What did you ever dream of… to ease your game development process ?
Right now I’m thinking about a visual dev environment… My personal dream is to be able to stop the game at any moment, create new objects and manipulate existent objects (including group manipulation), for debugging of course… The ultimate thing would be to be able to design your game while playing (say, adding new code while the game is running). That would be, say, awesome but it seems to be incredibly difficult to achieve/handle.
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My personal dream is to be able to stop the game at any moment, create new objects and manipulate existent objects (including group manipulation), for debugging of course…
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Been there, done that. It’s not as useful as it first seems, and it requires lots of awkward code to implement correctly. A good level editor and a method of getting your results into game quickly (ie, in a few seconds) works just as well and is much easier.
I too, would like to finally complete a game to my own personal quality levels. Unfortunately I tend to be something of a perfectionist and so things ends up being not good enough (usually my programmer art) so it gets left unfinished.
Been there, done that. It’s not as useful as it first seems, and it requires lots of awkward code to implement correctly. A good level editor and a method of getting your results into game quickly (ie, in a few seconds) works just as well and is much easier.
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Really ? You say it’s not useful ? I saw your Visual Editor thingy, it seems awesome (although I didn’t managed to launch it)… what’s the problem with that ?
Been there, done that. It’s not as useful as it first seems, and it requires lots of awkward code to implement correctly. A good level editor and a method of getting your results into game quickly (ie, in a few seconds) works just as well and is much easier.
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Really ? You say it’s not useful ? I saw your Visual Editor thingy, it seems awesome (although I didn’t managed to launch it)… what’s the problem with that ?
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It’s certainly useful, it’s just that you end up with all the difficulties of a game (lots) plus all the difficulties of a good level editor (plenty) plus a whole load of new problems (more than enough) all put together in one big application. While the end result is pretty neat you can get 90% of the benifits from doing good, ‘traditional’ tools at a fraction of the development time.
It also tends to result in an annoying dependancy between the game classes and the editor classes. Not always a literal dependancy, but the structure of both is heavily influenced where sometimes you just want to handle things in a completely different way.
Although I’ve not completely abandoned the in-game-editor approach, as I’ve recently done a GUI system where the visual editor is actually in the game. You can rearrange the menu components while it’s still running and it’ll save the changes automatically. ;D
Really ? You say it’s not useful ? I saw your Visual Editor thingy, it seems awesome (although I didn’t managed to launch it)… what’s the problem with that ?
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It’s certainly useful, it’s just that you end up with all the difficulties of a game (lots) plus all the difficulties of a good level editor (plenty) plus a whole load of new problems (more than enough) all put together in one big application. While the end result is pretty neat you can get 90% of the benifits from doing good, ‘traditional’ tools at a fraction of the development time.
It also tends to result in an annoying dependancy between the game classes and the editor classes. Not always a literal dependancy, but the structure of both is heavily influenced where sometimes you just want to handle things in a completely different way.
Although I’ve not completely abandoned the in-game-editor approach, as I’ve recently done a GUI system where the visual editor is actually in the game. You can rearrange the menu components while it’s still running and it’ll save the changes automatically. ;D
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About tied architectures : yeah, that’s precisely why I’m thinking about a generic approach… Like all you have to do in your game is a callback when, say you press “m” (like “magic”) and an editor starts with text fields, sliders, lists and all that to manipulate your objects (of course, your objects have wether annotations or implement some interface, or something like that to precise which editors widgets are to be used with which object) and you have a method that is called when there’s need to take changes into account.
Or something like that, it’s not really a consistent design for now
