I have a little project that I've driven past Lee and he agrees that it would be pretty cool and well received by them there user types but I have a wee problemo.

Basically I loath GUI stuff and hate Windows and well ... even contemplating changing the editor windowsy stuff (technical term that!) in GG makes me cringe. On top of that I'm not really all that keen on C code either!

So I'm looking for someone perverse enough to actually like doing that stuff, and skilled enough to do it and also mad enough to want to spend many hours lost in the humongous mess that is the GG Gui code, to assist me in my endeavours.

Full details of the project, which sounds relatively simple at first sight, will be forthcoming to any serious(ly bonkers) applicants.

Oh and the best to last, you'll be doing it for turds and titters and the everlasting respect and admiration of the few GG users who will think its a good idea, or to put it another way it's one of those things that most people won't know they need until they have it!

if I could code in C++ I would help but unfortunately I can fiddle but not proficiently for what you want, if you need icons or fancy labels I could possibly do that

Actually I can give a brief idea of what it is all about.

Currently you have the ability to attach a script to an entity from the GUI but not really any other interface to the script innards, so for example we currently have lots of very similar scripts (ai for example) that litter the scriptbank but all do pretty much the same thing.

This means that to change the behaviour of the scripts the user needs to, horror of horrors, throw a horrible looking script into notepad (other variants of horrible Windows text editors are availabe) and actually edit some numbers and stuff.

Now I know there are plenty of people who like doing this (I'm one of them!) but for a few people I this can produce horrendous nightmares.

Soooo, my plan is to add (or have someone who actually knows what they are doing add) a drop down pane, or whatever they are called, directly below the bit where you select the script that would allow the user to configure the behaviour of the script. The clever bit is that this configuration would be on an entity by entity basis and involves no script editing or script copying and renaming.

Basically the script itself would provide the engine with the details of configurable variables which would be embedded in a special header in the script, on loading the script the engine would read this header and populate the new drop down pane thingy with little editable window thingies where the user can change the values to their hearts content.

So hopefully at the end of all this we could have a single ai script that you could attach to any character (for example) and then tailor the behaviour of the individual characters from the GUI.

Boring stuff I know and unlikely to garner any 'votes' but some people might find it useful.

(btw, my role in all of this is the Lua interface bit, i.e. turning the special header into a suitable format for sticking in the drop down thingy, translating the users drivel into Lua variables and storing them away somewhere. The scripts themselves would access the variables via a new global table populated by the engine at startup, i.e. just prior to the 'init' scripts being called.)

Wow cool ok
This is almost the same thing as the original Unreal engine had in its editor for controlling just about everything in the game engine. .and..it was amazinnnnggg andddd so easy to use to do difficult things very quickly and easily.

Go for it..

Unird12b

My take on this idea was the LUA GUI (not sure if I mentioned this in one of my rambles), but it was an idea to slowly replace the entity properties style property editing with something more like the widget panel inside the 3D editing area. The code is in there to handle this type of thing, but the idea of the LUA GUI was a much more complex 3D panel box which contained radio buttons, sliders and other controls which would be populated based on what the associated LUA script wanted to export as user-configurable values. By adding field names to the header of the LUA script (as parsable -- comments), any scripter could set up values that a non-scripter could set, and which the script would use when run in the game (i.e. specify the angle at which the angry monkey creature would throw coconuts at you, the damage they would cause if they hit you, and the radius of the explosion the coconut would emit if it hit the floor, etc) At the moment you need to be a LUA scripter to set these three values. With LUA GUI (or AmenMoses approach) editing these values would be as simple as right-clicking on the monkey entity, selecting 'monkey-throw-coconut' script from a drop down and editing the values right there inside the 3D editor panel. As AmenMoses says, it's a whole grab-bag of pain unless you are pretty confident around the source code and have experience with writing UI systems, LUA parsing, data structure management and a nest of other skills one picks up over the years.

I think it's a great idea. I'm sure the coding part would be boring to a "non-coder" (me), but the end product sounds great!

