BabylonJs Editor: Default Skybox & environment.dds, Inspector select boxes, and UX

Before I report, I want to say this is a low priority, but I wanted to capture my observations here in case this is something @julien-moreau wants to change at some point.

Ok to see this

  1. Just open up the editor, and the default scene. open the Texture Viewer, and notice there are three textures called environment.dds

  2. In the inspector, I see that two are identical. The only difference is that the Coordinates mode differ

  • First: CUBIC_MODE
    image

  • Second: CUBIC_MODE
    image

  • Third: SKYBOX_MODE
    image

  1. Here comes the unexpected part: In the default scene, select Skybox and look at the PBR.
    image

  2. Now select none.

  3. Now add environment.dds back to the texture. Notice there’s only one in the list.
    image

  4. Look at the Scene.

The problem is that there are three of the environment.dds files. The list selector seems to be filtering by a unique name. As a result, the select box will always choose one of the environment.dds textures.

This can be fixed by fishing in the Texture Viewer and selecting SKYBOX_MODE and things are working again.

Here are the things that seem actionable:

  • Correct the default scene to just have one environment.dds file. If you’re using the ones in CUBIC_MODE maybe they need different names?
  • Possibly need to enforce unique names in the Texture Viewer, as you will always end up selecting whatever the named texture at index [0] was. This is a good way to avoid throwing errors, but might be confusing UX.
  • Maybe Another option is to somehow make the selector boxes in the inspector show multiple options if more than one Texture has the same name, such as the name, and then a number indicating which index they were. I am not as excited about this option, but it would help represent, such as in this case, that there are three textures with the same name.

As always thank you so much for this wonderful tool, and I sincerely hope that my feedback is useful in polishing the software.

1 Like

@the-simian thanks for reporting! I noticed that and haven’t found any solution to fix in the editor. It requires to PR an update on the babylon.js repo in order to retrieve the textures and apply the modified name. (I can’t use the .name property to save the new name as it is internally used to retrieve the texture in the .parse function of babylonjs).

@Deltakosh would it be possible to have a static Id (as for materials and meshes) for textures as well?
I can see that “uid” is generated on the fly and is not saved when serializing.

Can you guys create an issue for me on the repo? I’ll find sometimes to fix it asap

@Deltakosh sure, thanks! :slight_smile:
Done: Textures should be able to have a static Id · Issue #6476 · BabylonJS/Babylon.js · GitHub

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@the-simian fixed and preview released here: http://editor.babylonjs.com/electron/preview/BabylonJS%20Editor%20Setup%203.1.2-alpha.1.exe

Thanks @Deltakosh

2 Likes

@julien-moreau nice. I’ll check out the new build and mark this solution after I check