Hot answers tagged editors
23
For a 'classic' 3D terrain editor, the steps could be those:
Generate a mesh (e.g a grid of squares, every square made of two triangles), all vertices are shared between triangles (so that there is only one normal per intersection).
This should be made a 3DMesh and rendered in your program.
Make a tool to raise and lower (smaller and bigger) parts of the ...
18
Language: C was predominant, but C++ was around and used.
Dev tools: Development environments included those from Borland and Watcom (almost unheard of today) among others. Both Borland and Watcom had their own compilers and their own IDEs. Borland was by far the most popular in general, though Watcom had a reputation for producing faster compiled ...
9
I doubt such a power tool exists, game companies create in house tools, max-scripts and Photoshop scripts to make up for the lack thereof.
They generally adapt because Photoshop is the tool that all artists need to know how to use. Even if you created a tool with all the functionality of Photoshop, artists would still prefer the original and even if you ...
8
I like what Noel proposed on his blog. A telnet based variable tweaker. By using telnet he was able to use any telnet client to edit the variables. Later they built a gui around the protocol. It seems sufficiently simple, that it probably isn't worth a middleware library but looking at his code might be useful.
I disagree with his anti-Lua sentiment ...
8
The first thing you need to have a good grasp of is transforming 3D points to 2D screen coordinates and back again. Here are a couple of answers I gave about that subject; Understanding 3D to Screen, 3D to 2D.
Now, to go from your mouse coordinate in 2D to 3D you need to do a 3D to 2D transformation backwards. This is fairly simple.
An object/local ...
7
Try Gleed. From its site:
GLEED2D (Generic LEvel EDitor 2D) is a general purpose, non tile-based Level Editor for 2D games of any genre that allows arbitrary placement of textures and other items in 2D space. Levels are saved in XML format. Custom Properties can be added to the items in order to represent game-specific data/events/associations between ...
7
"Plugins" in Unity nomenclature mean native code (read: written in C/C++/Objective-C) DLLs. For what you want to do you more than likely don't need (or want, really) to use plugins.
For extensions, the Unity editor is very scriptable.
Are you asking if you can
Populate a unity scene at editor time from an XML file
Replace unity's default scene format ...
6
The first thing is to be clear on the data structure of your terrain, and what you want from an editor. Is it a mesh? An array of heights? Some sort of Minecraft-style voxel system? Do you need to be able to add mesh terrain features like trees and buildings? Manually, automatically or both? I could go on, but you get the idea.
A basic terrain editor ...
5
This is just mostly a follow-up to Valmond's response, but it doesn't seem short enough to add as a comment.
Once you get around to making a basic editor, you might want to experiment by generating the heightmap entirely on the GPU. This is completely optional but it's a good way of offloading work to the GPU for a constantly changing terrain. Valmond ...
5
Maybe the idea of Tweakable Constants fit your needs. It is so usable in fact that you'd think you would need a complex solution to have an effective run-time variables control, but in reality the implementation is almost too simple. The original discussion of this technique is also an interesting read.
Example:
glClearColor( H(1.0f), H(1.0f), H(1.0f), ...
4
The details of the content of the SDK are probably covered by NDA.
That said, since SDKs generally contain compilers and other related tools and libraries. Access to the development hardware is often a separate issue, although to most developers they will appear to be part of the same package.
You can use any text editor to write code, and just about any ...
4
On OS X, you can use PhysicsEditor. It is a tool for Box2D or Chimpmunk but there is a txt export for your need. The main difficulty is to find a mac.
Note: there is a windows version too. But i didn't use it. Try it and add a comment if it is useful.
4
NShader provides syntax highlighting for HLSL, GLSL and CG.
They also plan to extend it with the following:
Add syntax parsing and checking (handling braces, compilation errors... etc.). This requires the definition of parser rules under MPLex and integration in the language service.
Add compilation checking (using fxc...etc.).
Add basic render preview ...
4
As a completion to Sean's post, since you mentioned Doom: there is a nice blog by Fabien Sanglard, who made a review on the part of code used for making Doom (the one from 1993). The review is here: http://fabiensanglard.net/doomIphone/doomClassicRenderer.php
PS: The blog has a lot of Doom/Quake-related code reviews, and it's a nice read for a game ...
4
I did a lot of programming on the Apple (not professionally, but it's what I learned on) and Applesoft BASIC and assembler where about where it was at for hobbyists. Other languages were available -- Logo was common, Pascal was written about everywhere but I know no one who used it, I wasn't really aware of C being used on any Apple platform until Orca C ...
