Behavior Tool – Seamlessness
We have felt the need for a specific tool in our Editor for so long now. Something to enable us to focus on a specific character and tweak its properties. Whether its behaviors, animaiton, physics or any other property. We never quite dedicated the time to implemente the features we needed. However some bursts of inspiration struck me recently when I went over the Havok Behavior Tool which is a very nice and neat product.
Our plan for this week is to implement a few features in our editor, Iranvij, which will enable us to view a character in an isolated window, run the different animations with a time tracker and simulate this character alone to view the different behaviors from different states. This will be a big addition to Iranvij. The state chart for every character can be edited visually thanks to the new data driven Hierarchical Finite State Machines used for the characters and the visual graph features in our editor.
Another major feature which is being added to the game engine is the Seamlessness feature which will enable huge game worlds to be loaded and unloaded on the fly without any load screens halting the game experience. The main parts have already been implemented in the game engine, Zorvan, and now the necessary tools have to be added to Iranvij. This is going to be a big addition to the engine capabilities.
(Just thinking out loud.) About the behavior tool, I was thinking about how it’s going to be implemented so it gives us freedom to see any chain of animations and (possibly) interactions. I’m unsure whether it can be done cleanly from within a game scene (you know, with all the stuff that’s going on in the engine while a scene is loaded, maybe it would be hard to implement.)
Maybe it would be better to create another dedicated window for this tool, to be able to inspect a GameObject in isolation, or even bypass the game object and view an OGRE mesh in isolation. But we would lose the brain component that way, won’t we?
Yes we can definitely have it in a separate window. Havok behavior tool is this way and has nothing to do with a world editor.
We can have a game object which gets updated, just the game object, in this case it can have the brain and all the other goodies.