Show Lightvolumes

[greebo]

I'm currently working on adding the according ToggleToolButton to toggle the "show all light volumes" state.

 

What's the best way to define a global variable that can be accessed from both mainframe.cpp and plugins/entity/lights.cpp? I'm somehow struggling with this, I always get a linker error if I define the variable in a header file that's included by those two cpps.

 

Apart from that everything's working fine, it's just the global I need to query.

[OrbWeaver]

What's the best way to define a global variable that can be accessed from both mainframe.cpp and plugins/entity/lights.cpp? I'm somehow struggling with this, I always get a linker error if I define the variable in a header file that's included by those two cpps.

 

I thought you might run into that. As you have noticed, the lights are rendered by the entity plugin which has no access to the state of the toolbars or other Radiant config widgets.

 

There are three solutions which spring to mind:

 

1. Use some horrible "extern" global variables that can be accessed by both entity.dll and DarkRadiant itself. I don't recommend this (I have never done it and wouldn't know how to) but sharing variables between DLLs like this is an option. You might also run into problems with calling conventions across platforms (underscore versus no underscore in symbol names et.c) if you do this.

2. Add an extra function to the Radiant Module interface (include/qerplugin.h) to allow modules to query the state of the UI, just like I did with getXPath().

3. Merge the ui and game XML trees like we discussed, so that modules can get UI state by looking up paths like GlobalRadiant().getXPath("/ui/state/showAllLightRadii") in the same way they can look up game paths.

 

In the long run I think (3) would be the best, but if the merging of XML structures is not so easy then (2) would be acceptable.

[greebo]

Thanks, I think I will first try to implement (2) and if I get that to work, I will have a go at merging the XML structures.

[greebo]

Okay, I've added the solution as described in (2), so the "Show all light volumes" button is functional now (already on SVN).

 

I will have a look at the XML library and see if I can implement (3) as well :-)

[OrbWeaver]

Wow that was quick. At this rate DarkRadiant will be finished soon...

 

When you were examining the render code for the lights, did you get any idea of how difficult it would be to create a function to overlay light falloff textures on their 2D volume renderings? I thought this might be a nice feature to help people line up lights without relying on the render view, but I don't know how difficult it would be.

[greebo]

When you were examining the render code for the lights, did you get any idea of how difficult it would be to create a function to overlay light falloff textures on their 2D volume renderings? I thought this might be a nice feature to help people line up lights without relying on the render view, but I don't know how difficult it would be.

Heh, I got the same idea yesterday Not a high-priority feature, I'd say, but still nice to have.

 

I think it's possible, as there are a lot of cascaded render() methods and it's just a matter of finding the right one, but I need to know the appropriate GL commands (which I need to learn anyway), before I could test anything in that direction.