Holy cow, this is my 100th post. “Insert epic sentence”
Depending on how much time you follow my blog or Different Pixel activity you may know that we have an internal Editor called Sapphire
Past
It was developed over a year ago with the intent of being a “All in one” 2D game editor for our games, built on XNA. It started out pretty well and I’m very happy with the outcome. It served it’s purpose. The problem now is, most of the stuff we need, apart from the generic sprites positioning, rotation etc, are very specific stuff to the game/project in hands.
Considerations
I now find myself in the need of a Cut-scene editor, it will need the obvious drag-drop, open image etc, but the rest is specific to animation.
How about a generic editor with plug-ins?
Grabbing the current editor and making another working mode that cooperates well in the existent ecosystem is hard work. I don’t have as much time as I would like. It takes too much work and effort and building for specific case takes much lesser time. Since the tools are for internal use only I don’t need to have a all in one friendly editor. Just something that I and Rita can use and that she can quickly learn.
So here I’m not using the “correct road” but the “I need this stuff working” solution.
I decided to make a reusable empty framework with basic handling of common stuff and having an “open canvas” for the rest.
Framework
After some research I decided to use wxWidgets. I’ve used it in the past and it’s a major headache for some stuff, but it’s not an unfamiliar ground for me and I know first hand you can embed DirectX and OpenGL windows there pretty easily. Being cross-platform is a bonus, I intend to focus on Windows only but we never know what lies ahead the road.