Hello all,
Just an update to give some progress on Rime, what’s determined to be the worlds greatest Frostbite tool other than DICE’s internal FrostEd. (endrant.)
There has been some confusion on when, or where Rime will be released. Currently the answers are both, “Soon”. But as a step forward to speed up development certain parts of Rime will be Open Source. This is the first open source project that I will be hosting and hopefully people will be contributing. Now back to that word “certain”… As it stands now, Rime itself will NOT be open sourced, that way there can be tight control over builds, coding style, and management. What is currently open source as of a few minutes ago is the Plugin System, and eventually the RimeLib will be open sourced.
The plugin system will allow anyone to write plugins to interact with new content, or just write better editors than the built in ones if you are so inclined. But the plugins will be called upon each time a certain style of content is requested to be opened. All of Rime’s internal editors, content loaders are all just built-in plugins, so the system has been tested so far as working. With the exception of IPlugin (which is included in the repository) you will not need ANY other source from Rime to get started writing awesome plugins. You have full reign over C# at this moment with plugins so you can load external files etc, just as you would any other C# application.
Now, what is this RimeLib? Well RimeLib is currently the native C# library that was designed to handle all of Frostbite’s various classes and formats. Pretty much RimeLib does all of the hard work for you, so you don’t have to worry about alignment, hex editors, or any of that. For example, loading a mesh into a nice C# class with formatting is only 1 line of code with RimeLib. The library is still in early development phases and has not undergone a huge re-write since it’s first inception in IceEditor Alpha, this will all need to change along with proper documentation for all of the classes and a separation between release and debug builds (release will only have FINALIZED and 100% confirmed structures, methods, classes; while debug has everything including experimental code). You will be able to find RimeLib’s source code sooner than later (Hopefully a few releases into Rime’s Closed Alpha testing).
What are you waiting for? Go check out the awesomeness of Open Source!