Long time no see

So I’ve been away for a long time. Have no fear, this doesn’t mean I haven’t been busy! Quite the opposite, I’m currently working on a new iteration of the Nebula 3 toolkit. As such, I’ve begun working on a content manager. The idea is that the previous way of handling content is that you have five different applications, a level editor, a material editor (textures and shader variable editor), Nody, the batch exporter and the importer. This time around, we want to gather every application into one big tool, which lets us not only edit graphical objects live, but also avoids the fact that we need several applications to accomplish the one thing we want.

Enter the content browser, a tool which lets you review all your assets, edit them (live of course) as well as import new ones. This tool is the one I’m currently working on, and the idea of it is to be closely attached to the level editor and Nody. With the content browser, an artist or programmer NEVER has to switch between applications to edit, preview and update assets for their games, giving a huge increase in productivity.

As well as this is going on, I’m also working on a new iteration of Nody. This might sound irrelevant in comparison to the previous, but in my opinion (remember, this is my opinion, so don’t take it too seriously) it’s not. The idea for Nody 2 is to separate what is actually Nody from what is specific about shaders. By that I mean there will be a framework called Nody, or Nody 2 (haven’t quite decided yet) which can be used to implement a Nody-application, where a node-based shader designer might be one of them. Have in mind that the basic idea of Nody is to have a node graph which basically just connects inputs to outputs and produces a result. A colleague of mine had the idea to use the Nody library to implement a production line for wood sawing, while another suggested it can be used to setup behavior trees for AIs. The uses for Nody is more or less endless, but the important factor is that Nody, as it looks today, is only implemented as a shader designer tool. As such, I need to either separate the ‘relevant’ stuff from the current version of Nody, or quite simply make everything from scratch. The reason why I chose the latter is because we’ve found a way to incorporate Nebula stuff like smart pointers and the overall symmetric design in Qt applications, and as such I can write the new iteration of Nody to have automatic memory deallocation, something which Qt more or less lacks (despite the fact they have six different types of smart pointers).

Oh, and did I mention that I’ve started studying again? I’m not asking you to care but have in mind that progress might seem sluggish when I’m simultaneously trying to write a compiler…

Pics of the progress might appear soon!