S-M-R-T
Entry posted by Josh ·
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I've made more progress on the model editor. I needed it to be able to resave models after making changes. First, I started with an Entity::Save function that would save all entities in the GMF format. "But wait", I thought, "I can save all entities in the GMF format!" Then I thought, even better, I can simply write a Serialize() virtual class function in the base object and extend it for each class, so that instead of writing this:
stream->WriteFloat(position.x); stream->WriteFloat(position.y); stream->WriteFloat(position.z);
I can simply write this:
position.Serialize(stream);
"I am so smart! I am so smart! S-M-R-T!"
Wait a minute, if I write a World::Serialize function, I could save an entire world with all entities in a single file, so that another person can just open the file and recreate everything that was happening! Amazing! 
Of course, serializing every instance of every texture would be terribly wasteful. Should assets still be loaded from files? What if they were missing? What about models that were loaded and then modified? Can I use this for sending entities over the network? How does this all fit together?
It was around that time my conscience started kicking in, or whatever that feeling you get when you know you're doing something dumb is. So I stopped what I was doing, imported the GMFSDK code into the editor, and wrote a SaveModel() function, which is all I needed in the first place. 
I changed the default background color to dark gray (0.25). It makes thumbnails more easily visible, and is dark enough to not kill your ability to see dark pixels. The thumbnail generation uses the last rotation you had in the model editor, so it's very easy to adjust the thumbnail. The thumbnail renders use an orthographic view, which makes it easier to make better use of the available pixel space, and seems to look good. Thumbnail renders for materials and models use 2x antialiasing, which looks great blended against the background color.
The thumbnail icon view we use for assets is one of my favorite parts of the editor. Having used this and a few alternatives for a while, I think this gives you much faster and easier access to all your files.
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