It must have been a couple of years since I last posted an official update so many apologies to those who have messaged me asking for one that it has taken so long. I expect many of our newer members may not even know who I am – so I am Sytner, SWGEmu’s resident tool developer/client reverser. Since so much has happened since my last update I am just going to briefly summarise the state of all of my editors (for the sake of not taking up too much of this thread) and hopefully clear up some misinformation that has been floating around.
General editor progress:
• I have been very busy in real life the past few years, so my progress tends to come in chunks, but this year in particular a great deal of progress has been made in both client research and tools development.
• The majority of my time is spent working on the mesh/animation and terrain elements of the editor, but it now has read/write support for almost every SWG file of any interest.
• Unfortunately I do not have the time to write interfaces for editing all of these files, but currently there are UIs for editing: terrains and their associated files, snapshots (these deal with object placement on the world), shaders, meshes (static and dynamic), animations and datatables.
The terrain and snapshot editor:
• The terrain/snapshot editor (I often refer to this collectively as the world editor) is a mixture of graphical and form based tools which can be used to create entirely new worlds for SWG. A couple of screenshots of this section of the editor:
top-down planet editing,
creatures.
• The snapshot component is basically done besides a few missing graphical tools. The user can move around objects on the map, snap them to terrain, create various arrays of objects and so on.
• There are too many aspects to the terrain component to discuss it in detail here, but the file format is >95% understood and the main work remaining is just adding more tools to allow the user to edit terrains more easily.
• The world editor can generate high detail top-down images of the whole planet which can be used for new planetary maps.
• Support for space "terrains" too.
The mesh/animations editor:
• The mesh editor allows both static and dynamic (animated) models to be imported into SWG from a variety of popular formats including: 3ds, dae, ase, obj, lwo and smd.
• I managed to completely reverse animations this year, all that remains to be done is come up with a convincing way to generate the new data for them. Here’s a two videos showing
bone animation and
skinning.
•
This screenshot shows a fairly early version of the editor being used to import a new speeder into the game.
Finally two things to clear up since I get asked quite a lot:
• I have every intention of publicly releasing at least the majority of the tools as soon as I feel they’re ready.
• Although I rarely get the time to post official updates like this, I do post numerous pictorial updates on
my Photobucket during my periods of activity (admittedly not ideal but it works for now).