I personally love having an entire lua file that controls all aspects of a character cause it was easier for me to trouble shoot issues or add features or make the AI do EXACTLY as I intend it to. Now its become very difficult because they bounce around and share similar calls from other files and it requires changing multiple files and i just get very lost and its easy to break other characters.

While its a great idea to have similar functioning components sectioned off like this so not every character AI script needs to be updated... For people like me making this become more modular, kind of takes more control away from customization.

Reason why I do this like the traditional type of scripting is because I like creating completely new features. For example all the RPG elements that come with leveling, experience and etc. Additionally making different actions occur based on where you have injured the enemies (based on limb detection) and modifying how enemies interact with detected sounds and detection of the player. I also like making ingame cutscenes with characters that have the ability to also jump right back to attacking you or befriending you all within the same script based on certain actions the player does with them.

Some early examples of why I like that i could edit AI in LUA in the past:







So I've been holding on to old AI scripts like they are gold, simply because I like that i can fully control what they do and what cool new things they can. There are many many cool things I've been able to do that I don't have videos for, within LUA with characters and Id like to continue having fun with that sort of thing. So what ever happens I hope character lua isn't completely abandoned when it comes to characters. A growing fear of mine once i noticed scripts now look like this:



While it keeps things neat and organized and allows for less updating of character AI lua script files... I find it very difficult to implement new ideas or fix unattended to combat bugs. I think we will soon need some type of guide on how to continue to make cool scripts that call the usual AI components when needed. I've only been using LUA for a year but I'm in love with it.

I hate to bring up Unity because of the arguments that tend to occur, but the ability to fiddle with the script variables in the Unity editor is extremely useful, and I would love to have this feature in GameGuru.

@Teabone: This idea in no way stops people doing what you are talking about, if I were making a game with npc and whatnot I would not use the existing Lua scripts for them but would have my own as well. This is more aimed at the people who really take the 'no coding' claim to heart.

ah yes "Game Making For Everyone"

(no sarcasm, i like this direction)

totally agree. I am SLOWLY getting into scripting, its just combining scripts and testing around really, nothing serious lol.
But that would certainly help!

Thinking through the implementation details a bit more I'm stuck on a bit of it.

So I originally thought that it would be enough to just read the header details when the entity is first dragged onto the the map or when assigned a new script from the parameters panel but then realised that if for example you load an old saved map but have changed the script parameters since it was last loaded the parameter details will no longer match, the engine could potentially have details for a parameter no longer in the script (which wouldn't be much of a problem) or worse, not have a parameter that has been added to the script.

This means that on loading a map the engine probably needs to check all the parameter details stored with the map against the current state of scripts that they refer to to check they are still valid - but this then raises the question of what to actually do about it! (this would only be in the editor btw, we shouldn't need to do this for a standalone as everything should match up in that case)

Hmm, puzzler indeed.

Sry .net developer here.

I don´t know if this is the idea to push GG.
I would like to see it. Something like that to make it easier for lua devs I would apreciated:

Coldfusion did it like it and it works(not that coldfusion is a great language at all).
And then in the lua like this:


But you have surly a better idea. Please just make sure you not do stuff only to please non-coders

In the Lua scripts you would copy from the global parameters table into script locals for efficiency like this:


Haven't decided yet on the header format to specify, something like:

-- %PARAM <name> <type> <value> ( <value list> ) "Comment"

or maybe put the type in with the key, like %PARAM_F for float, %PARAM_S for string etc.

This will depend a lot on how we want to display it on the GUI.

Edited to add:
To further expand this description a bit, the <value> is the default, ( <value list> ) would be an optional comma separated list of valid values so the user can select one of them. The "comment" part could be used to populate the little 'hover over help' pop up thingy giving a description of the parameter to the user.

So for example my helicopter script has a parameter to specify whether the chopper is 'for or agin' the player, this would be put in the header as:

-- %PARAM_S Mode "enemy" ( "enemy", "friendly", "neutral" ) "Selects the mode in which this helicopter starts the game."

