A few people here at CMU have been hard at work over the summer to build upon Gyedo’s level editor to make it more general, and to get it back to the Panda community. We’re happy to report the level editor is complete and has survived a good bit of testing. There is a full feature list and wiki for the project http://wiki.etc.cmu.edu/pandale/index.php/Main_Page But just to review the features at a glance the editor currently has:
-UI based editing of shaders and their inputs
-Support for GeoMipTerrains
-Actors and various animation controls
-Cameras and waypoints
-Texture sequences
-importing and merging of scenes and libraries
-Layers
-All Panda light types
A large amount of credit goes to Gyedo and the folks at Disney who started this project and released their base code back to the community. We hope to add this level editor into the CVS tree within the week. But for now browse through the wiki and let us know what you think.
This looks interesting, the old leveleditor code was a trainwreck. And its Python too… I’m assuming its open source and could be included in the project I have in mind doing. Only thing WHY A TARBALL??? I’m a Windows guy and already have the stuff builtin windows but it does NOT open up tar.gz forcing me to go buy some sw that does or get something that ends up dying on me in 60 days or such. wish it was in a plain old zip still i suppose i could grab one file at a time. PS right now I’m couch surfing and on a friends cpu and just keeping my work inside of my gmail. Anyway I’d sure love to kick its tires a bit.
Any support for point based (non-model) entitys? I’ll probably quickly add it myself, if it’s not already there, it’s just that you guys have pretty much added everything I was planning on doing myself.
It looks great, I can’t wait to get my hand on it.
Like i sais I’m currently couchsurfing and need something thats really free to untar I’ve had something before that would but is 50 days then it dies unless u payware and I dont wanna leave my friend with something nonfunctional that is hard to get rid of and at least be able to put back so that the thing in windows that at least opens a zip would be useable again.
Also I noticed something in the editor documentation page that mentions the types of animated textures supported and in addition to the usual movie formats MPEG, AVI etc it nsays animated GIF… I didn’t think Panda supported GIF at all let alone GIF89 anim. 8 years ago I played with something called Flatland Rover that supported anigif and it was cool and easy to animate textures on objects. Egg texture cards never seemed to be what I was looking for as it just makes a square card and not applying to polys on a model like I was hoping for. Back in my Flatland days i had a whole underground complex scene with animated “Irwin Allen” style computer consoles and it was actually easy to do by applying anigifs as textures on simple block shapes.
Anyway I may spawn a new topic about my FoxyWorlds system I’m working on designing. GIF support would be SOOO cool/
Is it possible to attach behaviour scripts to individual objects? It will be great if scripts can be made into an component that can be attached individual objects.
You expect people to order their assets by file type (3d models, textures, animations, sounds), whereas most people prefer sorting by topic or object (e.g. car1, red_tree, airport etc.). Storing files this way also makes relative paths way easier.
Somewhere on the wiki I saw mention of an animation egg, but usually you export each single animation to a separate egg file. So if you have 3 animations for a model, you’ll get 4 egg files (1 model + 3 anims).
The editor allows many different assets like sounds and it can even change the background color. It would be nice if you could fully disable such features on demand, so that nothing gets mixed with other way set up AudioManagers, camera handlers etc.
You support collision solids. Any chance to also get ODE solids? Also how about attaching that collision geometry to joints?
How are layers managed inside panda?
Models have multiple attributes which define how they look like using the shader generator. Those are Diffuse RGB, Spec RGB, Shininess and probably also Glow RGB. Can’t really tell all, sorry. I’m using a few sliders in panda for setting those material attributes and then either calculating back into the modelling tool values, so that you have the right settings next time you export the model, or applying on the egg file directly.
I’ve noticed that you provide screenshots of models in the library. Are those generated on the fly?
What about LOD settings? Any chance to implement that?
For selecting colors you’d probably be better off using the wxWidget for picking colors than using 3 sliders.
I saw an option for placing models on the ground plane. Is this done by physically simulating falling? (A common technique in 3d modelling suites). If so, does it work with all collision setups or only with the ground plane?
Sorry that I don’t look into the code and get a few answers myself, but I’m really out of time these weeks.
So I installed panda3d and downloaded level editor. I went to the command line and typed in: python LevelEditorStart.py and got an ImportError: No module named WxPandaShell
Can anyone lead my through installation and running this properly? Thanks.
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