I have ideas for a new IDE for Enigma, LateralGM just doesn't do it for me; it looks like Game Maker, don't get me wrong, and it's better than GM itself when running in Linux, but in windows it's horrible, it's clunky and it's unstable. I don't have any logical theories for these differences however; I still think it would be nice to have a new IDE, and I have plans for how it should look in my head, which I will spend time drawing and annotating for you all, but graphic editing software will make this a gruelling process, so I may make a concept design within Enigma, which if I can design it exactly how I want it designed, if some people would be nice enough to hook the functions up to the system of Enigma and all the compilers, I'd be really happy. I love Enigma, and it's community, and it's developers, maintainers and contributors. The whole project is amazing, and it makes me sad how nobody notices the whole thing, there is so little attention to this project, especially nowadays since people's lives are getting in the way of development.
I really think LateralGM has so many issues (primarily on windows) that are just a pain to get fixed, I have seen The ExDeus's future aspirations for the project and I personally really like them, I would like to see Enigma become much more independent; it does not need to continue with GM compatibility, it can be so much more, so much more potential is here.
Now, I understand people in this world tend not to have much time to do things in life, especially how most people in the community and contribution circle of the development of the project are getting older and getting more involved in life things, it's more and more difficult for you to maintain the project.
I have considered learning a bit more on Java to help develop LateralGM, but I really dislike Java's GUI handling; I hate the whole thing with the clunky theme setting, etc. I think something else should be used to make an IDE, not Java; Java has problems.
I read somewhere that one of the developers/contributors would like to see an IDE developed in Enigma; this implies to me that it would be possible, and if it's possible, I would love to get involved.
Now, here is the way I work with code, just in case people need this info to know whether or not they want to get involved in my idea for this project; I will probably end up making the GUI, and get stuck on certain things.
Good things:
- I am very methodical, I have to be very careful in how I code things.
- I have good concentration, I will work and work until something is finished. I have even forgotten to sleep whilst working because I feel that I need to finish
things.
- I can comment code that is presented neatly quite quickly, this does not need to be when I'm coding, it can be from code that hasn't been commented.
Bad things:
- I can be lazy, but this is due to lack of motivation; I'm not good as a leader because I can never motivate myself, I lose interest if nobody else seems
interested
- Because I have to work until something is finished, often if I'm working on a function or similar, if I leave it and come back to it I forget where I left off,
meaning that I panic and try to avoid having to finish it. Normally however, I can get on okay if I just remove the code that is unfinished and start over.
I don't know whether this idea is going to be condemned or praised, whether people are going to laugh at me, or even if people are going to dislike me because I'm coming up with a new idea when LateralGM is still being maintained; it's an idea, I'm not saying LateralGM is terrible, I can work with it perfectly fine on Linux, but here are the things I dislike about LateralGM just briefly:
The sprite editor/viewer interface is very nicely presented, much more informative than GM's. However, it's a little more overwhelming, but lacks being able to apply animation effects, which matters not to most, but occasionally I miss these features, especially having to apply the effects manually through the image editor I am using on whatever system (On Linux I use GIMP, but dislike it because it's just an overwhelming interface that I haven't yet got used to)
The code/script editor just has a strange appearence, the font looks too pixelated, the colour coding seems off, and I find it annoying having to press ctrl+space to get suggestions for functions - but I find having it appear automatically annoying within Notepad++, so maybe make it appear automatically after a small pause, and only on unfinished functions, but obviously I'm sure a few people find it fairly annoying, I can see why too.
You may be thinking "ugh, this kid is 15, he doesn't know what he's talking about.", which I understand why you would think this, sometimes I come across completely opposite to how I want to, and sometimes things I say don't make sense - at all.
Obviously this has an included poll, so vote whatever you think - I've never submitted or opened a poll before, I'm assuming you can post replies here, but my bad if you can't x_x
Thanks again everyone, it's great being here.
~HitCoder
