Particle editor improvement suggestions.
by Magnus Blikstad · in Torque Game Builder · 04/17/2007 (4:34 pm) · 4 replies
I've been working a lot with particles lately and have come across a few things "missing" that would making this sort of work a lot smoother.
1). A "duplicate emitter" button in the emitter tab (actually, I hacked this in myself already since it bugged me too much =).
2). The ability to set the blend modes more freely than just "intense particle" or not. Seems the code is already there to do this, just no interface for it? (I could be reading the code wrong though, it's a bit... ehm. messy and spread out to get a clear picture of what's going on).
3). Ability to rename, and move up/down, an emitter, not too important but makes organizing things a bit easier.
4). This might be more difficult, but some better way to choose the imagemap to use would be nice, I have a pretty damn long list of images, takes at least a couple of moments to go through the list to find the one I want...
5). And this one is probably even more difficult. It would be REALLY nice to be able to edit more than one graph at the same time (in the same window). Having a larger graph window and being able to toggle any parameter on/off would be really cool. Say I want to mess with the color, I check the R, G and B buttons and get three graphs in the same window with the color values, no need to constantly click the back/next buttons to do adjustments.
1). A "duplicate emitter" button in the emitter tab (actually, I hacked this in myself already since it bugged me too much =).
2). The ability to set the blend modes more freely than just "intense particle" or not. Seems the code is already there to do this, just no interface for it? (I could be reading the code wrong though, it's a bit... ehm. messy and spread out to get a clear picture of what's going on).
3). Ability to rename, and move up/down, an emitter, not too important but makes organizing things a bit easier.
4). This might be more difficult, but some better way to choose the imagemap to use would be nice, I have a pretty damn long list of images, takes at least a couple of moments to go through the list to find the one I want...
5). And this one is probably even more difficult. It would be REALLY nice to be able to edit more than one graph at the same time (in the same window). Having a larger graph window and being able to toggle any parameter on/off would be really cool. Say I want to mess with the color, I check the R, G and B buttons and get three graphs in the same window with the color values, no need to constantly click the back/next buttons to do adjustments.
#2
04/17/2007 (5:30 pm)
5) Check this out... that was my first port of the particle editor... though we chose to make it much easier to use, though some of those features (like editing multiple graphs) is very useful... I did design the particle editor and new graph control I did for it to work that way. 
#3
04/17/2007 (6:39 pm)
2) would really be nice, normal/intense is not enough for good diversity.
#4
In either case, hope you guys got something useful out of my ramblings at least. =)
04/17/2007 (6:59 pm)
Matthew; yeah, I seemed to remember it being that way before (but I didn't really work with it until now so I wasn't too sure). So what you're saying is the control is already set up to do what I want? It's only the interface code that's been "crippled"? (unfortunately I find the scripts that run the editors awfully messy, confusing and spread out (there seem to be a bunch of code that's not used anymore too, especially with the particle editor? But I haven't looked at it enough to say if that's the case for sure or not)... It will definitely take me a fair share of time to get a good grip on it. Time I probably don't have, sigh).In either case, hope you guys got something useful out of my ramblings at least. =)
Torque 3D Owner James Bond