|
And for the production of
games?
LightWave has wonderful
modelling and animation tools for the making of
a video game, however Layout is not really adapted
to building entire levels. It works on a system
of plug-ins loaded into class slots. LightWave
uses callbacks to allow us to pass our own evaluations
(translation of an object, pixel transformation,
etc...) to our functions. It's a system without
inheritance that works very well for CGI but shows
some limitations in the making of a real time
application. It would be necessary to be able
to delve into the engine's pipeline and to "poll"
each entity as we like. In other words, to have
far more "low-level" access to the environment
featured by the SDK.
The interaction given
by the interface should also follow the way you
create a video game. For example, we place an
object called "Monster" into Layout with one mouse
click. LightWave should then understand this is
either an object having the basic properties of
a piece of scenery or the extended functions of
a monster that can be polled to manage artificial
intelligence, motion mixing, etc... The new entity
would then be visible with an owner renderer and
configurable by a simple click on Item Properties.
The native management
of "Context" for resources would be also very
useful. We could have the possibility to include
any number of resources by identifying them by
unique ID, name or type. The "context" would be
included in the LightWave scene file and directly
exploitable with a global scope by any plug-in.
Finally, it would be
great to have a higher level in the renderer's
pipeline to have the notion of a game world made
up from any number of discrete scenes.
What kind of computer are
you using at the moment?
I work on two computers at
once: a dual 800MHz PIII with a GeForce 4 Ti 4400,
1GB RAM and 40 Gigs of hard drive space for design
and a P4 at 2.4GHz with a Geforce 2 MX, 256MB
RAM and 60GBs of hard disk space which runs concurrently
for renders.
|
