Level Editor First Look
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Tonight's entry will be a short one, mainly just because I was playing around with the file manager and wanted to put up a screenshot of my work in progress level editor:
As I mentioned before, it is coded in C#/Winforms. My philosophy is if you're going to code something for Windows using something like Winforms, make it look like it was written for Windows. UIs are a real pet peave of mine. I can always pick out areas where two components don't quite line up like they should or something like that and the programmer was like 'Meh, its close enough for me, who's gonna notice?' Well, I am. Things like that instantly make a product wreak of poor quality to me and adversely affects my perception of the product from that point on. (And before you call me a hypocrite, I am well aware the separation between my Terrain Tool and my Terrain Layers controls is a sloppy mess and will soon be dealt with.) Keeping to the standard look and feel as close as possible also removes the temptation to get carried away with highly customized aesthetics and helps keep me focused on what the project is all about.
Keeping with the standard Windows look and feel, the first things I set up were a framework where the window would restore its size, position, state, even the position of the splitpanel's separator and which tab you had selected when you exited last. Most of the form is covered by a splitpanel with the rendered area as the left component, and the tab panel as the right. I want to make this layout pretty consistent, and have plans in the future of splitting the vertical space of the tab panel in two so that the PropertyGrid is always visible no matter which tab is selected, and will contain context sensitive properties about whatever happens to be selected within the current tab.
Like I said, short entry tonight, hopefully I'll get back into things this weekend a bit.
As I mentioned before, it is coded in C#/Winforms. My philosophy is if you're going to code something for Windows using something like Winforms, make it look like it was written for Windows. UIs are a real pet peave of mine. I can always pick out areas where two components don't quite line up like they should or something like that and the programmer was like 'Meh, its close enough for me, who's gonna notice?' Well, I am. Things like that instantly make a product wreak of poor quality to me and adversely affects my perception of the product from that point on. (And before you call me a hypocrite, I am well aware the separation between my Terrain Tool and my Terrain Layers controls is a sloppy mess and will soon be dealt with.) Keeping to the standard look and feel as close as possible also removes the temptation to get carried away with highly customized aesthetics and helps keep me focused on what the project is all about.
Keeping with the standard Windows look and feel, the first things I set up were a framework where the window would restore its size, position, state, even the position of the splitpanel's separator and which tab you had selected when you exited last. Most of the form is covered by a splitpanel with the rendered area as the left component, and the tab panel as the right. I want to make this layout pretty consistent, and have plans in the future of splitting the vertical space of the tab panel in two so that the PropertyGrid is always visible no matter which tab is selected, and will contain context sensitive properties about whatever happens to be selected within the current tab.
Like I said, short entry tonight, hopefully I'll get back into things this weekend a bit.
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