ENIGMA Forums

General fluff => Off-Topic => Topic started by: DaSpirit on September 22, 2013, 08:17:39 pm

Title: What do you want from an IDE?
Post by: DaSpirit on September 22, 2013, 08:17:39 pm

Recently there have been many IDEs that start floating around. I've noticed that more or less, they do the same.

Ideas are crucial to creating anything. It seems like these IDEs are missing something. I want to make my IDE the best and most productive IDE out there, but I want to generate feedback. This should be useful for other IDEs too.

Ideas:

General:

• Detachable workspace. You should be able to detach editors into their own windows.
• A universal property table. This should be able to edit any major settings of any resource type.
• An easy plugin manager. Even for the most trivial tasks.
• Save before compile. This is standard in most IDEs. You will lose less code this way.
• Multi-select on the hierarchy tree.

Image Editor:

• Select multiple image frames at once. You should be able to perform operations on them all at once.
• Ideally, every operation should be hardware accelerated.
• Have layers for each image.
• Preview animations while editing.

Tile sets:

• Auto tile. Auto detect tile borders and place the correct tile.

Map Editor:

• Have layers for both objects and tiles.
• Manipulate (rotate, scale, etc) object instances in real time.
• Add a flood tool. Mainly useful for tiles, but should work for objects too.
• View a list of all current objects and tiles. This can be helpful for detecting resources that you may have duplicated or placed outside the map.
• Select/cut/copy/paste objects and resources in the map.
• Automatic light baking objects.
• Object/tile grouping. Create groups and place groups down as whole.
• Random paint groups. Choose a bunch of random tiles/objects and fill a selection of them.

I will add any other suggestions to this list if you post below!

Title: Re: What do you want from an IDE?
Post by: time-killer-games on September 22, 2013, 08:43:31 pm

Three major things I was surprised you don't already list:

1) Select, cut, copy/duplicate, paste, move multiple instances simultaneously.
Likewise with the resource tree. I hate having to delete groups and resources individually.

2) Add existing resources from EGM folders.

3) Third thing I forgot but I know it was extremely important, I'll get back to you when (if) I remember it.

Title: Re: What do you want from an IDE?
Post by: Goombert on September 23, 2013, 01:38:41 am

Quote

I hate having to delete groups and resources individually.

If you get the LGM jar I uploaded yesterday I fixed multiple deletion, still can't move multiple selections, but you can select multiple items right click->Delete