Time to prepare the Brushes.

Well it's been another 3 weeks Since my last post.
And I am kinda struggling with finding a good name for this one.
None of the other ones were "Good" in the sense of really good Titles but more matching.
Well we will see what I come up with until the end of this post.

Game Engine Split Finalization / New Tool:

Well after the last Post my goal was to finally Split the Engine completely from the Game to make a separate tool work. My Modeling Converter Tool. So also threw my UI Engine into the core engine and after a bit of work it worked fine.

So why do I need a Model Converter Tool?
I have my own Model format. It is nothing special. Supports the essentials and is not as compressed as other ones.
The reason why I have my own format is simple: I found no format that supported "Vertex Coloring" without a Texture. And I didn't want to use Textures in the first place.
There will be textures in my game and most likely even in a couple of Models but the goal is to run with Vertex colors. 

Anyways after a bit of time I Managed to do a simple Implementation of my new Model Converter Tool. And It looked quite well.

Sadly I do not have pictures of the issue I ran into Pretty Quickly.

New UI Features:

So the issue I was running into the "Top" of the Modeling Window was getting pretty clunky.
There were a lot of "Buttons" I needed to add and This was already quite big.
So I needed a Menu Bar. With a whole Menu System. Because this was one big System for myself that was missing.
So after looking around for a bit I found no real implementation that was not JavaSwing based and even that was a bit hard to understand.
So I decided, lets just look how the "Menu Bars" in other Programs like NotePad++ and Steam behave and  try to mimic that.

So I simply started had some issues with "depth" in my Engine because UI even so it was Improved had no real sense of "depth" yet but after a lot of changes I managed to implement a Menu Bar + Sub-Menus.
Ofc there is a limit. I didn't implement sideways menus just Top Down versions. But for a first attempt its quite well.

Model Tool Features:

Next was it to implement features to the Model Converter Tool.
Here is a list of implemented features:

• Setting Vertex Colors.
• Transforming Models (Scale, Rotate, Translate)
• Centering the Model
• Normalizing the Model (So its scaled down to fit in 1 Tile)
• Undo a change
• Redo a change
• Texture Reading. (Basically drop a Texture in the window and it will apply vertex coloring based on what pixel each vertex would fetch.
• State Exporting/Importing (Undo/Redo Memory)
• Vertex/Triangle Selection Display (seeing what you have selected)
• Model Merging. 
• Multi Model Export

And this is roughly the list of features I have implemented.

This these two things took me around 2.5 weeks already and this looked like a very little being done on the Game.

So I decided there is a bit of time left before I want to do the post why not just implement some relatively quick features into the Game.

New Game Features:

So on my Todolist I have put "Tile Placers" and "Terrain Tools".
Tile Placers was just to big since it needed a massive amount of features to work.
Especially since I am still designing that in my Head.
So Terrain Tools it was. That implementation was a lot easier since my new UI engine allowed a easy way to add new "Mixed" components.
So after a tiny bit of work and a lot of optimizations.
The Terrain Painter and Height Changer are now a thing. Quite a bit faster then before and also some more features to it.

So yeah this sums up what I have been up to.
Here is the actual List that show the work that I have been doing.

One last note is: I will take a week of this project now because other projects are now kinda screaming at me that they need a bit of attention. Not as much time luckily as Game Engine but a week is needed at least.

So it might take a week or two longer for the next Patreon Post then the usual 3-4 weeks that I have keeping up at.

Anyways thanks for reading.

Speiger.