Suggestions for Particle editor
by Alex Rice · in Torque Game Builder · 07/10/2005 (2:22 am) · 4 replies
The particle effects in T2D are awesome. Just beautiful. Obviously T2D is a great value ($80 for me) no matter how you slice it.
One thing I'm a little confused about also is that T2G has these .eff files, but I don't remember seeing them in TGE. So T2G has compiled effects files? Are they editable in a text format, other than just loadEffect()? If they can't be edited as torque script, then it makes the usability of the particle editor very mportant.
I do have some suggestions for the Particle Editor where I think there are some usability problems.
background image
The first thing I did was change the editorbackground.jpg file. The G logo and the gradient causes problems. There is enough red in the mostly-black background to cause pink hues in some particle effects and that's distracting.
Graph field editor
The other problem I noticed is that the Graph Field editor only exposes 1 single value-pair at one time, and obscures everything else. So it hides almost all of your data! It's like looking for a needle in a haystack.
bare minimum to be user friendly
Some kind of grid view either listing all the Graph Field time value keys in a long table ,or in a tree view you can drill down into, like this:
blue sky- would be kick ass
A real bona fide fcurve editor, like this animation editor in XSI. On the left is your tree view of objects, which you click to select then you can edit the function curves by dragging control points.
For some reason though , for it's particle systems, XSI does not use that animation fcurve editor. It uses a properties window with a tabs, scrollbars, sliders, text input fields, etc. But the tabbed interface exposes everthing pretty well:
One thing I'm a little confused about also is that T2G has these .eff files, but I don't remember seeing them in TGE. So T2G has compiled effects files? Are they editable in a text format, other than just loadEffect()? If they can't be edited as torque script, then it makes the usability of the particle editor very mportant.
I do have some suggestions for the Particle Editor where I think there are some usability problems.
background image
The first thing I did was change the editorbackground.jpg file. The G logo and the gradient causes problems. There is enough red in the mostly-black background to cause pink hues in some particle effects and that's distracting.
Graph field editor
The other problem I noticed is that the Graph Field editor only exposes 1 single value-pair at one time, and obscures everything else. So it hides almost all of your data! It's like looking for a needle in a haystack.
bare minimum to be user friendly
Some kind of grid view either listing all the Graph Field time value keys in a long table ,or in a tree view you can drill down into, like this:
blue sky- would be kick ass
A real bona fide fcurve editor, like this animation editor in XSI. On the left is your tree view of objects, which you click to select then you can edit the function curves by dragging control points.
For some reason though , for it's particle systems, XSI does not use that animation fcurve editor. It uses a properties window with a tabs, scrollbars, sliders, text input fields, etc. But the tabbed interface exposes everthing pretty well:
About the author
#2
www.mindlube.com/garagegames-forum/editorBackground.png
07/10/2005 (3:04 am)
Here is the replacement editorbackground.jpg I am using. This is 1024x768. Another problem is that at 640x480 and 800x600, the bitmap has a different register compared with the gui on the left side. I guess that's why you used a gradient in the original image? Maybe it the gui needs to be masked off with another bitmap image of solid white or solid gray?www.mindlube.com/garagegames-forum/editorBackground.png
#3
Totally agree with all of your posts. The particle-editor is just a placeholder and we'll be launching into full professional editors as soon as the development has settled down a little. There are still considerably improvements to be made to the particle editor with features like collision-detection, per-emitter area/positions and even a wrapper for spawning effects themselves similar to the super-emitters in the product Particle Illusion.
We've got to be damned sure that we've got the API right before we launch into the expensive game of doing a pro-editor but it will happen and what a day that will be. ;)
It's probably a good idea to use a background such as you provided. With your permission, I'll probably replace the existing one with yours.
EDIT: Just to mention that the particle-effect files are not a special format, they are just the common file-format used by T2D to save its objects. They are binary files saved by Torques stream-system and are non edittable. The next version has a new and much better file-format system in the sense that we can easily extend it without breaking what went before.
- Melv.
07/15/2005 (8:28 am)
Alex,Totally agree with all of your posts. The particle-editor is just a placeholder and we'll be launching into full professional editors as soon as the development has settled down a little. There are still considerably improvements to be made to the particle editor with features like collision-detection, per-emitter area/positions and even a wrapper for spawning effects themselves similar to the super-emitters in the product Particle Illusion.
We've got to be damned sure that we've got the API right before we launch into the expensive game of doing a pro-editor but it will happen and what a day that will be. ;)
It's probably a good idea to use a background such as you provided. With your permission, I'll probably replace the existing one with yours.
EDIT: Just to mention that the particle-effect files are not a special format, they are just the common file-format used by T2D to save its objects. They are binary files saved by Torques stream-system and are non edittable. The next version has a new and much better file-format system in the sense that we can easily extend it without breaking what went before.
- Melv.
#4
07/15/2005 (9:33 am)
@Melv- OK great! Thanks for the feedback. Sure go ahead and use the editorBackground.png if you want to. 
Torque Owner Alex Rice
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