I'm a frontend dev myself (actually you could say fullstack), so there are things I have/had trouble doing when I started 3d (and tbch still am for a lot of things).
Some of the problems the typical engineer with none-to-little-3D background and knowledge comes across : - debugging the scenes : - where is this mesh I just added ? - how to move there, rotate around this, … - what’s in my scene ? like with photoshop layers I’d like to hide some to focus on this and that … - tuning the look and tunning the gameplay : - reduce the feeback loop between code and gameplay/render - I’d love to be able to tweak the materials attributes in real time with a UI - I saw a video of the guy who made Braid, his working environnement is awesome (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gwsi7TEQxKc) ; I’m not sure if that’s the correct video I’m referring, but you could see he has a simple split view. Left is code, right is game. A save on left view (the code) did hot refresh the right view (the game) without having to start the level from scratch
I think this would be a good start. You solve all this problems and put all these features in an IDE (or a tool of some kind or form) and I’d be pretty happier.
What do you think ? Some questions to help you comment if you want : - what do you think about webgl ? does it have a bright future ? or will it turn out to be like java applets or flash (that is, both dead today) - do you think people are ready to pay for such a thing ? is there a market for tools for developers ?
