Comment by dismalaf
9 months ago
Visual editors are a waste of time. For 2D, lots of solutions exist (Tiled for example). For 3D, you can use Blender as your editor.
The key to making no engine work is to make only what you actually need.
9 months ago
Visual editors are a waste of time. For 2D, lots of solutions exist (Tiled for example). For 3D, you can use Blender as your editor.
The key to making no engine work is to make only what you actually need.
That’s a great idea.
I have limited experience scripting Blender, but there is a BPY API to add custom panels, so adding metadata to “entities” and simplifying the export workflow is probably feasible to the point it will be very close to an editor.
Even without scripting Blender, GLTF is a "scene" format. GLTF files hold information about models, textures, lights, etc... So you can create your scene then import straight into your game with GLTF (open source, super common).
And of course since Blender is used for movies, it does scenes well already.
> For 3D, you can use Blender as your editor.
Really depends on the team size, composition, and game. If you have designers on the team who aren't dedicated programmers, I don't think blender will cut it for them.
??? Blender has scripting but it's for artists... Like, artists make movies with it... Movies that have scenes with dozens of artists working on it...
The people who are used to making models are probably not the same as are building levels.
At least when I last tried Blender the UI was a lot harder to use than something like Unreal or Unity editor.
I'd probably look at the Godot editor first.
But I do like the idea of trying to find an existing editor in the same domain and modifying that rather than building from scratch.
Yes, but most artists can't script. The scripting is for tech artists or programmers to build tools/pipelines on top of Blender.
The demands of a movie differ from a game which is why I'm a bit doubtful. But nothing is impossible to achieve with peope planning, so I'm not dismissing it.
Visual editing is how all UI is designed. It's not a waste of time. Visual editing is the primary way to prototype, which means it's heavily used at the beginning and less as development goes forward. Projects have some process to translate the prototypes into scaffolding UI in the Editor, then modify with state where necessary. This pipeline is common across all types of software.
Sorry, I thought the context was clear given the parent. Making your own visual editor is a waste of time when ones exist that will output a format you can simply put into your game.