WYSIWYG layout editor

I'd be in heaven on earth if you could flip a switch and suddenly within the layout editor the layers actually scrolled at the seperate speeds you set AND displayed at the zoom amount you set for each individual layer. As it currently stands its working a bit blind to place tiles and props in all my layers and seeing if it works well in game.

workflow could be : scroll around environment exactly as it appears in game, place objects exactly where you want them

currently its: place with guessing, run game, tweak, run game, tweak, run game, tweak... eventually mostly satisfied and move on to object number two

thanks,

Mike

Har! My parrot's name was wissywig.

Har! My parrot's name was wissywig.

..?

This is a good idea, but it's an absolutely huge undertaking, so I wouldn't expect to see any movement on it till at least 2.0 is done. Perhaps then a layout editor addon or fork could add some preview capabilities.

The game engine can be modified to be used for building. Instead of scrolling with the player, just stick scrolling to mouse, place building blocks and stuff with it etc.

It is called level editor.

In future, when we have folder and separate file based file/project formats (you are going to do that for 2.0, right? xml format :)? ) there could be a feature to save a runtime state into xml file - like there's the current save state binary format - and import the object position, rotation, size etc. data to layout editor in edit time, or have simply a XSL sheet based tool which would effectively CONVERT that data into a layout xml file! That way you could position objects runtime and see them in the "wysiwyg" manner, and then have "what you see" as a layout file.

(Btw. separate xml layout files would allow also runtime layout loading! And that you could make your own level editor, and have it to export xml file, and import in construct's level editor! And and and... many kind of things :D)

You can already make a level editor loader and saver its not that hard just time consuming.

Yeah, I know. And it's not even that hard... I just meant that it would be great if the "canonical" layout file format was so open and easy to use that it would be easy to develop external level editors which would be complatible with counstruct's file format.

It should be, though don't lose sight of the fact that the IDE still uses a lot of internal numbers and handles which will be difficult to be in line with.