Well, since I am currently spending a lot of time building a shader editing feature into my world editor, I may as well keep people up to date with what is happening.
The world editor I have been working on is primarily for my game's development and modding facilities; however, since it will be a few years before Sports Fiction is ready, and since we all could do with not just a comprehensive shader (and material) editor, but an integrated world editor that pieces maps, entities, materials and physics properties together ready with DBP in mind; I'll be spending the rest of 2013 building this editor so that it can be shared for free with limitations. All the fancy bells and whistles will come with a price tag.
It is highly likely that the editor will ship with Blender and Gimp as integrated plugins under GPL license so that content can be altered by these tools directly without having to reload maps or the editor itself.
With it you will get more out of the free version than you can purchasing Dark Shader; I can just tell already that once complete creating shaders will be 10 times more easier for learners and 10 times more expressive and creative for mature shader programmers.
In the first month of the shader editor I have planned and prepared a document class based on some of the WPF components and have completed a custom file dialog today; which generates thumbnails for images, remembers the last folder you referenced and stores it in a history list. I've also provided bookmarking so your favourite folders get remembered instead of having to repeatadly browse from A to B through folder by folder. The dialog can also load in multiple selections of textures can can display the textures in detail, list and thumbnail view with custom grouping by type.
I will be spending some months giving it a test run as a Counter Strike GO map creation tool; release my own CS map via the editors export facilities; which will hopefully help raise some awareness of the project and generate funds for its development.
Judging by how FPSC reloaded works out, it may feature some segment creation facilities.
After this period it will be used to finish of Sports Fiction.
The editor's progress will be showcased in the next Sports Fiction update in its own WIP thread in roughly 3 to 4 weeks time.
