Well first of the ZGE has become much more fully featured over the past year or so,. thanks for all your amazing work!
These all sound like great goals,.
for the 3d stuff I would add some mesh generation/manipulation components. I have been playing around with that TopMod mesh manipulator and the procedures that I find myself appliying to the meshes I can see should be done at run time (for procedual correctness i.e. data compresion/ result variation) a couple of subdivision techneques and some smooth/tighten,. and at least one of the styles of converting the edges into a 3d 'cage' type mesh,. as these used together are great for creating interesting complex structures from simple ideas/meshes. Of course most of this can probably be achived in scripts with the current system,. however as you know most people do not posses a Phd. in 3d maths. least of all me
The music engine is also a welcome idea,. my problem with the midi has always been the lack of a way to edit the tunes,. ZGE has a cool realtime sound engine so the best way to compose music with it would be to be in real time,. as music is more than just notes,. for dynamic music pans, filters, osc ect. should to be set per tick,. now that we have arrays I would say this is mostly solved,. I still would like the editor to provide a nice grid based interface to array data,. for me that would be quite usefull,. but again if I take the time to set up a system to load array data from a file I suppose I could edit in another data editor and it would work similarly to what I'm after.
Texture generation has improved greatly,. or my understanding of some of the mathemetical functions has,. and with Kattle's kind posting of scripts much can be done now,. that said Werkzeug3TE is still super 'productive' i.e. I can can just mess about with it and generate amazing textures in no time,. with ZGE it is still much more work (abstract math), and a tad hit and miss. remindes me I was going to post this,.
http://www.apophysis.org/ is a cool opensource delphi fractal generation app. could use some functions in the texture gen. section
library yes! (I have some stuff to add)
for documentation,.
I can work up some basic tutorials perhaps. as we each have our own understandings and methods of design,. the more the better to attract various people,.
one simple thing you could easily add is to include the "Book of Words" or the Writing Expressions page on the pulldown help menu,. I have a very bad memory, (or poor recall) and often need the referace. The more that is added the more use that will be,. should be off-line in my opinion as well for ppl not logged on to the wwnet,.
as for what ZGE should be,. I just want to build games and other interactive art, it does these things well,. I love the principles it is based on, the size, the prodecural nature and the price is right
Perhaps I would open it up to .dll integration a sorta modular upgrade path for people with specific needs,. physics, alternative sound/music, net integration, these things are availible throught this method,. . sure they are platform specific,. however, it is near to imposible to dev. for systems I don't have access to anyhow,. so crossplatform although very cool,. and I support it in concept, in practice it is difficult to utilise.
Whatever you add to ZGE I am sure it will be cool!
it keeps things organised and the groups that can be collapsed and moved around make it quite easy to work with,. as well as the consistancy of place for the various elements,. I can see how a selected component in the tree could open a window in the right with stackable operators while retaining the tree for over all organisation,. . works fro me.