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A couple years ago i naively posted threads about a mythical all-in-one solution, turns out that many designers believe this a waste of time, a novelty program of sorts. However, i am still carrying the torch and have recently scrapped the entire source code and started over. My source code is now all of five days old, so there isn't a lot to show for yet.
There are a vast number of programs out there aimed at creating external files using an editor that makes everything easier. This is the idea behind the all-in-one, except everything is integrated into one application that can do most of the work.
Polling the audience:
I'd like to get as much feedback as possible to get an idea of the viewpoints on the subject, feel free to post comments, critiques and ideas.

I'm not sure what exactly you mean by all-in-one. A program that can produce all aspects of a game; art, sound, etc?

Well it not as much intended to create the original resources from scratch completely, its focused more on bringing them all together. Which it could create the resources itself, i just haven't dug deep enough to cover all those bases myself, yet. I have dabbled at writing (in DBP) image editors, uv-mapping, modelling from scratch and primitives, terrain editing etc.
Resources would be one half of the system, the creation/editing of images, models, sounds, etc. and the other half would be integration...the implementation of all those resources is where it gets really tough for a lot of people, especially those who are not programming gurus. Think along the lines of shoot em up kit or something, except for the real developer, not just a tinker toy that can do only certain things.
btw: the types of games i mainly wish to produce with it are 3rd person games, because its the most broad category of games, whether it be action shooter rpg or what have you. So it could be thought of like FPSC except more intuitive and not so specific.

EDIT: whichever solutions the program in the end presents, they need to be completely independent of other programs, for example, programs like make-human or DAZ3d offer solutions to fit somewhere in the pipeline, intended to produce an asset that is used later down the line in other programs. The goal is to make the pipeline from end-to-end all in one application. So not only should you be able to create characters like a character studio, but also handle animations, as well as end them up in the game with collision and movement controls etc.
Yes, its a very ambitious undertaking but for the millions of line of code i have written, i see the benefit clearly.

Interestingly enough, Blender is actually pretty close to this. The game engine has fallen behind the film tools, though the base is there, and not only supports modifications and addons through scripts, the core itself is open source.

If you haven't used it before, you should, even just to get some ideas perhaps, or at least look over at thier website and get an idea of what all it is capable of doing. It is a pretty impressive list altogether.

I understand wanting to build something yourself, but it really comes down to a question of your exact goal: do you want to build this program or do you want this program to exist? If the later, contributing to an existing project with a big head start could be a viable option.

@Ortu: you make a very good point, Blender is actually the closest thing to what i'm talking about, and it says something that it may be the only software of its kind that does it all itself. I messed around with it years ago before it had all the features it does
today, but for several reasons i opted not to Blender at the time.

I notice that, from a DBPro perspective, whatever software chains designers use there are always pros and cons, and even if you have a package that does exactly what you want it to do, its never as good as being able to access these features from within the engine itself.(DBPro)
Edit:
For instance, in considering Animer as an option for importing BVH onto DBO's, its a good option(because in a way its the only option TGC has for MOCAP) but it would be much better if i wrote the BVH translator myself and could thereafter directly import BVH motions directly into my DBP application and directly apply it to the DBO(s) in real-time all at once.
For one thing (in Animer), you need to manually link the joints to correspond each time you import a motion onto a character, and all the extra work of going through the repetition process, a lot of time gets spent doing grunt work. With the in-house solution, for example if you had some FPSC characters that all have the same skeletal structure you would only have to do the translation once (for each BVH skeleton type) and then select which target skeleton type(FPSC) and bam,thereafter it would be like "click, click" and everything is done for you on the fly. The goal is achieved in the fact that the amount of time saved is exponential.
Also, Blender is not for the average person because the learning curve is steeper than that of Shoot Em Up kit for example.
[u]

WOW, that's a very tough call.
But that's also what I'd like to see done for DBP (Think like "Unity3D" for DBP with the ability to code/script with Dark Basic Language and availability of editing tools).

