Project Management
Entry posted by Josh ·
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Leadwerks3D has built-in project management features that assist the user to create, share, and publish projects. When you first start editor for the first time, the New Project wizard is displayed. You can select a programming language and choose which platforms you want the project to support. It is possible to add project templates for new languages, too.
Once a project exists, you can go into the project manager and switch projects. This will cause the editor to use the project directory as the path to load all assets from. All files will be displayed relative to the project directory. You can drag an image into the icon box to add it to the project. (Xcode users will probably notice the influence here.) The +/- buttons will allow you to import a project or remove one from the list, with an option to delete the directory (iTunes much?).
I want to add more features like exporting projects into a folder or .zip file, or maybe a .werk project package the editor recognizes. The editor will have options to skip asset source files like .psd, .max, etc., and only copies relevant files, so all the hundreds of files the C++ compilers generate will be skipped. We might eventually even add integration with SVN repositories, backup systems, and team management features, but that's beyond what we need to worry about right now.
A "project" in Leadwerks3D is a game or other program, and will typically contain many maps (scenes). Since this kind of defies a conventional design around file requestors and files and folders, we might not even use a traditional "Open Map" dialog. All the project's maps will be available in the "Maps" directory in the Asset Browser. I can even save a thumbnail of each map when the file is saved. To add a new map to a project, you would simply drag it into the Asset Browser, preferably in the "Maps" directory. Or maybe we will also include an "Open File" file requestor that can be used to import any map, material, texture, etc. into the project. The current design of the editor is the result of a lot of experimentation and testing, so I'll continue to play around with it as I add features.
Michael Betke and I have traded a lot of projects back and forth, and this system is designed to make that task easier so we can all exchange self-contained projects. If you have any suggestions to add, post in the comments below, or in the feature requests forum.
--Update--
And here's the export screen. This is similar to the "publish" step. I need to write a parser that goes through source code to determine what files are actually needed in the project. The project template defines what file extensions to scan for used files:
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