luxe 2024.9.2 is available for testing!
Use version control/backup (always) and switch your modules.lx version over to try it and let us know if you run into any issues.
Here’s some highlights.
Note because we’re working actively on a 3D game, a lot of 3D stuff is landing, but we’ve got some great 2D stuff landing too to round out the editing experience for tiles and more.
Icon markup syntax
First steps for this, but there’s now a built in icon font with ~7.2k icons available to use in strings. To use them you can feed in a raw unicode escape, like \uf0005 but instead,
The luxe string markup now includes $icon-name which will source an icon by name. The example below is hello there $camera $code.github things.
One thing to note, editing text fields aren’t updated for the syntax markup, so you’ll be fighting the text fields trying to input this. We’ll soon fix that so when editing it shows the raw string, and when committed, shows the formatted kind better. For now it’s a weird mix, you can paste already marked up text in at least.
Things without a prefix will read the default icon set, and ones with a prefix like code. are user/game/module specified. This is done with a myicons.settings.lx file, which looks a bit like the below example.
icon.code.icon_font = "font/code/codeicons"
icon.code.github = "\uea84"
Not Yet But Soon: Modifier icon id
We’ll probably use this soon (but not yet!) to make it easy to have an icon for custom modifiers, alongside the custom svg path, like #icon_id = "camera" would be a lot easier than sourcing an SVG each time!
Not Yet But Soon: Input icons font
If you grab a pack of input prompts like the amazing one from Kenney you can convert it to a font to use this way.
I’d like to include this one as a default, so that you could use $xbox.RT anywhere text can go as a convenience! That should land soon too.
Editor camera modifier stuff
Previously you couldn’t even make a camera in the editor (for some reason). Now you can place them, see what they see, and view their frustum on select. Work in progress, but already useful!
Nav mesh modifier
Also very wip workflow wise, but you can now bake and use nav meshes as a modifier. This will evolve to allow wide spaces, multithreaded rebuilding etc but for now the foundations are in.
Something I was testing is whether they could be sticky (to a Transform) rather than fixed in space. It seems doable!
Skeletal Anim fixes
Alongside the new blend graph from last release, we also found that importing multi-part models would break. It also now imports up to 16 weights per vert, picks the top 4 and renormalizes, making it less likely to have weird results with varying files.
A lot less of this now as it’s more robust!
We also for now, generate a .anim.lx for each clip so it’s easy to preview the animation in editor or game.
Basic shader import
Something we’ve wanted for a while, you can now pull in shared functions from built in or other shader files. It’s very simple (just copy paste in place) but helps a lot. We’ve also fixed the stack overflow issue, so you get marginally better errors when editing shaders.
There,
That’s it for today. There was a bunch of little fixes here and there, and plenty ongoing work on the new tilemap editor (not ready yet, we’ll let you know when), let us know if you run into issues.
Enjoy!