3
Mesh material settings are dependent on the game and engine(s) used, which is why there are no specific tools that let you load up any kind of mesh file and take the referenced data from it.
Such a tool will have to cover a broad area of material formats, or expect custom ones. If you are working with OBJ files, for example, the editor will have to be able ...
3
InkScape is a good choice for vectorial images.
Size your document to 1m x 1m...
Add the bitmap...
Draw the polyline...
Save as .svg or .xaml document... whose are text based...
Develop a light parser to load the data
3
The easiest way to get syntax highlighting/editing assistance is to:
Open Up RegEdit.exe
Goto "HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Software/Microsoft/VisualStudio/10.0_Config/Languages/File Extensions/"
Open up the key ".c", select "(default)" and then right click>Modify then copy the value.
Then make keys for each file extension (include the period) like ".hlsl", ".fx", ...
3
Personally I would just use a 3D tool and ignore one of the dimensions. Something like Maya is likely going to be a lot more robust than some custom tool just to do 2D animations.
There are a handful of games that I've worked on and that I know about that have used this approach. As an example, here's an article that talks about Zombieville USA (iOS game) ...
3
You may be interested in Physics Body Editor. That's an open-source tool handling bodies with multiple fixtures.
A big update is in progress, and next revision will support complex dynamic objects made of multiple rigid bodies linked with custom joints, as well as a scripting support for directly testing your bodies.
Hope you'll like it ;)
3
It comes with compilers (Metroworks Codewarrior, and GCC via cygwin), lots of documentation, lots of sample code for different techniques, a Nintendo designed emulator, and optionally development hardware. From a code perspective, it's all really low level, basically directly talking to hardware registers with macros. Lower level than even something like ...
3
If you haven't already read it, I'd recommend reading this, gives some ideas of how non-tile-based 2D can be done very effectively:
http://www.davidhellman.net/blog/the-art-of-braid-index/
You could also take a look at the Aquaria source code, and see if its editor is adaptable to your needs (that used a mix of tiles and arbitrary object placement)
I've ...
3
What languages were used?
6502 for most, rarely C (Aztek), lots of BASIC, some Pascal (Apple Pascal).
What was 6502 assembler development like?
There were some pretty neat assemblers and tools for 6502: Orca/M, Merlin, plus in the later days it was possible to develop on a PC and serial link to the Apple to remote debug. Let's not forget the Beagle Bros. ...
3
You can build XNA projects outside of the IDE (debugging them effectively is another matter entirely), just like any other C# project. Using the MSBuild system.
The specific thing that you need to know about for XNA is the Content Pipeline that you need to process your content. You can build content projects outside of the IDE, but to set them up you would ...
2
Offhand, I don't know of any game-agnostic editors aimed at this task. However, you could consider using any existing paint program (Photoshop, GIMP, Paint.net, Acorn, Pixelmator, et cetera) that supports layers, build each level sprite in its own layer, then simply saving each layer individually to some directory, and then writing a tool to post-process ...
2
The Bitsquid Blog has a couple of interesting articles regarding their implementation of 'Visual Scripting':
http://bitsquid.blogspot.com/2011/05/flow-data-oriented-implementation-of.html
http://bitsquid.blogspot.com/2010/09/visual-scripting-data-oriented-way.html
The second article relates closely to the second part of your question, where the blogger ...
2
Visual Programming is a large subject. Even if you very tightly target just AI, you will probably need to handle generic logic anyway, which is where most of the work is.
And even then you'll probably always find your system just a little bit too limiting, so you either need to constantly expand it or end up with huge sprawling visual messes.
Kismet, in ...
2
The Box2D website does list 3 editors that could be useful to you.
http://www.box2d.org/links.html
One of the links is dead however. I was only able to check this one out:
http://www.brainblitz.org/BoxCAD/
There is an option to dump to code that I tried, and it does in fact give you the Box2D code of whatever you built on screen. Looks pretty decent.
2
It looks like you're looking for a map editor, and there are several questions here which relate to that:
Something like Tiled is good for a tile based game.
Something like GLEED2D is good for a non-tile based game, has XNA hooks, but exports to a plain xml format.
Something like tIDE is also good for tile based game with XNA.
I believe all of these ...
2
No, there is not a drag-and-drop way to program, unless you're using a language specifically designed for drag-and-drop (which are not in any way easier than written programming, and can be nightmares).
No, you shouldn't be looking into making an Android game when you're an absolute newbie to programming in general and Java. Making a game isn't easy, so ...
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