EverEnding DevBlog 76: Panelist

For a lot of this week I ended up being out of town on a little family vacation, so there were a few days there where I couldn’t do much of anything. I don’t know, maybe I needed the break – I’ve certainly been feeling more motivated for the past few days. Then again, that may also have to do with the slightly grotesque quantities of caffeine I’ve been imbibing. Who can say?

Anyway, I’m finally getting close to the end of working on this stupid pain in the ass interface component for this stupid pain in the ass entity editor – and, what’s more, I’m starting to realize some of the unexpected benefits that can occur when one takes the long road. Here’s a screenshot:

Here you can see the scrolling windows in place for the control panels of the behavior editor. They look basically the way they’re supposed to now, but are still a tad unreliable in terms of behavior. You can also see an entirely new window here in the middle-left: I originally created this just to test out the scrolling window class, but then I started thinking about what controls I could include there, and I started to be intrigued by the potential applications. Now, granted, since I have to add each control manually in the program, this is hardly as flexible a dev tool as the development console you get in most 3d engines, but it could still be pretty damn handy. Right now I have a switch to enable/disable the FPS display, and I’ll probably add some buttons to change editor mode, but beyond that I haven’t decided which controls to add. I may just add them as I feel like I require them.

So, not a ton of progress this week, but I’m finally wrapping up these side-tracking problems of interface design that have been taking up my past few weeks. Once I do some debugging and add a bit more polish to all of this stuff, I should be able to go back to the entity editor itself, where I anticipate some fairly quick progress. As I go I’m probably going to have to revisit these interface elements bit by bit to add or streamline features, but I think in general my work will be more directly related to the game from now on – which is a really really good thing, because this incidental stuff and the time it devours really saps my motivation.