BZWorkbench Progress

Now that I’ve familiarized myself with OpenSceneGraph enough to load, manipulate, and render textures and meshes within FLTK, I can start writing the framework through which the Model will interact with the View.  My to-do list for this week is to:

1.  Get an API in place to load and store single instances of meshes and textures and distribute references to them to other objects (i.e. a data broker for the 3D scene).

2.   Add a method to the simpler BZW objects to allow each one to refactor itself into an OSG node that can be added to the View.

3.  Add an event handler to the View that will allow the user to select (and eventually manipulate) objects in the scene graph, using OSG’s API.

4.   Add methods to add and remove objects from the scene graph and have their addition or removal reflected in the Model.

Although it’s a lofty goal, my hope is that the project will have enough features in place by my GSoC mid-summer review to allow the adventurous users to make BZW 2.0 maps with most of, if not all of the supported objects.  We’ll just have to see how it goes .

The June 15th deadline has been modified.  Rather than requiring the simple UIs to be compete, they have been postponed to June 30th.  Instead, the advanced features of the data model have been moved forward.  So by June 15th, the entire data model and the top-level file parser should be working or near-working.  Once the data model is completely in place, the UIs will follow.  They probably won’t take as long as the data model to complete.  The sooner I can start on the 3D scene, the more features I can add to it.

At the time of this writing, every BZFlag object except for “mesh” and “define” are supported by BZWorkbench’s data model, and I plan to get at least “mesh” done tonight.  Once both are done, the top-level BZW file parser needs to be written.  Fortunately, that will not be difficult with the way I’ve set up the object data models.  The model will then be complete enough to begin constructing the object-specific dialogs that can be launched from the MCD’s “More…” button.  Thank you all for your patience; the GUI implementation scheduled for June 15th should be completed on-time.

My main concern regarding this project right now is making sure it can correctly load and parse already-made BZW files–my goal is that the editor should be able to load anything BZFS can before moving on to the UI if possible.

Okay, we got the World Configuration Dialog and the Master Configuration Dialog working.  Some of the buttons on the MCD need to be implemented still, but both dialogs can write out their data in BZW format.  The WCD can effectively write “world”, “waterLevel”, and “options” objects, and the MCD can write out the “position”, “rotation”, “size”, “shear”, “spin”, “scale”, and “shift” keys and values for any object that supports one or more of these.  It also allows for the last four keys (the affine transformation keys) to be repeatable.  Now that the MCD is complete, I can start working on the object-specific dialogs, like the Tetrahedron Dialog, the Arc Dialog, the Sphere Dialog, etc., because they are now accessible via the “More…” button on the MCD.  Also, I’ll be implementing the “Edit BZW” button on the MCD after the other dialogs are complete.  I hope for it to at least support syntax-highlighting.  I should have all the dialogs up and running by July 1st, possibly sooner.  The goal is to get them all running AND bug-free by then, so we’ll see how it goes