Since January’s big update I’ve been pushing hard on a couple of big improvements to Flex. The first is a feature that has been long requested, but required some significant structural changes to the app, multiple characters!
From the beginning of development I built Flex around a single character. Much of the code that communicates between the UI and the character, the connective tissue of the app, needed to be ripped apart and reconstructed to handle multiple characters. Additionally, there were some user experience considerations around multiple characters, as well as accommodating long-term plans for things like additional characters and props.
I’m pretty satisfied with my solutions, and happy with how fast and intuitive adding and interacting with multiple characters feels.
Check it out below [click the image for a gif]
As you can see a key new feature for handling multiple characters is the new scene outliner side-bar. This incorporates global file menu commands (New Scene, Save Scene, Settings, etc), as well as displaying a list of the characters and other elements you’ve added to the scene. You can use the outliner to quickly select between these elements, or close the side-bar and simply click on the body of a character to switch your selection.
Currently the core of the multiple character code is finished, and I’m just identifying and cleaning up bugs. That said, two big areas are still yet to be fully implemented: Scene Saving/Loading, and the Tutorial.
The old character data structure that the app uses to save needs to be updated to include additional character elements, as well as the global scene options (camera & lighting). Additionally, I want to make sure previously created characters still load properly into the app.
I plan to spend the next weeks rebuilding the saving/loading, as well as the tutorial (which unfortunately got wrecked when I refactored the structure of the app).
I’m estimating this work will take me another couple of weeks, with an additional couple of weeks planned for cleanup and testing. So I’m aiming for an early to mid-April release of the multiple character features.
Thanks for staying tuned on the development of Flex. If you have any questions or comments about multiple character implementation feel free to post them below!