Extensibility and Properties

[delscorcho]

irrEdit looks like it's coming along very nicely. I've seen commercial game engines with less mature editors. I'd love to see irrEdit become a true game editor... it's almost there!

An editor's usefulness increases exponentially with its extensibility. Since irrEdit is closed source, how does a programmer expose application-specific scene nodes to irrEdit, along with properties? It should be possible to, via a plugin interface, open source, or simply a DLL, to expose game-specific scene nodes to irrEdit. Say for example my game has an NPCNode, for which I specify some set of properties, like defaultHealth, characterType, etc. There should be a way to place an NPCNode in irrEdit, with my properties visible. This would turn irrEdit from a basic irrLicht scene creator into a true game editor. Apart from a decent property system, the editor wouldn't have to care about the game's custom nodes at all... just let game programmers add custom nodes and expose a simple set of properties for each.

Is this currently possible? And if not, do you have a plan?

Thanks!
Bill

[r-type]

It's not yet there and I am too eagerly awaiting Niko's next version while crossing my fingers he will add the extention system.

[delscorcho]

Yeah, it's necessary, otherwise it just isn't possible to build gameplay. And unless you have gameplay, you don't have a level

The level of abstraction he already has is perfect. You create a scene node, for which there is some set of properties. All we need is the ability, perhaps just through XML even, to add custom scene nodes to the editor with their own sets of properties. Even if we have to deserialize the properties ourselves, at least we can build gameplay in the editor.

[Athlon_Jedi]

so far this can be acheved with the scripting engine and c++ codeing although i would love to be able to use the editor for the majority of tasks and code the game logic useing a code view similar to renderware or similar. then we will have a system that would rival even the latest commercial packages.

[r-type]

There is no way to add custom scenenodes or custom properties. Afaik you can only create irr's default node type and belonging properties. If you can please share!