It’s been a good week. The prototype panel is functional and the updated behavior editor works well, allowing re-ordering of behaviors and creation of new behaviors as well as easy access to all behavior control panels. Some buttons still need to be hooked up, some functionality needs to be added, a few error checks need to be factored into the process, but overall it’s getting really close to done.
Here’s what it looks like now:
All of the behaviors are lined up along the top there, with numbers to show where they are in the ordering. Click any one of them to open its control panel, drag left and right to re-order. On the left side is the main information panel for the active entity, allowing manual changes to coordinates and name, as well as hosting the all-important (and not yet implemented) save and delete buttons.
So here’s what’s left to be done to complete the behavior editor:
- Hook up all of the buttons on the main information panel
- The save buttons should be easy but will take some UI work
- The delete button should be even easier, but will require some minor checks to ensure that a behavior that is prerequisite to another isn’t deleted
- The set image button will be quite difficult and time consuming, but the created image browser will also be used in the detail editor so that’s fine
- House control panels in a scrollable window (some large ones go off-screen)
- Make sure scroll window shows selected behavior at all times (for selecting/opening behaviors from the list on the right)
That’s all I can think of so far. Some of that stuff may take a while, but I should be able to put a pretty substantial dent in it over the coming week if nothing else comes up – and, as mentioned, the image browser component is one that will be re-used for the detail editor as well, so it’s a perfect way to segue into that, the next part of the project.
The end is in sight! Well, the end of the behavior editor anyway. Obviously the project itself still has a long ways to go, but I’ll be that much closer to working on content,sweet content.
One thing’s for damn sure: I’m never making another game engine again. I’ll tweak this one to suit my purposes, improve it here and there, maybe make new modules, possibly port it to other platforms, but never a-fucking-gain am I going to spend 1-2 solid years of my life on an engineering project tangentially related to the creative field I want to pursue. In the meanwhile, well… at least it’s a good learning experience, and I really do love the degree of control it affords, but man. Man. Never again.