ClemensKernBlog » VrgStudio

VrgStudio W.I.P. and Master Thesis

Clemens — Wed, 12 Jan 2011 19:39:58 +0000

It’s been a long time since my last post. Well, I finished my studies about three months ago and can call myself a “Master of Science” now. Then, I started working full-time at Trinigy as a Software Engine Engineer. So I don’t have much time to work on the Vergence Engine but I won’t let it die. Here is a short overview of the new Toolset I am working on as my Master Thesis (which can be downloaded >here< or watch my presentation >here<. Both are in german, sorry about that) which is called VrgStudio:

The Editor is based on a Multiprocess Plugin Architecture resulting in a high flexibility and stability. The following picture shows the basic architecture:

The Graphical User Interface, built on top of Qt, is defined in XML-Files and a Scripting Language. Currently I am only using JavaScript powered by Google’s V8. This allows me to edit the GUI and some of the functionalities (the scripted ones) during runtime of the editor.

The pics below show the basic Level Editor and a Curve Editor which enables easy animation over daytime, for example the color of the sun as shown in the shot.

I also implemented a small Resource Browser which is still lacking thumbnails for resources other than textures. This browser is largely implemented in JavaScript and provides a realtime filter by keywords.

This was only a very short overview of what the editor can do. Feel free to ask any questions if you are interested in any details.

VrgStudio: First Steps

Clemens — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 21:42:04 +0000

I am currently developing a new Editor, called VrgStudio (was VStudio, I renamed it to prevent confusion with MS Visual Studio), for the Vergence Engine (more information here and here). Today I finished the first step, a Plugin and Message Passing System. Plugins are loaded as dll-files and communicate via messages. A Plugin can register callback-methods for messages, so basically it is a event system with a few extensions.

At the moment everything is running single-threaded, but concepted for a multi-threaded or even multi-process system. All in all, nothing fancy yet and nothing to show except a boring console window.

Next step is a basic GUI-Plugin: I started playing around with Qt, but still needs a lot of work.

Current lines of code: 2268 total, 2093 without comments

The Game-Industry is stealing my ideas

Clemens — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 10:50:32 +0000

I saw this presentation video of the new Unreal Engine 3 Editor yesterday:

http://g4tv.com/trailers/hdvideos/37413/Unreal-Engine-3-New-Features-GDC-2009-Trailer.html

The first thing I thought was: “Hey that tagging mechanism is exactly the same I was planning to do for the new Editor of the Vergence Engine“. I never publish my ideas, except a draft in google docs: “wahh google is selling my ideas”. OK whatever, tagging is a very common approach, so I can’t blame google or Epic for this

Anyway the new Unreal Ed has some really cool features. Check it out!