CEGUI Anim editor.

[Nickenstein79]

As some of you may know, I have recently been digging into the CEGUI codebase to resolve an animation issue that I ran into.

As a result of this work, I have now got my game into a state where I can do some very snazzy animation stuff with CEGUI.

I rely heavily on CEED for my layout designs. (I <3 CEED! Everyone should make the effort to get it up and running on their dev system. Once you get it working it's AMAZING! It saves you countless hours of xml editing.)

And I find myself increasingly wishing it had an animation editor (with tracks for key-frames and things).

A visual widget-anim editor that will export the XML-Animation files that CEGUI can load.
(So that people can make very elaborate animations without having to hand-type thousands of lines of XML to make bespoke anims.)

So, rather than being a complaining bitch and nagging for it, I'm going to make it.

This thread is here to announce that I'm working on it, and also for people's suggestions on how they would like it to work, feature requests, etc...

The way I am currently setting it up, is to work much like Microsoft's XUI-Editor system that is used by many commercial game studios for XBox titles. As I am incredibly familiar with Microsoft's XUI system and I like the way it works. (It works in much the same way as a flash animation editor, and is a lot like CEED in many respects.)


As a side note, there are a whole bunch of PSP/PS2/PS3/Wii/DS games out there that are running UI's designed in Microsoft's XUI system, because I wrote a cross platform XUI-player a few years ago when I had to port a bunch of games to lots of different consoles. But *shhh* don't tell MS!

[Kulik]

CEED has a work in progress animation editor, perhaps it would be better if you contributed to it. It's written in Python.

The timeline and some keyframe modification are implemented but not much more. To be honest it's in the early stages.

See the code at https://bitbucket.org/cegui/ceed/src//c ... t/?at=v0-8

[Nickenstein79]

Oh cool!

I'll have a look.

[Ident]

It would definitely be a great idea to have the animation editor improved. Being able to set keyframes and interpolate between them in CEED is a fantastic way to do animations and would make CEGUI "truly" animatable. As for now it is a lot of work to animate things.

Catmull rom interpolation would be absolutely awesome as an additional feature btw.

So anyways, I d also heavily recommend to improve the CEED editor in the respects you want to change. It might save u a lot of time and hassle, although at the beginning it might take a while to get into the code and into python. I use PyCharm for CEED development (python) and it works quite nicely. Also there is a guide for setting pycegui up for windows in case you need it ( i think u were one of those who already got this running but i am too lazy now to check ) http://cegui.org.uk/wiki/Building_CEED_for_Windows

Something like Maya's graph editor, when u can drag around key-frames and add new ones would be great: