A new direction for Milestone 5
Okay, I've made a decision. As much as I'm staring longingly at my notes for creating a virtual machine and an assembler and a lexer and so on and so forth for the scripting part of the engine, I think I have to put them away for use in M6 (and beyond, actually having a usable script engine is going to take several milestones, I think).
Because M5, I have decided, will be another pass at the Indoor Level Editor.
Now, don't get me wrong, the current ILE is a good first attempt. But I've decided the interface is far too clunky. It takes too much mouse movement and mouse button presses to do what really ought to be very simple things. The focus of M5, therefore, is to streamline the interface to make things a lot easier to accomplish.
I figure this is probably a pretty good place to spend some time, since many many similiarities will exist between the ILE and the Outdoor Level Editor, the Modeller, and even the Animation Editor. I think we want to get this right!
I will still let you guys play with the result of M4, because I will definitely be looking for feedback on how the interface can be improved. I have a few ideas already to be sure, but as always, I want to know what you guys think.
Not that the work on M4 is a waste! The algorithms (picking, triangulation, camera movement, etc) will all remain, we're just going to overhaul the interface, which in comparison, is the easy part.
For that reason, I'm going to suspend working on the manual (at least the ILE chapter), since it is going to be significantly different in M5 than it will be at the end of M4.
All this is not to say I won't add anything new for M5. I'd still like to add some new functions to the ILE in M5 (at *least* extrusion and quad divides, and probably some sub-object delete functions), and I'm going to add a hierarchy tree to the project screen (thats going to be a big deal, more on that later).
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