Editor plugins

[Niosop]

For the editor could you have it scan an editor_scripts directory for lua scripts?. Something like how the InitDialog system works but it will add a menu entry to a "Plugins" menu at the top of the editor instead. A list of submenus could be defined in the lua script so when they hover over Plugins->My Nifty Plugin it would show our own options.

 

Some additional callbacks could be defined for the lua scripts so that the plugin could know what was going on with the editor. Something like onModelAdd, onModelDelete, onModelMove, onModelPropertyChange, onTerrainChange, etc. This way we could hook our own code up to expand the editor and share these plugins. For instance a pathfinding plugin could monitor model changes and update a file with new node info every time a model is added or removed. Or, instead of doing it on the fly using callbacks, we could define a menu entry like Plugins->Pathfinding->Generate Nodes which would run our Lua function (which could optionally call a DLL if we wanted speed) to generate a new node list based on the current scene.

 

I think this would allow the editor to grow very quickly via community contributed plugins while not bloating the main editor with features that only a subset of us would really like to have.

[Josh]

Interesting...and you can even use C++ with this, since Lua can call DLLs.

[Rick]

I 2nd this idea. It would be really amazing to see what we can come up with. Of course it would be behind getting a collision function to work on bodies we create in lua

[VicToMeyeZR]

Very good idea. +1 from me

[omid3098]

+

[Michael Betke]

This is a nice idea. Josh could do some plugins too and earn some extra cash. And we some features we need.

[Niosop]

Ahh, and we would need a way to push things into the editor. As it is, any objects created in code are displayed in editor but aren't actually modifiable or added to the sbx. This way we could have a cave stacking plugin that would allow you to select an object and it would stack the objects to make a cave, then you could tweak the cave manually after that.

[Marleys Ghost]

a cave stacking plugin

 

 

Blasphemy!!!