XNA And Forms
I’m not a tools guys… really I really only program to be able to design so tools and I don’t mix but unfortunately the devils must… XNA has removed a large portion of the hell of writing DCC importers which is nice but still misses out the other vital tool IMHO.
A level editor
The last time I attempted one was about 10 years ago in MFC and DirectX5 IIRC I’ve worked on bits of in house editors (Sudeki Ed, MrEd (HS’s), UnrealEd etc.) but haven’t started from scratch but really felt I needed one so figured time to knock one up. I thought this was gonna be a huge soul sucking experiance but I guess that shows how little I’ve programmed with modern .NET gui.
.Net & Forms is good 
in about a weekend, I’ve got an editor that reflects in the game and using a few interfaces allows you to add enties and alter any properties of your entities in a fairly swish UI. Using my XNA renderer into a panel I can display and move things.
I’m amazed that in about 2 days worth, I’m about half way to hitting my basic editor I wanted (just hit testing, a few manipulators and serialization til its rudimentary useful). Don’t get me wrong thats purely the most basic rubbish editor you can imagine but still for the amount of work thats amazing.
[edit] Forgot to mention, Ziggyware article has the details on was what i based my form XNA intergration. Here
So heres a piccy and a link to it fullsize
Monday, March 19th, 2007 @ 10:47 pm 
Computer Games, Development, XNA
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March 21st, 2007 at 4:56 pm
Very nice
For those interested in creating their own XNA editors with WinForms you can check out my tutorial:
http://www.ziggyware.com/readarticle.php?article_id=82
March 21st, 2007 at 9:33 pm
Indeed I forgot to mention thats the reference I looked up
I’ll edit the blog put the link on… know there was something else i meant to say heeh
March 21st, 2007 at 10:16 pm
Thanks Deano
Now get back to work!
March 27th, 2007 at 10:56 am
Heyas,
Much as I hate to suggest it , have you tried the .net XMLSerializer stuff for your entities? Been putting together my own editor for a small home project and found it incredibly simple to store off and retrieve entities just by adding the appropriate attribute tags to the properties. Not an ideal end solution but great interim one (similar to what we did in sol-ed)
m
March 27th, 2007 at 10:01 pm
Hey Mark,
Yeah I’ve even got a partial implementation using XMLSerializer in the engine already. HS uses a custom C++ template/MACRO magic system to a similar effect. Reflection is great
I also found a more comprehensive version on CodeProject.com that I’ve been meaning to take a look at.
Entity save/load is a big item on my to do list.
Haven’t heard the name sol-ed for a while
Deano
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