In the parameters pane this could then put up a "Mode" box with a drop down defaulted to "enemy" which allows the user to select "friendly" or "neutral".

Not quite sure how to deal with script variables that aren't entity specific though, might need to think about that a bit. For example in my pickuppables script the variables apply to all entities with the script attached, "maxWeight" for example which gives the maximum amount the player can carry.

Thats cool. I really want this feature in GG. What they could do is instead of using shadows is just add a zone that we can place on the floor that makes player invisible to AI. I really want stealth kills in my game, but Im no coder. That way you could place zones on corners behind boxes etc and just make fake shadows for those zones. And or animated hiding spots. Splinter Cell and Tenchu are my favorite games of all time thus far.

I admire your bravery. I for one, will be sitting this one out. You couldn't pay me to touch windows GUI code.

@JackalHead: You can already do that with a bit of Lua scripting, I have a zones script (a search in scripts forum should find it) which allows zones of any shape and size to be created and allows tracking of player entering/exiting zones and characters likewise. All you would need is a small additional change to the ai scripts to check whether the player is in one of you 'safe' zones before allowing detection.

Start a thread over in scripts if you want to pursue this further.

A while back I created a concept of a revamped UI for GG, would be happy to contribute graphic elements and layouts for the UI. But digging under the hood of GG ain't my cup of tea.

General Layout:



Scene Entity Browser and Window layout selection:

I always liked that interface it gave GG a far more expensive and professional look ..

@Landman wow I like that layout looks really clean and professional

I think I see what Lee mentioned in the code, it looks like something similar was started. There are some routines that are not currently called from anywhere, one of them would attempt to load a file called scriptbank/behaviours, haven't a clue what that file was supposed to contain though.

Landman thats beautiful
I'd love a View menu so we can hide things like entities, lights, trigger zones and etc. Much easier to find things when you can layer other things out. I understand you can topically do this by ghosting entities but we need a bit more control over whats visible on the editor when designing it.

One thing I would really like to see is that when you select an entity in the left hand entity window all entities of the same type on the map get highlighted, i.e. just like they do when you hover over them and if there is only one on the map to take you to it.

Maybe if anyone is really feeling adventurous have a right click menu from the entity selector which could give options like 'delete all', 'locate', 'hide/show' etc.

Seems like finding a GUI Guru is like finding a needle in a barn full of hay.

how difficult would it be to have animated gif's instead of bmp's for the animated assets ?

I specialize in Java and Javascript. So it'd maybe worth looking into (no promises) but I'd be more than happy to help where I can.

Haven't looked into the repo entirely but has Lee released the entire source code on the repo?

Yes all the code is there, could do with a satnav to navigate it though.

Satnav uses TomTom, I only use Google Maps.

I always wanted this. Cause sometimes i have objects i accidentally put on the map I cannot locate.

Hence, this UI:



Lee has done an incredible job of taking this engine into DX11 and adding PBR. It's about time people take it seriously, as a business if TGC wants to make money. They need a slick and easy application with kick455 graphics. The latter Lee has done.

I don't like the cluttered UI approach, context sensitive popups are much better imho.

One big improvement would be to have the entity selection panel put the entities in categories which can be collapsed down, even if it were simply based on the name of the folder the entity originally came from it would make it a lot easier to find a particular entity again. Also if you have an entity selected and click to add another entity it should default to the directory the selected entity came from rather than the last entity you placed on the map (or even make the behaviour configurable via a popup selection box).

@Landman - yes I remember that post from way back, very nice pro UI you have going there.

While I am not too fussed about GG's UI, like I feel it is functional an all, but I have always thought it was a bit toyish looking, the UI in the PP is even more like a toy imo.

GG's approach of not having the UI in the way of the designer is a great concept. So a much more serious UI that can be toggled on and off easily so you can focus on model placement and such would be awesome.

I think a UI like your design there would go along way to make GG a more serious product.

Reliquia....

me too