by Arthur » 12 Oct 2011, 14:13
Yes, he were doing something like that.
Basically, he repackaged a track editor for STK that someone else used to make, so he didn't really move it forward, but made it more easily installable, The main problem was that the original creators had abandoned the project, and since then we have made the move to Irrlicht, with the change of formats etc. And though I'm no coder and have absolutely no right to criticize them, I believe they made a hackish job at making an editor, and thus it would probably be more fruitful to write one from scratch.
So, to break it down, it died because of:
1. Lack of people, most notably programmers
2. Formats changed
3. The codebase was not solid/flexible
4. See 1.
The idea is good, however it's such a big task that the STK programmers probably find it more important to improve the game itself, and maybe, after 1.0, work on such an editor might be started by them. It could be done before, but that requires more contributors.
Another thing to mention is that since the move to b3d, we've got much much better scripts for Blender, most notably the ones for 2.5+, which makes all the track/kart specific settings easily available from inside Blender itself, so to e.g. enable weather you just check a box and choose rain in a dropdown menu, export the track and there it is. So in a way, there's less need for a separate track editor as both Blender itself and the STK scripts for Blender have been notably improved.
Hey pal, I took an oath for justice! "In happy days or tightest tights..." or something like that.