Iso?Editor?Object Creator?

Typically the way I approach it to build the editor around the game simulaiton and display engine. This is, "Editor mode" is just another mode of the program. Thus you start the engine, get it up and running (not all features need to be done) and added the editor mode to it.

This prevents you from having two separate systems to maintain, and elimiates the possibility of how something appears in the editor not being exactly the same in the game.

-Matt P
Developer: AoE/AoK

I made the Map Editor first, then the engine, then the object editor, this because I have a map file format, and having the engine with no map to test was of no use, later I made the object editor, because what use is the map inside the engine with no agents? of course I had to go back into the engine and add code to support the objects, this is the way it works for me, complete mayhem , going back and forth from one to the other, I use trial and error, most discourage this aproach, but its the way we get the best inventions :o).
anyway, see what fits better your style, and what you want to have working and when.

Good ideas guys,

What my coding team and I are doing is creating the iso engine first, then we are using the engine to make the map editor. This is actually a great way to debug your iso engine before you get to the actual application. Another advantage is that we can use the same map traversal algorithms and code for the map editor as we are going to use for the game.

Also, prior to making the map editor, that is during the development of the iso engine, we have a coder working on the map aspects, and map editor components. Instead of using a graphical interface he is weakly coupling the map editor to a text based interface for the time being. Once the iso engine is built he going to just recode the gui for it using our new tools.

Another thing to think about is your windowing framework. In my project my windowing framework (MVC [model view controller]) is separate from the iso engine (we wrote it from scratch.) The iso engine is actually embedded into the windowing framework as a derived type of a view and controller. What we basically have is that "tiles" are actually the aggregate of views and controllers and the whole iso engine has a component in the model that manages the states, graphics, traversals, animations, event repercussions, etc.

This definitely extends the release time of your demo though, so I''d only suggest this method if you are extremely serious and dedicated and patient. I feel that in the long run it is the best way to go though bercause it will allow you to _easily_ extend the capabilities of you user interface. We are actually loading our interface from a text file, that is how powerful this framework is!

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