Guild of Writers

Looking at posts in this thread, it seems evident that a custom GoW toolkit is both desirable and possible. Concepts such as the common Python library and GPNMilano's Alcscript dictionary, added to a texture library and a prefab mesh library could be added to a custom Blender interface to make Age writing a lot easier.

Chacal wrote:Looking at posts in this thread, it seems evident that a custom GoW toolkit is both desirable and possible. Concepts such as the common Python library and GPNMilano's Alcscript dictionary, added to a texture library and a prefab mesh library could be added to a custom Blender interface to make Age writing a lot easier.

I am in complete favor of all of this. Everything listed sounds like they would indeed make things not only a whole lot easier for us, but all of this will give newcomers to age creation an easier time as well.

With a good custom interface, AlcScript wouldn't even be necessary

Paradox wrote:With a good custom interface, AlcScript wouldn't even be necessary

Such a shame. I love alcscript. My most complete age/area to date has only...oh something like 15000 lines of alcscript...heh.

GPNMilano wrote:

Paradox wrote:With a good custom interface, AlcScript wouldn't even be necessary

Such a shame. I love alcscript. My most complete age/area to date has only...oh something like 15000 lines of alcscript...heh.

... and I thought my version of Pahts was bad with 10389 lines for two districts

Paradox wrote:

GPNMilano wrote:

Paradox wrote:With a good custom interface, AlcScript wouldn't even be necessary

Such a shame. I love alcscript. My most complete age/area to date has only...oh something like 15000 lines of alcscript...heh.

... and I thought my version of Pahts was bad with 10389 lines for two districts

Well that's just my Dorehn neighborhood. Since it's in D'ni i put alot of SDL variables in there for the lamps and the custom stuff like Cyan had, so all that stuff needs pythonmods. plus i use alcscript for just about everything from sprites to full alcscripting for my clickables, and use visual scripts on everything with alpha so that it can be sorted into drawable spans that won't cause clipping. It's a pain but well worth it.

And speaking of Dorehn, since it's pretty close to being released (two weeks or away) i'll put in a shameless plug:

Sneak peek Show Spoiler

@GPNMilano: Really looking forward to seeing your neighbourhood, since I'm currently trying to do one, though having issues laying it out, a bit. Though Linger has been a great help, in that, mind you.

It looks great from that render, as well. =D

Trylon wrote:

J'Kla wrote:No matter how long it takes, it still looks like it will be ready before Cyan sort their tools.

Lately I've been wondering how possible it is to join libplasma together with ogre and rebuild uru from scratch as well... Probably that would be done before cyan releases their stuff as well
(Then again it would probably get whoever makes it into a lawsuit if it gets distributed)

This certainly appears to be likely. I think that unknown 'how long' has lead to a number of those that migrated to SL now looking to migrate to OSGrid and related VW's.

Blue Mars will probably increase the interest in Blender and Collada format models. Adding meshes to the list of importable objects for SL and OS grids is likely to further increase interest in Blender. Plus I expect more people to add modifications and branches to Blender. Some developers are adding features common to all modelers as part of the base branch and their specialty features as modules to be added. Some of the PyPRP and SL related modules initially created problems unless one kept things in separate directories. Fortunately the idea of each module having separate space seems to be spreading. I see Blender's popularity growing and the development cycle is certainly unlikely to slow down.

I hate to think of re-learning the UI. A new one may make it easier for new and casual users, a good thing. I worry what that will do to me. Hopefully with mappable hot-keys they will supply a legacy map for existing users. I expect I could make my own but what a drag. I'm sticking to my 2.48a until I have a serious reason to change.

Without licenses everyone is pretty much on there own. /me wonders off waving her "Licenses Now" sign.

kaelisebonrai wrote:@GPNMilano: Really looking forward to seeing your neighbourhood, since I'm currently trying to do one, though having issues laying it out, a bit. Though Linger has been a great help, in that, mind you.

It looks great from that render, as well. =D

Thank you. I very specifically choose to keep a few staples of the D'ni Neighborhoods intact (the link in point in particular with the fountain) the remainder of the hood was of my own design and layout and was textured with a mixture of Cyan stuff. To keep the D'ni feel. And a mix of my own textures to show the uniqueness of the area and the it's storyline in particular. Basically the same thing i did with ChloesHoodOffice just on a much larger scale.

Trylon wrote:Lately I've been wondering how possible it is to join libplasma together with ogre and rebuild uru from scratch as well... Probably that would be done before cyan releases their stuff as well
(Then again it would probably get whoever makes it into a lawsuit if it gets distributed)

Joining libPlasma together with ogre would be redundant since many of the classes in Plasma (which libPlasma is based upon, hence the name probably being a play on the idea of it being a "Library of Plasma". Plasma, the engine, a networking/graphics engine. Ogre is a graphics engine, so other than the network code mixing libPlasma and Ogre would be a fruitless endeavor as you'd just be creating a hybrid version of the two.

Blender 2.5 alpha 1 was released very recently, and I got my first good look at the 2.5 series today. The new UI is a little different, but I can really see it being much easier to use. 2.5 has been in development for ages as a complete rewrite to clean up the UI and data storage... it looks like it's really paying off.

I'm really impressed by how fluid the UI is. External rendering engines can be implemented through Python, and provide their own Materials and other settings. This could be used in a future PyPRP to have completely Uru-specific material panels, physics panels, and world panels to replace the default Blender ones. You could even add a panel to the object settings that lets you change page number, etc. This is a really exciting concept. As a bonus, you can now store arbitrary attributes on each datablock that are saved in the .blend file, so all this custom data can be saved without needing AlcScript or game properties.

For people who don't want to upgrade, I suggest playing around with the new interface for a little while. It's more familiar feeling than it looks, and I'm already in love with it.

(I, err, don't really post here this often. Blender 2.5 has me that excited!)