Our editor

A big slice of our development “budget” has gone into SurgeED, something I’ve been working on and off for the last two years…

SurgeED is a world editor with some “workspace” capabilities. The idea is that we don’t just author maps in it, we aggregate all our development tools and utilities into this unified system, which allows for compiles, change merges, automated tasks, etc.

At this time, it does most things world editors do, using Spellbook’s renderer for the viewport (so what you see in the 3d window is what you’ll see in the game, hopefully).

Then we have a tool, called SurgePlayer, which takes a workspace built with SurgeED (both in compiled and non-compiled form) and runs the actual game.

On the video below, you can see me mucking around several things, but mostly on the material editor… we almost didn’t put it in, thinking that the material editing would be done in the modeling tool, but after some debate, we started to see that we have much to gain in adding it in the editor… this way, we can make trees that are slightly different, without going into the modeler and creating a different tree, create objects that are just skinnable, preview shader effects, etc

Some features of the editor include:

• Standard object manipulation tools: move, rotate, scale, snaps, etc
• Support for meshes, helper objects (boxes, spheres, points, etc), lights
• Trigger system (helper objects with events tied to them, that call scripts)
• Automated backup system (no tool is 100% stable, specially one being developed “on-demand”)
• Full undo/redo system
• Custom object classes
• Custom object properties
• Template system
• Asset management
• Asset compilation