Day 94: Basic Editor WIP

Day 94 short tech update:  

I've spent the last 4 days working on the base "Workshop Editor".  Part of it is determining basic editor features and user interactions, part how to support all assets being user-generated-content (modding), and part how to display all this to the players (UX).

What you see in the screenshot is my first attempt at a production quality asset, the modular "hull wall 01".  This should a pretty good asset for testing procedural hull generation, which is how I want the ships outer hull to be default created, with the user able to modify it afterwards.  Also shown on the right is what I just finished spending some hours on: generating automatic thumbnails of ship blocks.  I am emphasizing an automation based workflow so that a lot of the content creation can be put into the hands of modders, and artists can focus on creating modular pieces to empower awesome themed ships.

I am still pretty uncertain how the specific ship build flow will go.  There's three fairly distinct paths a user can take to starting their ship build:

- place important components

- plan spaces and their use

- plan the exterior shape

I will be planning on prototyping all three, and hope to support all strategies equally.

Tomorrow and the next few days will be working on the first UI system:  a library of parts to pick and place.  After that I will work on prototyping the build flow.