Scene Commander,
Quote: "If you've any suggestions on how we could make it easier to use, but still retain it's power please post in feature creep, we will be looking at improving the editor functions in early 2015."
I have a question(s) regarding making Reloaded easier to use (retaining its power).
I have attached 2 screen shots. They show a new level I started working with as a test level :
Screen Shot 1. shows a small section of the level where I have started editing the terrain and if you were to walk around the area in view you can see its quite complicated with a lot of terrain editing features. Reloaded world is quite large so a lot of features could be added to any single terrain. I am presuming that the more editing and features set to the terrain the more polygons will be created possibly as the terrain would be more complex as seen by the engine in counting the polys it contains - at least that's what I presume? i.e. Flat terrain - less polys - more complex terrain = more polys. A really complex terrain could and perhaps currently would be a big burden in and of itself on the engine and users performance and when attempting a Bake though I am not sure if the bake only sees the entities as a burden when it fails on complex levels full of entities. Not that I have a level full of entities but cant bake one with the number of entities I already have in some levels which seem to be too much for it currently.
Having said that my question really relates to Entities....and...
Second Screen Shot :
From another viewpoint further away you can see I have added a few entities. Again such a large outdoor level could potentially contain a very large number of entities quite naturally irrespective of the Terrain complexity itself.....
Lee has I believe mentioned recently looking at spay painting entities so as to create for example a forest of Trees or perhaps Rocks as one can see a few of in the screen shot (ignore the actual entities as they are just whats suitably to hand so as to add something of that nature).
My question and perhaps suggestion is (may be suggested already) when placing entities in level editing mode (F9) as opposed to top down view - can you say if it is currently possible to take the single entity (item) being placed and place it, multiple times whilst having similar options to those available in top down editing view - i.e. Rotate, Scale, move up, move down and so on the entity - and place another which can be similarly manipulated so that each entity appears to be different from the last which such manipulations should help with as the number of permutations visually for a single object would be many apart from its texture of course perhaps as we cannot change that in these editing modes. Presumably no such editing is possible in F9 entity editing mode so all entities placed must appear exactly the same as each other unless one edits each one later in top down view by selecting its properties menu from the Entity widget which could be a massively time consuming operation if there were thousands of entities to consider. So time consuming so as to make it almost impossible to contemplate. Thus what would really be needed would be to carry out all operations on an entity when placing in F9 edit mode in-situ so one can see exactly whats going on and place precisely and exactly as required which would be an massive order of magnitude faster. Clearly the idea being that a single entity could have many multiple variations to add the variety needed as one would see in often occur naturally in the natural world and to remove the obvious visual repetition of many exact same looking entities , whilst at the same time hopefully and I don't know if its the case - saving mem by using instances of one entity looking different one from another. Maybe it don't work like that and there would be no saving of performance/resources I have no idea how Reloaded handles any of this internally.
Multiple instances of one single entity really for best effect need to be of different scale, angle, rotation, height and so on and placing then editing every single instance via properties in top down view by selecting the menu options and entering 3D edit mode to edit and manipulate scale, position and so on of each one individually would be a massively time consuming operation - like editing blades of grass!
Painting or spraying may be helpful if one could use it and maintain performance and have the tools to control and edit, quantities, density, randomness, vary scale and so on though at the moment the process if it still exists/works and is available I guess is too much of a strain on the engine to use?
In outdoor worlds where they are open not sure how any of this could be done effectively at all without killing performance or if the the bake process will be able to handle it all. Perhaps quads will help if the make it back in or whatever Lee may have in mind for 2015. I don't think Reloaded on my system at least will manage to get far with a lot of entities in a complex terrain with a lot of the world in view at any one time at the moment....and not sure how restricting the view and with what helps exactly if at all currently.
Screen Shot 3 : Top Down editor View. Earlier version levels I have made for testing with a similar terrain complexity I can't bake any longer though they have many more entities so I will see how this up to date level created with this version goes and how far I can get.
At the moment I don't see any way of covering my scene here with a tropical rain forest for example. Not as is at least. Will be interesting to see how 2015 goes and where we can or may have to tailor our cloth at the user end.
System : Advent Windows 7 Home Premium 64bit. Intel(R). i5-2310 CPU @ 2.90GHz. 8.00 GB RAM DDR3. Storage : 1389 GB : 1088 GB Free (1389 GB Total). Graphics : NVIDIA GeForce GT 530. Total Available Graphics Memory : 4095 MB. Dedicated : 1024 MB. Shared : 3071 MB. Direct X10
