New Scale Tween Component for the Vortex Engine

Ale

This week was pretty packed, but I found some time to write the final addition to the native components for the vertical slice of the Editor. This time around, the new Scale Tween Component joins the Waypoint Tween and Rotation components to provide an efficient way to animate the scale of an entity.

With this new component, Vortex now supports out-of-the-box animation for all basic properties of an entity: position, rotation and scale.

The current lineup of built-in components for Vortex V3 is now as follows:

  • vtx::WaypointTweenComponent: continuously move an entity between 2 or more predefined positions in the 3D world.
  • vtx::RotationComponent: continuously rotate an entity on its Ox, Oy or Oz axis.
  • vtx::ScaleTweenComponent: continuously animate the scale of an entity to expand and contract.

The Scale Tween Component was implemented as a native plugin that taps directly into the Core C++ API of the Vortex Engine. This will allow leveraging the speed of native, optimized C++ code for animating an entity’s scale at a very low overhead.

In the future, once we have implemented scripting support, a script that desires to alter the scale will be able to just add a Scale Tween Component to the affected entity, configure the animation parameters (such as speed, scaling dimensions and animation amplitude) and rely on the Entity-Component System to perform the animation of the transformation automagically.

Of course, Scale Tween components can also be added statically to entities by means of the Vortex Editor UI.

Time permitting, next week we’ll finally be able to move on to entity hierarchy and component persistence. I want to roll this feature out in two phases: one where I first implement the load operation and then, once it’s been proven to be solid, I will then implement saving from the Editor UI.

There’s this and much more coming soon! Stay tuned for more!