The Amazing Draggable Checkable Multiselectable Multidimensional TreeView with Icons
Entry posted by Josh ·
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Last week I compiled the engine into a DLL and a static lib. That was pretty painless, and I have the project set up so it's easy to switch back and forth. I still haven't got Code::Blocks compiling right, which I will need for the Linux build. It can't seem to find any libs, but it's not too important yet.
After altering the behavior of the MaxGUI canvas slightly, I was able to load the engine DLL in BlitzMax and display 3D rendering on a windowed application. It's very easy to do this in LE3:
gadget:Byte Ptr = CreateWindowsCustomGadget( QueryGadget(canvas,QUERY_HWND) ) context:Byte Ptr = CreateContext( gadget )
Or with C:
Gadget* gadget = CreateWindowsCustomGadget( HWND hwnd ); Context* context = CreateContext( gadget );
The editor is taking shape, though it is still very early. It feels like a cross between Visual Studio and Valve Hammer Editor (Worldcraft) which are both programs I like a lot.
I knew from the beginning the only acceptable way to display assets would be a draggable, multi-select treeview with icons. For the scene hierarchy, I wanted checkboxes and icons. I looked at ways to hack the Windows treeviews and I looked at wxWidgets, and didn't find anything suitable that would work on all platforms. At last resort, I started writing my own custom control on a graphics window, and I'm getting surprisingly good results with that. The behavior is about 60% functional now, and it's faster than the Windows tree view because it's completely hardware accelerated. The only problem is that the FreeType text does not match the Windows GUI font 100% completely, even though it's using the same font and size. I'll see if there's anything I can do to make it match more closely.
The reason I am spending so much time on this tree control is because drag and drop is used everywhere in the new editor. You can drag a texture onto a material, drag a material onto a model, rearrange nodes in the scene hierarchy, and even move files around on your hard drive. So it's not surprising if some customization is needed to support this functionality.
Knowing the kinds of things people want to do like copy all used assets into a folder ("Publish") and import a bunch of models they downloaded off the internets, it's kind of fun to design interfaces to make development easier. My goal for the LE3 editor is to have more of an established official procedure for everything, along with extensive documentation. I've gotten lots of feedback from some fantastic artists, so I know what will help them get a large project done faster.
That's all for now. I've got a lot to do!
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