Sketch Shapes

A few things:

As far as new functionality goes, I’ve finished implementing the Mesh Output device. Currently it does NOT create optimized meshes, although that is planned. Even so, combining a lower-tri count mesh with a generated normalmap for the terrain can produce the appearance of quite a high detailed terrain if your engine supports such things.

The bulk of the time has been spent working on Layout-related things. The Alpha1 release had a rather rudimentary UI that was really intended only to expose the functionality that needed to be exposed. That UI has now been refined to what will probably be it’s end state. The new Layout UI is (in my opinion) the best of both worlds, giving you a simple, uncluttered view to work in… when we hit Beta I’ll start releasing UI screenshots, but until then you’ll have to take my word for it. 🙂

I’ve added two new Shape tools that will be in Alpha-2. The Sketch Poly and Sketch Line tools. As their name implies, all you do is draw with the mouse to define enclosed shapes/paths. These are damn cool! They certain give you a lot of the “painterly feel” to creating terrain shapes and masks without storing anything but vector data. In addition, it’s quite nice to be able to make a shape and then tweak the vertices so that it looks just right.

There’s lots of layout-related stuff left to do this week and next, but hopefully Alpha-2 will be released at the end of that. I’m informally targeting the “85-90% completed” mark for the end of the Alphas and the beginning of the larger Beta test.