FlowED is a Scene editor for Flow and the Ogre3D engine. Following in the tradition of object placement editors, FlowED provides developers with all the fundamental tools required to easily set up, load and save a scene populate it with media.

The focus in this initial release has been on providing a generic tool that isn’t too deeply tied into the engine framework, it doesn’t force you to work in any particular way. It does give you intuitive WYSIWYG control of your scene using the mouse combined with minimal use of the keyboard.

Having come from Blitz3D to Ogre3D we realized early on that we had taken some things in B3D for granted. The fact that a .B3D file could contain a scene complete with bone, mesh, node, material and hierarchy information, any of which can be called directly from within your source code is something that isn’t as straightforward in Ogre.

Ogre has completely separate Mesh, Material, and Skeleton files. A mesh file contains a static mesh and a default material reference; no hierarchy data. A skeleton file contains a set of hierarchically linked bones but no mesh. A Material file contains one or many material scripts. Despite all this there is no generic scene file to bind all these things together and make it easy to produce an interactive game.

FlowED utilises the Ofusion Pro .OSM scene format. Ofusion being a commercial exporter for ogre that includes a loader/serializer libs in both XML and Binary filetypes. We decided to integrate the loading and saving capabilities in the engine directly.

Currently Flowed supports the loading of .OSM scene files and Ogre .mesh geometry files. Enabling you to export directly from 3dsmax, or build a scene from scratch with standard Ogre .mesh files.