Where I see the hard part is to find the right balance among the various editing blocks (like for instance terrains, vegetation, static models, vehicles, weaponry, characters with animation, texturing, shaders, sounds etc.) that should/could be included / excluded with care, since there are so many dedicated softwares around (and free or cheap too) for each task that makes it hard not to re-invent the wheel.

The strong point that I see in your perspective/proposition is that none of them is really dedicated or strong for DBP engine/coders.

I'll add that for all-in-one, in my perspective, I don't see it necessarily as whole block with connected side branches, but it could be a main chunk with separate utilities for each of the above mentioned blocks the result of which to integrated as a whole later on, on final assembly.

The stand-out parts that I personally see would be:

---Ambient builder editor (Needed):

- Terrain builder with great editing capabilities
Good texturing possibilities with ability of texture painting,
i.e. like drawing realistic roads on it, for example.
For the game engine:
-texture painting in real time ( if I hit the ground with a pick I want to see a different color spot appear there.
- Deformable ( explosions, holes etc..).
- Sky / Clouds / Sun editing
For the game engine:
- Applicable Day-Night Cycles
- Weather

--- Vegetation Modeler ( could be third party if particularly suited for DBP):

- Trees, Foliage, Plants, Leaves, Grass - possibly with ready to use basic library.
For the game engine:
Possible animation


--- Static Meshes Modeler ( could be third party if particularly suited for DBP):
Buildings - objects - weapons: texturing, UV mapping options like flat, cylinder, sphere mapping and UV unwrap; shaders appliable, bumpmaps etc.

--- Vehicles Modeler (Needed):
physics , driveable vehicles, preserve local limb rotations.

--- Characters/Animation Modeler (Needed):
Common Base skeleton(s) based on most used BVH types (have a look at bvhacker editor).
Rigging , BVH import, Animation library of most common gestures (
Walk,Run,Jump,Fall,Die,etc. ready to go. - you made this point in your post.
- Animals go into this category - not sure what animations are out there.

--- Sounds (could be 3rd party editor/source)
- Ambient
- Engines
- Weapons
- Animals
- Speech


--- World Editor (Needed)

- In-game world
Grab all above and build your in-game world (Terrain, sky, clouds, vegetation, buildings, objects, ambient characters, ambient animals).
For the engine:
- Handling of the static and animated ambient stuff.
- Shadows ?
- Possibility to set collisions - Group collision,
- Vehicles physics, Tilt to terrain inclination (this could be handled by the code)
- Set entry point
- Set start character
- Possibility to save / load the entire in-game world-level.

This is how I see it after a quick thinking, for sure it's not exhaustive but may give some feedback.

You and other feel free to comment or add to it

my 2 cents
Cheers all
Scorpyo

man, Scorpyo thats a pretty good breakdown for a first pass at it.
All of your suggestions are reasonable components to the program. With your Ambient Builder Editor list, the big part is the terrain editor, and the best implementation i've come across is Extended Terrain XYZ, it has terrain tools and painting on terrain, can control 8 layers of the terrain. i had a couple problems with it, number 1 is i couldn't get the terrains working on import into the engine, i also couldn't get one of the sources to compile myself, so i kinda just left it sitting there, also there is no implementation that i know for terrain sewing or using multiple extended terrain objects. I don't know yet who wrote it but it is an excellent starting point, it just needs the few finishing touches to turn it into an infinite terrain system.
DarkClouds produces the best skies i've seen, but a skybox system and a day/night cycle and weather are all easy enough.
I do see your point in the fact that any solution that is already created specific to DBpro shouldn't have to be re-invented, but it depends on its advantages over disadvantages.
For example with your VEGETATION MODELER suggestion, Treeparty is a excellent solution already, so i guess its not really high on the priority list in the beginning, but later on after the program is fully functional, it would be a good addition to have a completely integrated solution.
The components i'm trying to focus on in the early stages are the ones that create the foundation to which there is not a viable integrated solution, kinda bridge the gap, like the character studio, animation package, integrated world editor with static light mapper, dynamic light manager, particle effects editor and system, weapon designer, vehicle and physics designer/editor, plus other modules that aid in game programming, like setting up all the interactions and routines for NPCs, dialogs, item collection and management etc.
The thing is that i have already created many times over, other attempts at this program over the years in pieces in other languages, for instance i written the character studio at least five times over, every time it gets better, more stable and more complete. I've made a vehicle physics editor before, not it DBPro though. I made a cutscene editor for Realtime machinima to be integrated with games(not DBpro either), i think a keyframing cutscene editor would be very popular amid designers.

