Wednesday, February 21, 2007

Editor and debugging

So I've started work on an editor. I'm using .NET and C++ to get the editor done. I'm using .NET because it seems to have a TON of features for UI development which are all very easy to use and are all garbage collected for me. I'm still going to try to maintain proper memory practices but if I miss something, it won't be as big of a deal as it would be in the game so I can let the GC worry about it. Also, having a designer in Visual Studio will come in damn handy when I'm making some of the manager windows. Right now, I have Ogre rendering into a form as well as a "viewport manager" which has a ton of customizable arrangements. I have every combination possible with a 2x2 grid. You can have one stretched across the top, and two in the bottom row. There are 8 different combinations that are possible and they all work.

I haven't hooked up buttons or anything to it yet so it's just a hard coded enumeration but I'm taking it slow and making sure each feature works and is cleaning done before I move on. The aspect ratio in the viewports isn't re-adjusted if the size changes so ignore the stretching in any shots until I implement this (which will be soon)

One feature that was needed for both in-game and the editor was a bounding box that had a transparent material over top of it so you could actually see the bounds that it enclosed. This isn't as big of a deal for small bounding boxes but the larger they are, the more useless a wire frame view of it becomes, especially when you're scene is littered with hundreds of them. In the editor, you'll be able to turn on/off certain volumes to keep speed reasonable since they are transparent but they'll show up in different colours so you can leave all the ones on that are relative to what you are doing and turn the others off. They look kind of nice actually. The colours are just in a script file so they can be changed (read: should be changed).





1 comment:

Anonymous said...

i would love to contact you personally about questions in some aspects in your game if possible .
contact me at ahmed_ismaiel [at] hotmail [dot] com

Thanks And best regards
Ahmed Ismaiel