DCL-Edit - Further Development

by 0x9429f8b66914d603844501fb0c640e9fd7220377 (Chris)

Should the following Tier 6: up to $240,000 USD, 6 months vesting (1 month cliff) grant in the Platform Contributor category be approved?

Abstract

This grant proposal is meant to help funding further development of DCL-Edit over the next six months. DCL-Edit is the visual scene editor for the Decentraland SDK, developed by members of the MetaGameHub DAO (see https://dcl-edit.com).

Grant size

240,000 USD

Beneficiary address

0x2a9Da28bCbF97A8C008Fd211f5127b860613922D

Description

Over the last months, we have been working on DCL-Edit, a visual editor that runs locally on your PC, allowing you to build and code your scene with the Decentraland SDK in parallel.

Giving you the typical workflow of well known state-of-the-art game engines, the current stable base version already greatly boosts productivity.

Since the release of the first stable version (check out our previous grant for the base version of DCL-Edit: https://governance.decentraland.org/proposal/?id=0cb35ba0-7e05-11ec-9447-6b730f00647d), we’ve added a couple of additional features like materials, improved UI and a prototype scene importer.

The journey has just begun, though. Although significantly boosting your productivity already, DCL-Edit still has so much potential. We’re about to get this tool to the next level. Based on the feedback from the developer community, we now put together a roadmap for the next six months to establish DCL-Edit as a professional, reliable and highly productive tool for Decentraland.

To reach our goal, a big refactoring for DCL-Edit is required. That means some significant chunks of the editor will be rewritten from the ground up, which will require some time. But fear not, we will keep updating the current version with bug fixes and smaller features as needed.

Specification

DCL-Edit is developed in Unity and can be downloaded as a npm package. It's currently running on Windows only (about to change) and it is licensed under the MIT license.

Current list of features:

• place, transform, scale, and rotate entities
• assign identifiers to entities to instantly use in code
• add basic shape components
• assign to and manipulate materials of entities
• asset browser for GLTF shapes
• undo functionality
• parenting of objects

Personnel

We are developing this as representatives of the MetaGameHub DAO, a community that is heavily involved in the evolving Metaverse and Blockchain Space (check out https://www.metagamehub.io).

• Christian Werner (Project Manager)
• Jonathan Lübeck (Lead Developer)
• Michael Rust (Code Architecture)
• Vanessa Miske (UX/UI)
• Michael Gantner (Developer)
• Vincent Labuhn (Developer)

we also plan to hire additional developers after the initial refactoring iteration

Roadmap and milestones

July, August

• Refactoring - New Architecture
• establish CI/CD workflow
• scene importer - import existing scenes from the Decentraland Builder
• add Mac / Linux support

September, October

Advanced Asset Management:

• new asset types: textures, materials, scenes (which will allow including existing scenes in another scene)
• GLTF compatibility
• live model update
• sorting and filtering of assets
• build optimizations

Component Generalization:

• having more components available out of the box e.g. audio sources, and utility components like trigger boxes
• component description interface to make custom components available

November, December

• Usability / User Interface Improvements
• interface for loading / organizing backups (history, settings, …)
• advanced control settings (keyboard shortcuts, mouse settings)
• improved Gizmo tools
• testing phase

The first step is a bigger refactoring iteration - the code needs to be cleaned up, and we need a nice CI/CD workflow established for higher development and testing efficiency.

We'll then port the tool to Mac and Linux before starting with major improvement on the asset management, entity components, and overall usability / productivity.

We are regularly synchronizing with the Decentraland Devs, e.g. during the weekly dev meetings on Wednesdays, so it might of course happen that other currently undefined features may be prioritized over the listed features when found necessary.

Vote on this proposal on the Decentraland DAO