- First of all, using just ANY test scene is not right. There should be ONE test scene for all artists to use. Your ship should appear in a fixed location, near a station that in turn orbits a planet, and a few stationary ships nearby, so that one can tell, at a glance, how one's ship compares to other ships in terms of materials used and overall diffuse brightness and specularity.
- Secondly, it should allow you to move forward, to see if the ship's mesh orientation is right (but the ship should spring back to the original position when you release the throttle), and to change it otherwise (90 degree rotations).
- Thirdly, there should be a gui window in a corner that allows you to add .obj meshes and textures, choose blending mode and technique, add LOD's, etceteras. All changes of parameters and reloadings of obj's or textures should have immediate effect on the ship viewed.
- Fourthly, it should allow you to position weapons, subunits, engine exhausts and pilot. Actually, first of all it should allow you to copy the units.csv data from another ship by entering the ship's name. Check boxes for .blank and .template, etc.
a) produces a folder under units
b) saves the bfxm and textures to it
c) saves the modified units.csv
e) saves a diff to apply to units.csv, to submit with the package
Dreaming is cheap
But consider this: The payoff would be enormous: Artists would finally be able to be productive, for a frigging change.
And it doesn't seem to me it should be THAT difficult:
Basically, a modification of the engine whereby the "test mission" is hardcoded, the incorporation of mesher code (or calls to mesher.exe), and a GUI.
The GUI, if it makes it easier, could be a full-screen GUI that you toggle on or of with, say, F9.
The rest is just Python
If there's interest in this, I could start designing the GUI layout.