Possibility of a Scene/Prefab/node system like on Godot?

[MilesThatch]

Last time I was working with leadworks, something that I found to be a time consumer was that complex objects have to be built entirely in code. 

This is something that I found completely hey none issue in Godot engine, with it's scene system. Where a scene is merely a collection of game components like lights, cameras, particle emitters, meshes, out of which you built that game object. 

For example a lamp scene would be built out of an area trigger zone node, a spotlight node, a 3D mesh node and maybe if you wanted to get fancy, a particle emitter for some sparks. The entire process of setting up that scene would take less than a minute, including aligning, rotating and arranging all the nodes, because it is all done in gui. Distinct the recall having to program all of the loading, placements and alignments in leadworks.

This makes prototyping and in fact even development exceptionally fast. So it off loads the building and assembly of an object to an editor window. In much the same way you get a dedicated window for setting up your materials instead of having to do it in code.  Now mind you, you still program the behaviors of the object in code, and you could still use code to generate additional components.

I'm wondering if there's any possibility of bringing this kind of a workflow into the current engine? It won't change how you program the object, it will only add a much faster approach to setting up new objects with necessary components.

 

[Josh]

You can save any scene in Leadwerks and Ultra as a prefab. There just needs to be a single top-level entity in the hierarchy.

[MilesThatch]

Are all entities creatable via code also creatable via the scene hierarchy?  Like joints, pivots, cameras, listeners?

[Josh]

Joints are not an entity and there is currently no method to create them in the editor. Listeners are not an entity in Ultra, there is just an Entity::Listen() command that makes any entity the listener. Everything else can be created in the GUI.