The best part about the advantage of this program is lets say you were building your world, then you click on an NPC and you could edit all aspect of it on the spot, like you could go back into its animations, edit its appearance and props, behavior and anything else. At the same time you've got access to the lightmapper and world tools, terrain tools and everything within the same environment. Of course there should be breakdowns in certain situations, like the vehicle physics editor should take you to an empty environment where its just the ground and the vehicle so you can edit it without being incumbered.
I've got to go for now, but i'll come back later and upload some media to demonstrate some of the aspects i'm discussing, and thanks so much for the feedback!!

Matters such as these inspired me to create my own all-in-one solution; although it takes years to complete; I enjoy the daily challenges and lessons learned along the way. I look forward to seeing how far it goes and using it for my games.

At the moment me and another programmer are working on sphere shaped terrain editing for planets; something I need for my game's space travel concepts.

for the all in one solution.... i have tried this many times in the past and tell you from self experience not to bother...

i look back at 10 years of coding and i had about 4 or 5 of these all in one solutions that never took off and its mostly from broken ideas or snags that i realized in the end would kill it. I made model editors,animators,music editors...

i found that i have 2 usable tools from my last 10 years of coding and the rest of that time i wasted on the all-in-one trials...

by the time it takes you to write such a tool you will find that there is just not a market for it. There is however a market for games and i would just recomend that you build specific tools to help you with a game project in mind. Spend most of your time on a game project if you can cause that will generate allot more interest then a development tool.

Well, you said you wanted as much feedback as possible so here goes..I don't think it's a great idea. Even just for modeling I use about 5 different programs, UV mapping I use 3, creating textures I use at least 2, one of them being Photoshop. My point being, there are standards for each part of asset creation that would be nearly impossible to match.
I'm sure it would help some people - I know of someone who is creating models in makehuman without using proxies and have no doubt they will run into problems at some point (for the point of saying so, it's also a fantastic idea to sculpt the models and re-UV them) - I guess to me it just sounds like a loss of a certain amount of control that I currently have.

Hopefully you take this as constructive criticism, because as Ortu said if you want to do this you definitely should go for it.

I am all for it, I always try and incorporate the toolkit with the game itself - even if it's not intended for end users. Like a map editor - being able to test a map as you go without switching out of programs is a massive boon to workflow. This is especially true with platform games that involve precise jumps for example, as the level can be fully tested.

I think that having a lot of experience of writing tools and editors helps, because incorporating editors is kinda like project evolution IMO - it can take a while to define your own workflow and know the pitfalls and time consuming tasks and have ideas on how to avoid them.

For specific project engines that you intend to use for other games I'd say get as much in there as you can, don't worry too much about making editors suitable for end users - if that becomes a thing then they can always be tidied up... the main benefit in it is to streamline your own workflow and provide the tools that you need exactly how you need them. I think it's very easy to come up with tools that save a whole lot of time, but take up a lot of time to make them user friendly - it's a case of picking the right battles I think, spend the tidying up time on the tools that you use the most... level editors for example that have undo features, or copy and paste features end up saving a lot of time and is usually a good investment to improve them, but other tools probably don't need to be very fancy.