LotusEd R2 - Preview

I'll be posting screenshots of LotusEd R2 (still so early on it has the "My Application" application title ;) )

First screenshot:


How it's going to work seems pretty evident, I think. I've still got to make stuff fit right, but so far it's been extremely easy to make this (under 200 lines). Just a note: F-UI rocks.

looks good so far.

This is somehtign that is of real practical value.
good stuff noel

A couple adjustments to the UI, including more room for the 3d view and a more suitable size for the panels.

nice

your old editor seriously sucked as you could not modify parameters in realtime.

Coolness! Good editor is always a good thing.

Looks really cool :) And btw Rob: are you talkinga bout my editor? Because you could....

obviously not talking about yours am I? duhhhhhhhh :)

No, in yours you can modify stuff in real-time, acid :P

The old editor I wrote was teh ub4r suck4g3. ^_^

lol :P Btw Noel: You know the Lotus R2 forum is up for BETA testers? Check j00 mail :)

Hey, I just woke up, it's not like I've done everything yet :P



Edit:



Somethin's funky.

It's getting there...



Slowly, but it is.

Cool - I'll be watching you like a hawk... until my summer holiday starts this thursday and I will be in the wilderness for following three weeks. So please hurry up, so that I can see something cool before I (have to) leave :)

looks great cant wait to try it out i need some nice small flame effects to this should help with any luck

Noel R. Cower : you desirve an award.

Decided to do a 'nice' little skin for F-UI's gadgets, then I managed to add in a couple other things that were missing.

Noel, is there any chance of getting full list of features and options/flags you are going to have? I'd like to get more info before my holiday starts...

Mustang: There's no way I can get a set list of features at the moment, but what I plan to have in, or already do (I'll add a * after an entry if it is already in), consists of the following:

-Animated particle textures*
-Particle texture tilesets* (Similar to the way Particle Candy does it, if not the same)
-Emission rate*
-Various emission shapes* (Sphere, cube, ring, cylinder)
-LPS script loading and saving (obviously this will be included at some point in time, since the Lotus scripts are sortof a big selling point for Lotus)
-Particle waves* (A wave is basically a spiral/helix movement about the center of a particle)
-Seamless changing of textures and blend modes for emitters (thanks to the new texture system)
-Particle Deflectors (These affect the speed and position of a particle based on their weight and distance- maybe size too, but previous versions only depended on weight and distance)
-Exporting of Lotus-useable Blitz code- and maybe importing, but we'll see about that.
-Loading of particle meshes. This is still a 'tricky' situation, since I won't be adding in a mesh system to keep track of various properties for meshes in the actual particle system, but the editor can do a good enough job of keeping track of this stuff.
-Anything currently in Lotus R1 (as soon as the 'thing' gets implemented into Lotus R2, it will be added to the editor).

That's a very, very basic feature list so far.

Also, the latest screenshot is misleading, as in the final version only one panel will ever be open at any given time (to give me more room and to prevent you from making stuff go out of the 'frame'). There are a few bugs in F-UI I'm trying to get sorted out at the moment, so I don't know if I'll have the editor finished too soon, but it should be at a useable stage in a week (it's a given that it's useable right now, but it's effectively useless with the Lotus scripts not implemented yet).

OK, thanks!

"-Various emission shapes* (Sphere, cube, ring, cylinder)"

What - no rectangle / plane) (well you can use cube I guess with zero height) These all have radius etc settings, right? Can sphere be ellipsoid?

"Loading of particle meshes."

Can I use animated (boned) meshes, or at least control size / rotation over time with these?

No. You can blame Blitz for this.



Yes.



Sphere, ring, and cylinder have radius (and 'inner radius', so you can have a sortof ring for those as well) settings, for cube it's 'range', or 'width, depth, and height'.



Not at the moment, but all it takes is the addition of an extra function argument, so you might as well consider that a 'yes'.

A release date perhaps?

