Okay It's been a while since my last post and I have been slowly working my way through creating some of the initial GUI Elements for my Level Editor, and eventually the game. 

I have just added a checkbox class and an Editbox class that will allow the user to enter data. As a starting point these really are the only two extra elements I need. The editboxes are needed to allow the user to edit things like, Entity Name, position, scale and rotation and obviously the checkboxes are great for turning things on and off. 

Anyway enough of my ramblings, here is a short demo of some of the functionality of the Level Editor:

So the video is pretty minimal at the moment but even now this is going to make life much easier than editing values in an XML file to add objects to the scene. 

Next steps are:

• Allow the user to specify an object to place in the scene
• adjust rotation and scale as well ( fairly low hanging fruit )
• start work on the XML exporter
• Add extra GUI Elements( Dropdown list and Listbox with scroll bar )

I definitely need to get started on the XML exporter, although it shouldn't be too difficult it will be a time consuming thing to get right. I already have a specific format of how the file should look, due to having to write the importer so I want to get that nailed as soon as.

The other bits and pieces are just general improvements to the Level Editor which will be implemented over time. I really want to keep this level editor as minimal as possible so I'm having to assess each of the functionality I want to add and think about whether I really need it.

Happy with Development at the moment,
just need to keep motivation high!

So I have done more housekeeping, it can be sightly tedious but the feeling at the end is amazing. Just knowing that your code is abstract and reusable, along with smaller compile times is ace. I have  taken out all the game specific code and put it into it's own project and the JBEngine project is now compiled as a library and linked to from the game project. I have also added a Level Editor project which is where I will more than likely be doing most of my work for a while. This is going to give me a great chance to test out my GUI elements fully and add any new bits that might be necessary. 

After doing an initial look through of my GUI elements I realised I needed to sort out how the font size would work with the Text and also that the calculations for figuring out the actual size and offset of the images was far too complicated. I have managed to sort out the calculations, which took a while as I was getting confused between user co-ordinates, internal co-ordinates and then screen space co-ordinates. 

User Co-Ordinates: 1-100
Internal Co-ordinates: 0 - 1
Screen Space Co-ordinates -1 to 1

To overcome this, instead of passing the scale and offset of the textures in screen space coords I instead changed the Quad I was using for the full screen from ( -1 to 1 ) to ( 0 - 1 ). This meant that all my calculations could be done in the 0 - 1 coords and then finally in the vertex shader just do a conversion to get the vertex positions in ( -1 to 1 ). 

It was all a bit of a headache really but the code is much simpler now and it also made it easier to sort out how the font sizes would work. I ended up settling on using pixels to decide font size, meaning that the text will scale when the resolution changes. This seems to be the way most games are doing it now. This is still to be fully implemented but It shouldn't take too long. 

The Level Editor should come along fairly quickly as the majority of the functionality is there already within the engine so it will just be a case of setting up all the GUI elements and adding the logic for the editor. This is still a sizable amount of work and could easily get out of hand if I don't keep tight goals on it. 

Plenty to do so I best get cracking :)