LevelEditor Roadmap

LevelEditor Roadmap

V3.4 features:

• Sublevel support.
• Dynamic and on-demand resolve/unresolve for sublevels.
• Global flag to set auto-resolve for sublevels on main level load (use Preferences dialog box from Edit > Preferences menu item).
• Duplicating game objects (CTRL+SHIFT while dragging objects using Move manipulator).
• Object snapping.
• View commands (frame all, frame selection, hide, show all, and so on).
• Snap modes [toggle-able mode in toolbar] (rotate on snap, snap to vertex, snap to grid vertex).
• Snap modes (top, left, bottom, and so on).
• Custom pick filter as a Microsoft's Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) component.
• Render GameObject display properties (caption, box, pivot).
• MovePivot manipulator.
• Design View preferences (background color, camera properties, and so on).
• Proxy shapes can have diffuse and normal textures.
• Basic shadow map (helps level designer with object placement by adding extra visual cues).
• Global render settings.
• Various place-able types of lights.
• Dynamic shadows to help object placement.

V3.5 features

• Render thumbnail in Resource Lister.
• Resource metadata (Game asset can have custom metadata)
• Resource preview (Display 3D preview for the selected model resource)
• ResourceConverter provides an interface to convert resource to game-object when drag/dropping it onto Designview.
• 3D line renderer
• Hide inherited attribute using schema annotation.
• Add new manipulators as a MEF component.
• Display view type and fps at top left of Design View.
• Draw X, Y, Z axis in the lower-left corner of the Design View.
• Improve logging and error handling on C++ side.
• Programmer's and user's guides.

V3.6 features

• Package Manager for installation.
• Integration of StateMachine with the LevelEditor.
• Prototype assets.
• Rendering normals.
• Pick-cycling for overlapped objects.
• Extension manipulator.
• Move pivot point command.
• Pick filter.
• Sublevel object placement.
• Bezier spline linear. You can define a linear as a Polyline, a CatmullRom spline, or a Bezier spline.

V3.7 features

• Terrain Editor: Author large outdoor terrains with multiple blended layers. See LevelEditor's home page for more details. Note: undo/redo is not implemented yet.
• Prefab Asset: Create prefab from existing game objects and save it as an asset that can be reused later. Note: There is currently no Prefab Editor. A workaround is to manually edit or overwrite an existing prefab file.

Features for future releases (in no special order):

• Add new set of schema annotations to address the shortcomings of current annotations.
• Add RenderLoop (turn on/off continues rendering).
• Smooth camera animation during fit operation (frame all, frame selection).
• Align objects (similar functionality as was provided by the ATF Level Editor's View->Align menu item).
• Add Unity3 style prefabs.
• Add support for source control plugins (Apache™ Subversion® [SVN] and Perforce).
• Add Refresh option to context menu for Resource Lister.
• Allow user to add commands or flags to render commands.
• Add support for ALT+Click on an object to set it as current look-at point.
• Add transform to gameReferenceType; consider using sublevel as prefab.
• Create new MEF component for handling Resource Root.
  • Add IResourceRootService to LevelEditorCore
  • Implement and export IResourceRootService in LevelEditor.exe
• Refactor shader classes in native renderer to allow multiple implementations (HSL [hue, saturation, and lightness], Cg [C for Graphics], and so on).
• Display orientation cube at top-right (similar to what the Maya® viewer provides).
• Convert camera controllers to MEF components so that camera commands can iterate over all the controllers and create a command for each. Or add a RegisterController() function to CameraCommands so that the user can register custom camera controllers.
• Add Align commands (similar to functionality provided by ATF Level Editor).
• Add support for populating linears.
• Add support for aerials.
• Add find/replace function.
• Add Exporters (skeleton exporter to demo how to traverse a level document, read each element, and store the result to a file, plus the UI for choosing file name, and so on).