[edit] oh and on top of my previous request for thousands of premade-FX, how about loads of premade media for the particles too? ;)

[edit 2] and a randomisation button that you can play around with? ;)

I'll consider them, Caff. ;) The randomization button is entirely possible (and not that hard to do if you just want completely random values). Loads of media, on the other hand, would require me to know what'd be needed. (read the bottom of this reply).

I don't want to set a release date, since obviously we know what happens when people don't meet them (and although I can very easily and very quickly add stuff to Lotus, the editor is another matter entirely)- VividGL and Storm come to mind- and because I'm going to spend some time after I get all the features I want in to bug hunt/beta test/optimize.

If anyone's got a list of premade effects- and media- they'd like to see included you might want to post'em or e-mail them to me.

Awesome stuff

Yeah. Premade effects are what made particle candy as popular as it was (not that it wasn't already really nice).

Anyway, this is regarding the original lotus, but it probably can be applied to Lotus R2. Probably should have let you do it, but I was eager to see the results :P. I added in Convex mesh support for tokamak. Not too hard. I made the following changes to LotusTest.bb (for the rocks), TParticles\h_particle.bb, and TParticles\c_particle.bb:

1. Added Const cT_CONVEX=4 to header
2. Added Field ConvexBank% to Type LotusEmitter
3. Added the following to the select E\TokaMesh...case in Create_Particle:

Case cT_CONVEX
If E\ConvexBank Then TOKRB_AddConvex P\RB,E\ConvexBank,BankSize(E\ConvexBank) Else TOKRB_AddBox P\RB,(P\SizeFrom\X+P\SizeTo\X)/2,(P\SizeFrom\Y+P\SizeTo\Y)/2,(P\SizeFrom\Z+P\SizeTo\Z)/2
TOKRB_SetBoxInertiaTensor(P\RB,(P\SizeFrom\X+P\SizeTo\X)/2,(P\SizeFrom\Y+P\SizeTo\Y)/2,(P\SizeFrom\Z+P\SizeTo\Z)/2,P\Weight)

4. Added a third parameter to SetEmitterTokamakMesh:

Function SetEmitterTokamakMesh(Index,MeshClass%,ConvexBank=0)
gLotusEmitterList(Index)\TokaMesh = MeshClass
gLotusEmitterList(Index)\ConvexBank = ConvexBank
End Function

5. You probably know where this goes (LotusTest):

	Convex = CreateBank(FileSize("media\rock.Bin"))
	filein = ReadFile("media\rock.Bin")
	For i=0 To FileSize("media\rock.Bin")-1
		PokeByte Convex,i,ReadByte(filein)
	Next
	CloseFile filein
	ExpRockMesh = LoadMesh("media\rock.x")
	HideEntity ExpRockMesh
	gExpRocks = CreateEmitter()
		SetEmitterPosition gExpRocks,0,0,0
		SetEmitterParticleMesh gExpRocks,ExpRockMesh
		SetEmitterUsesTokamak gExpRocks
		SetEmitterTokamakMesh gExpRocks,cT_Convex,Convex
		SetEmitterRandomRotation gExpRocks,0,359,359
		SetEmitterWaitSpan gExpRocks,3
		SetEmitterCulling gExpRocks,True
		SetEmitterFX gExpRocks,34
		SetEmitterLifeSpan gExpRocks,1280
		SetEmitterColorFrom gExpRocks,255,255,255,3
		SetEmitterVelocity gExpRocks,0,.25,1
		SetEmitterWeight gExpRocks,.1
		SetEmitterRadius gExpRocks,2
;		SetEmitterTrail gExpRocks,gExpSmokeTrail
		SetEmitterDeflectorsAffect gExpRocks,1

6. I realized the rocks had to all have the same scale for the convex mesh to be scaled right :'/, so I changed line 236 (after step 5) to Size=2.

Cool, huh?

Oh yeah, and you'll need to put rock.x and rock.bin into media. (rock.x and rock.bin are in the samples directory of the tokamak wrapper v.6) You'll need the latest wrapper and tokamak dll (1.2).

