New features
Hello
I just wanted to ask which new features are planned. I have heard that somebody is working on SVG support. I do not know exactly what this means. Importing existing SVG graphics into the app, right? - Yes, it would be a huge gain to have the possibility to "hand design" some parts, beside the procedurally generated stuff. But I do not want to use another application to create these, import them and just postprocess them with FxGen. I think it would be much cooler/sufficient to create a simple polygon drawing tool (using the mouse) into FxGen (what else is SVG good for?).
Since OpenGL is already used, it could be used for rendering these polygons (using vertexcolor and other procedurally generated textures, yeah!). The existing Rect and Glow filters could be also converted to polygons, so you can position them with the mouse.
I daresay that this would be absolutely awesome. What do you think?
Houdini
EDIT: Yes right, OpenGL is not used in the FxGenLib. So this polygon tool would have to be done in software.
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Some other feature
Some other feature requests:
1. How about a realtivly easy way to render normal & spec maps? Maybe similar to the algorithm used in this GIMP plugin: http://nifelheim.dyndns.org/~cocidius/normalmap/ ?
2. Some way to force the resulting texture to be tileable (in one direction only or both).
3. A "stand alone" console paramenter based texture compiler, so that small FXGen files could be distributed even for games that don't have the FxGen lib implemented (yet).
4. A Linux port of the GUI :)
Thanks!
Excellent ideas, all around
That's an excellent idea, Gustl! I was thinking we'd have to have an entire Inkscape inside our program, so I shrugged it off, thinking that it would be better to just do the SVG in Inkscape and export it. But your idea makes a lot of sense, in that stuff like gradients could be done within the program, making SVG pretty much a moot point if we can draw polygons. However, we might want bezier curves, like the pen tool, also. Then we could do cool things with gradients and blur to get Glow.
From what I gather, we have several interesting ideas.
Dentoid made the SVG operator, check it out here: http://www.fxgen.org/files/vectortest5.png
Deck has made the Vortex operator: http://www.fxgen.org/node/52
And, of course, you have made the Lookup operator, Houdini... http://www.fxgen.org/node/56
Whether all these changes actually make it to the codebase, however, is an entirely different matter. ;-)
Just wanted to note that my
Just wanted to note that my vector operator doesn't really have anything to do with SVG in itself. It's just an operator for rendering vector graphics. However, I've added functionality to the editor to import SVG to the operator, since it was faster than implementing lots of vector tools. In theory it's possible to add editing inside the FXGen editor though, since the operator itself just renders vector data no matter where it came from.
About tilability, FXGen already generates tiling textures. However, sometimes it would be good to be able to do non-tiling stuff as well. :)