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[denreaper]

Is terrain support implemented? This seems necessary for any game using terrain... If it isn't necessary, does anyone know of a way to fit items to the terrain in Visual Ogre Studio without terrain support?

Thanks in advance,
Denny

P.S.  Excellent work on the project.  It's great, especially the plugin system!

[pjcast]

There was an attempt to get some PLSM2 capability in..but, I believe it was just for loading the terrain, and not for editing. Anyway, since Ogre version is updated, I removed some of the outdated assemblies.

Basically, there is no functioning terrain editor. Though, it is surely possible. But, I do not have any time to work on this editor for the time being. In fact, in recent times, I've become convinced that using any managed language (C#/.Net, Java, Python, etc) is very good for rapid design and development... however, when trying to stay current with a moving target like Ogre project, the wrappers then become the issue (lack of support, complex object conversions, wrapping layers being different than real API), which removes the benefits of the rapid development since you are quickly left far behind.

So, I think, if I were to restart this, I would go the route of wxWidgets. Much of the code can be ported, since C++ is pretty close to C#. Also, wxWidgets has a pretty cool Advanced UI kit with dockable windows.. plus you have the portability. And, best of all, can quickly and easily stay in sync with Ogre project. Though, I admit, wxWidgets is hardly perfect, and looks similar to MFC (ugh) and definitely does not have the elegance of .Net/Winforms, but at least it is portable. Though, my main problem is the wrapper... Since there is really no official Mogre maintainer at the moment, that presents a problem for trying to quickly update to a later version, as well as narrow down issues with passing objects from C# to C++.

Anyway, I don't have time to start a new wxWidgets project, but that is what I would really recommend as the first step to bring Visual Ogre Studio back to life... a conversion from managed to non-managed c++.

Major issues would be:
* Magic Docking library - replace with wxWidgets
* GUI - replace with wxWidgets
* Iron Python support - replace with regular python C/C++ bindings (boost.python)
* Syntax highlighting - http://www.scintilla.org/ - even has nice code completion
* Mogre - connect directly to Ogre
* Plugin system - can easily be replaced with native

Quite a bit of work, and would probably require a different design approach.. but anyway, would be good to get everything to native, that way we would gain portability, speed, and up to date with Ogre.

[OvermindDL1]

I still have that old look-alike project made in wxWidgets if you wanted some code, dockable things and all, not the prettiest setup, but I whipped it together quickly, and it is short enough, could start from that if you ever felt so inclined.

Something I like, do all the moving annoyance junk in C++ and bind it (very painlessly with boost::python for example) to Python, and write up all your wxwidgets gui code and other quick stuff in Python.  When ready to distribute then use the python win32 exe generator thing to bring all your python code into an exe and distribute that with the python dll, your dll, etc...

wxWidgets wraps the native platform api's so it looks native to everything else on their (or you can use the Universal draw class and have it all drawn internally, tends to be faster, but can desync from looking like everything else, which may be what you want as you can design anything to look like anything).  wxWidgets does not wrap MFC, but rather it wraps the real Windows C gui interface (which is what MFC wraps, although very badly).

The Python version of wxWidgets (wxPython) still has a bit of the C++'ish interface, but it definitively is far easier to use.

Although there are form designers for wxWidgets (and python native ones like glide and so forth) that ease most of the wxWidgets work.

What I would *love* to see is a boost::gui (probably wrapped around wxWidgets or so), they always tend to make the best interfaces, things you never thought possible in C++.

Oh, and yes, I had Scintilla in my stuff.