Hello, Model-Changing! I am going to present you some changes that were done since we started to develop Neo.
First of all, I want to say that now we have a webpage http://wowdev.tools where you can watch all of our projects, code commits, contact information and possibly other things in the future.
Secondly, we'd love to see anyone interested in Neo developement in our Discord channel. It does not only refer to developers who want to join us. You can help us testing builds or just giving opinion and ideas.
As you might have noticed on the webpage, Neo and other our projects are built automatically with every commit made to the repository. So, you can always get the most recent and relevant build and play around with it without compiling.
I also recommend you to subscribe to our YouTube channel which is currently empty but will definitely have some content in the future.
Okay, now come the actual editor news!
1. Asset Browser
We have implemented a convinient thumbnail cache system that works just like thumbnails for images in Windows explorer. You open a directory and are already able to select the model you need.
Models are now rendered correctly in all expansions.
Preview window got some basic navigation.
You are now able to select skin variations for creatures.
You can now change the background of the preview rendering window.
TODO:
WMO support
Character hairstyle, facial feature, etc changer.
Search
2. Map Editor
Interface
The interface logic was changed to a more convinient one from the way it was done earlier. Awesome dockable widgets are still there but their behaviour was changed in order to ease the switching.
We have added a toolbar (1) on top of the rendering window that contains quick access buttons to all the available editing modes in the editor. It works pretty much like in Noggit and will be controlled by number keys (hotkeys are customizable) in the future.
When you select the required editing mode the World Editing widget (2) changes its content according to the selected mode. Switching by multiple widgets were inconvinient since they were getting lost or overlapping each other, that is why there is now just one widget that contains all other widgets inside! It is still possible to undock it and drag it away, for example, to your second monitor. You can do it with pretty much anything in Neo actually.
Graphic tablet support
It has been quite some time ago since Mathias implemented graphic tablet support in Neo. However, it was not integrated properly into all the features. That's why we have changed it!
Now Neo is able to sense the pen pressure in sculpting, texturing and vertex shading modes. Texturing mode has obviously the widest functionality implemented for tablet usage. Besides pressure (brush speed or intensity in other modes) you can change the radius with it. Every setting is supplied with its own sensivity slider. So, if you want your pressure sense to allow full amplitude (0.0 - 40.00) and your radius sense to only change the radius slighthly (for example 0.0 - 0.34 if you want to paint some thin cracks or something), you don't have to choose between them. Just turn on both and tweak the sensivity for each of the features.
Texturing
Besides important tablet control functionality, texturing mode has got a spray brush! You can control multiple features there like the size of the spray particle, the amount of particles in one "shot" and the pressure. There is also a feature to paint solid inner radius just as a normal brush and spray in the area between inner radius and outer radius. That leads to a very interesting effect in the resulted painting! You can see it yourself in the gif below.
Models
You are now able to rotate, tilt, scale (m2 only) and delete the models now. Ctrl + C/Ctrl + V functionality is also working, though is not yet stable.
Other features are to come soon! Also it is worth to mention that Neo is currently in the process of becoming a cross-platform tool. It is being ported to OpenGL and GTK insteaded of DirectX and WPF which would allow us to run it on any system natively. You can follow this "transitioning" in "cross-platform" branch of our repository.
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