years back, and the new UI was remade earlier this year.
Most of the features are still there (as well as some new features), they're just in different places.
As for moving objects - Things can be edited outside the scene graph still. You just have to use the direct mouse manipulation widget, in combination with some hotkeys:
http://wiki.wolfire.com/index.php/Editor_Interface
The skeleton rig system got dropped in favor of blender, more on that below.
As for why:
The old UI library we had was causing huge performance and compatibility bugs, and was very slow for us to program. We ditched that old UI library and redid the UI in something that was much more stable, and that we could fix and enhance much more quickly with the programmers who are currently on the team.
The in game skeleton rig tools were dropped years ago, in favor of using purpose-built tools for character creation, posing, and animations (Blender). It is much more helpful for heavy-duty animation and posing work, and is still available for people for free even though it isn't a part of the game. Several people in the community have had success and have adapted, so while this harms the experience for newer modders, it has helped us more and may in the long run help the modding community more. We're open to adding simpler features back to the editor in the future, but that isn't our focus right this second.
Basically, we decided to on focusing on making the editor better to use for people who had some experience with it, since that helped us work on the game faster, and helps out people who are making the best maps and content. In the near term, we're going to work around that by making better documentation, adding some in-game cheat sheets, and getting help making better tutorials.
In the long term, we may add back some things to make editing simpler for newer users, while still not getting in the way of advanced users.
Most of the features are still there (as well as some new features), they're just in different places.
As for moving objects - Things can be edited outside the scene graph still. You just have to use the direct mouse manipulation widget, in combination with some hotkeys:
http://wiki.wolfire.com/index.php/Editor_Interface
The skeleton rig system got dropped in favor of blender, more on that below.
As for why:
The old UI library we had was causing huge performance and compatibility bugs, and was very slow for us to program. We ditched that old UI library and redid the UI in something that was much more stable, and that we could fix and enhance much more quickly with the programmers who are currently on the team.
The in game skeleton rig tools were dropped years ago, in favor of using purpose-built tools for character creation, posing, and animations (Blender). It is much more helpful for heavy-duty animation and posing work, and is still available for people for free even though it isn't a part of the game. Several people in the community have had success and have adapted, so while this harms the experience for newer modders, it has helped us more and may in the long run help the modding community more. We're open to adding simpler features back to the editor in the future, but that isn't our focus right this second.
Basically, we decided to on focusing on making the editor better to use for people who had some experience with it, since that helped us work on the game faster, and helps out people who are making the best maps and content. In the near term, we're going to work around that by making better documentation, adding some in-game cheat sheets, and getting help making better tutorials.
In the long term, we may add back some things to make editing simpler for newer users, while still not getting in the way of advanced users.
Re: What happened to the editor?
Ah, gotcha.
Thanks for the info!
Thought something must've gone seriously wrong for the editor to change so much.
Too bad about the in-editor rigging tools, seeing the effects of the skeleton + animations on the mesh in-engine, in real time was kinda nice.
Thanks for the info!
Thought something must've gone seriously wrong for the editor to change so much.
Too bad about the in-editor rigging tools, seeing the effects of the skeleton + animations on the mesh in-engine, in real time was kinda nice.