Also, I believe I remember you talking about this issue, but I wasn't sure what you had decided - Will you sell Lotus R2 or keep it free?

First off, a picture:



Texture loading and setup is done, including tilesets and animated textures.



I'll have to download the new version of Tokamak and the wrapper, but it sounds cool.



It'll be sold.

Hwy, "native" Tokamak support would be ***SO*** cool!

I'm not so happy with tokamak not being cross platform so far...

Another few 'fairly easy to implement' requests (for your 'particle designer') -

- Option to change the background colour (your screenshots are a bit grey!)
- Option to turn the grid off
- Ability to load in a .b3d backdrop / scene to preview the effect in a 'working environment'

Yes - what Caff said! We have all these "minor features" at work and they rule (our in-house developed particle editor).

All of those are easily done :)

Got bored and made a neat little effect, since I needed to see whether parent/child and trail relations were working right.



Oh yeah, and the wireframe sphere in that is just another result of me getting bored :P

DOWNLOAD A BETA WEEEEEEEEEEEE

Download buggy-licious beta (well, I haven't found anything...)

It includes some media so you can fool around with it. Also, it will probably cause a MAV if you quit due to some strange and mysterious bug with F-UI and FreeFont() and DO NOT ever try to make an emitter's trail the same as itself (as in the trail is the emitter emitting the trail.. confusing? Probably. It'll crash too- a failsafe has been added into the editor since this release against that so nobody will meet their untimely crash (you can thank smilertoo for that) ). And please, read the readme text.

I have a list of particle effects that could come in handy:

1. Thruster - the one in the lotustest.bb is fine.

2. Explosion - The one from lotustest.bb is okay.

3. Explosion 2 - Explosion with rocks (lotustest.bb) (maybe even more explosion effects)

4. Sparks - handy for if you hit somthing with a 'energy beam' or somthing

5. Smoke - from lotustest.bb

6. Ammo casings - perhaps tokamak cylinders?

7. Fountatins

8. Water falls

9. Snow

10. Rain

11. Fog (really big, slow moving sprites with long life)

12. Fireworks

13. Use your imagination - you already seem to be doing so :D

Maybe you could make these emmiters into functions where you pass a variable or two specific to the emmiter type. For instance, you could pass a thrust amount, and the function would mess with the values appropriatly.

Also, I thought of a way to merge the two c_Particle files. You could add a constant to H_lotus - "TokamakOn". Put if statements at each part of the particle code with tokamak specifics that checks to see if the constant is 1 or 0. The blitz preporcessor will see this and not even compile those chunks. You might be saying that that leaves the problem of people not having the tokamak functions. True. That's why you have a file called "TokamakDummies.bb" that you include in h_lotus if tokamak is not use. It would just have functions named the same as the tokamak functions, witht eh parameters. they don't even have to have any code.

Actually, I was going to say that people who don't have the Blitz Preprocessor would be at a greater disadvantage- assuming you mean Michael's.

Nah. Actually the built in preprocessor is the one that does it. I don't use Michael's preprocessor.

The demo is buggy but shows a lot of promise.

Now for some moaning!

I have to say I find the menu structure unwieldy, it would be nice firstly to have more options available on one toolbar, so that you can jump around from one option to another. I would say have two toolbars, one your 'entities', the other a 'properties' that adjust according to the entity you are working with (an emitter, texture etc.)

Move the right-click 'emit particles' option to a massive 'emit' button somewhere on the main toolbar, always visible to toggle wherever you are.

Also, the UI control for a decimal value is restrictive - you cannot hold down LMB on the up/down arrows and drag the mouse up/down to change the values significantly. At the moment you have to click LMB which changes the values by 0.01

other than that, cool.

You choose the stepping values for float and integer spinners. To change the stepping value, alter the top-most (always visible) spinners on the Control Window.



How about both? :P



This bit leaves me confused, actually. If you have the time, could you illustrate what you mean (e.g., crude yet clear example drawn up in MSPaint)?