Inactive Preview Renderer

[Skaldarnar]

Name: Preview Renderer
Summary: The Preview Renderer should render a spinable scene from a given BlockCollection or BluePrint object.
Scope: Engine? Mod?
Current Goal: Providing an interface to pass in an object to render and show it in a seperate window.
Phase: Inception (awaiting a curator)
Related: Git Issue #123

I'm not sure with all the technical issues. I would like to have this tool for testing the building generator stuff for procedural city generation.
For me it would be fine to pass a BlockCollection to the renderer that opens a new window displaying the rendered BlockCollection (in a new little window, probably).
There should be not need to start up the whole game for testing a single BlockCollectin or Blueprint, though.

Later on, the preview renderer could be used for a grammar editor or other blueprint tools provided for the community.

 

[pencilcheck]

is this good enough for a start?

 

[Cervator]

Progress

Posting a few sample pix of the miniaturizer for pencilcheck - it similarly pastes an existing part of the world in a mini form in a fixed spot in the world (while the above is a hovering representation of the chunk the player is in):

 

[pencilcheck]

Finally, after a few hours of work:


Ok, what you are seeing here is two separate things. I used a miniaturization tool to create a small model of the area I have chosen, which is on one of the blocks to the right.

And the other one that faces towards us and right next to our toolbar is the new preview of the new model made from BlockCollection. This one will be fixed on your screen no matter where you look. And it rotates!!!

Since this is only for testing purposes, I'm converting the chunkMesh to BC, then BC to chunk and to chunkMesh again, then finally render which is quite inefficient, but this can be changed later. Right now there is no button or toggles to turn off this feature once it is been triggered

Also for testing purposes, this new preview triggers right after you create one miniature block.

 

[pencilcheck]

This change has been pushed to my github branch here.

 

[Cervator]

And built in the highlight job here

The going thought is that with this able to support BlockCollections (even with the quirky temp test hookup - we needed a source for a set of blocks) we could have the /build command from the PAG system from Skaldarnar prepare a tool/blueprint that can go in your toolbar/inventory rather than build straight in the world. Then with that object active the preview could render somewhere as a GUI element (rather than an in-world object - although that could be useful in places too) and using the object would perform the build.

So - Skaldarnar - can has PAG PR nao plz?

 

[Cervator]

Bump! Moved out of the incubator into Core Projects, but I'm not entirely sure what to do with this one. @Josharias kinda has something going on in ItemRendering for showing items in the world including with animation (like the Yin & Yang symbols in L&S). This had code attached but it probably doesn't work anymore. The miniaturizer broke long ago.

We still need something that can preview multi-block constructs though.

@pencilcheck - how goes these days? Been so long I forgot you did this

 

[pencilcheck]

Hey, yea it has been a long time since I have done this .. more than 2 years!!! Time sure flies by. Well I can't be committing any more time for this project anymore, maybe have someone else take over it? Been busy working these days. How about you?

 

[Cervator]

Hey, yea it has been a long time since I have done this .. more than 2 years!!! Time sure flies by. Well I can't be committing any more time for this project anymore, maybe have someone else take over it? Been busy working these days. How about you?

Same, always busy Good to know your account still works! Do share if you run into anything interesting on your end.

We're making progress, even if just finding little bits of time here and there. I'm sure somebody will get on this again one day like @Josharias since he's nearly there anyway

 

[Josharias]

<feeling the poke... background wheels turning>