Member Avatar for yup790

I have been using XNA recently and discoverd a major difficulty: when designing levels you have to spen ages pre planning exactly where sprites/objects will go.
To solve This problem I had an idea for a game engine/level editor that just imports sprites, creates variables for the sprites and has a wysiwyg 2d level editor, I am hoping the level editor will be similar to the game maker or 001 Engine editor.
It will convert this data into code and all other functionality/object behavior will still be done in "normal" XNA code.

The area I was confused with is weather it would be better to make a visual studio add-on, a complete IDE and compiler or something else.

Please help me.

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  • Latest Post Latest Post by Akill10
Member Avatar for phoenix_2000

I'm no expert on this area, but if you really intend on creating an engine, it should either be a compiled piece of code which functions get called in your level file, or if you don't mind your users compiling it themselves, release it as a library.

making a complete IDE seems a bit overkill, especially with a compiler, since then you'd have the same as visual studio.

just my thoughts tho.

Member Avatar for yup790

Maybe using the term engine was quite confusing. I would not use the software to create action. It would just create code for the draw method in the XNA framework to layout sprites.

Member Avatar for Akill10

The simple way I did my 3D level editor in XNA is create a separate project. Then, when I was finished placing objects in the editor, I saved the data into xml format. The data just consisted of standard things like: position,scale,rotation.

In my main game project, I then created a class which would load in the data from my editor. So, in my main game, I had a base class called Object and anytime I loaded the info for an object from my file, I add that object to the list of all objects for my game loop to use.

see: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff604980.aspx
or
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff604979.aspx

for some information on XML.

Also, to then apply a texture to your tiles, if you had each tile have a name, i.e "dirt". While loading in your tiles, you can check the name, and apply the texture that matches the name.

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