Expansion api for animators

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powerpop
Posts: 171
Joined: Thu Jan 08, 2004 1:39 am
Location: san francisco

Expansion api for animators

Post by powerpop »

I seem to be posting a lot of possible design changes (sorry about that - just dont want to forget ideas as they come while i learn IRR)

Animators are incredibly useful - I already see that many people have made useful new ones (3rd person camera, flares, possibly a multi-axix circle animator) - embedding many of these animators into the scenemanager is just asking for trouble - first, its hard to know which ones should be core and which not - second it kind of bloats out scenemanager - i am not advocating for a plugin api (yuck) - how about something in between:

- make a new source folder for just animators

- make a new object that manages animators based on time (rather than just in between frames) - because really, almost all animators want to do something based on a set time and we probably will save a lot of CPU if we are not running through all the animators in between every frame

- make a list that says all the animators that this compiled version of irrlicht supports - allow people who write their own animators to add to this list (during runtime) OR they can copy their new animators to the animator folder and compile them into irrlicht

- take out the addBlahAnimator calls from the SceneManager since (a) this is not sustainable anyways and (b) its just as easy to make an animator directly!

this way the animators are not hardcoded into irrlicht and can be extended - the reason i see for this is that animators are like pixar shaders - there will literally be hundreds if not thousands of animators out there and have a system like the above will make it a little easier to deal with as a coder!
qwe
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Joined: Sun Dec 28, 2003 12:54 am
Location: Oregon, USA

Post by qwe »

yeah, that would be great. Animators are incredibly useful and I would love to see them made more extensible.
niko
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Post by niko »

Hm, you are right. Most of the animators are even very short, so their code could even be inlined in the .h files. Good idea. Let's see, maybe I'll do this with the next version. :)
qwe
Posts: 112
Joined: Sun Dec 28, 2003 12:54 am
Location: Oregon, USA

Post by qwe »

I'm gonna go over to the tutorial forum and start a thread for custom animators. I made one this morning that y'all might find useful. 8)
powerpop
Posts: 171
Joined: Thu Jan 08, 2004 1:39 am
Location: san francisco

Post by powerpop »

the tutorial forum??!
qwe
Posts: 112
Joined: Sun Dec 28, 2003 12:54 am
Location: Oregon, USA

Post by qwe »

sorry, i meant faqs, howtos, and tool lists.

http://irrlicht.sourceforge.net/phpBB2/ ... php?t=1010
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