ENIGMA Development Environment

Today, in the ENIGMA IRC channel:

Quote<ENIGMA User> just found out about enigma and i'm pretty turned off by the immature community. don't think i want to stay
* ENIGMA User has left ("Leaving")

This is not the first time that the ENIGMA community has been viewed as immature. The problem is that this community is very lax; anything is allowed here. But too much freedom is problematic - it leads to anarchy. And while I do believe that anarchy is not always pure chaos, it is unattractive to others.

So I am proposing that we should be stricter on what we allow on the forums and what we do not. I'm not saying to remove "hate topics" or the like, just to control them better. If the discussion goes out of hand or if the discussion was never just anyway, we should lock the topics right away.

This is one reason why our community is small, and also part of the reason why this project is discredited. If people think that the community is immature, what does that say about the state of the project?

Discuss. Yay/nay?

A few days ago, I was strolling through when I thought I found a wonderful community. I heard that ENIGMA initially began in it, with JoshDreamland being a popular member. I decided to join their IRC channel to make some new friends. #enigma is pretty much dead nowadays, so I wanted something new.

Within an hour and a half, RobertBColton and I was banned. We did nothing wrong. The end of it went like this:

QuoteOct 13 16:45:50 <Cyrus>   !later RobertBColton ban $U$
Oct 13 16:45:51 <xbot>   Ok, I'll tell robertbcolton that when they next speak!
Oct 13 16:45:59 <Cyrus>   !later DaSpirit ban $U$
Oct 13 16:46:00 <xbot>   Ok, I'll tell daspirit that when they next speak!
Oct 13 16:46:03 <Cyrus>   first person to talk loses!

Even after a few days, they did not unban me. I would have been permanently banned if I did not speak my mind up. I was enjoying myself on the chatroom until I was banned. Everyone seemed nice. In reality, to them, new people "generally seem out to cause trouble". Avoid it.

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!

SMF is terrible looking and terrible acting. Sure, it does what it promises to do, but it is very difficult to get around. Take the Private Message system? What is that trash? You can't even look at your conversations, all conversations show up on the same screen. The user control panel for SMF is terrible looking too.

We should get MyBB instead. It gets many good reviews and is constantly maintained. Because it is popular, users would have a more consistent experience. Try out the demo.

Our Aim:

The main objective of this project is to create a better, cleaner and faster editor. We draw a lot of inspiration from other professional tools such as Visual Studio and Qt Creator.

Features:

• Movable and dockable trees and toolbars. Customize however you want. You're also able to move toolbars around. If anything is in your way, you can get rid of it.
• A welcome screen. Instead of that annoying start screen that GM Studio starts with, there is a new welcome screen which lists recent files and also has buttons for starting new projects or loading existing ones.
• Work on a new project with saving it. Start working immediately, without having to choose a project location.
• Multiple projects. The root of all resource trees are now project names. This lets you view and edit multiple projects simultaneously. You're allowed to set an active project on which the toolbar creates new resources in.
• Tabbed Resources. No more having to sort out windows within windows, you're able to switch and navigate through resources much easier.
• Split views. Simultaneously edit different resources and/or resource types at once. Plus, each split view has it's own tabs for organization.
• Open resources in an external window. This way, you can finally work on dual monitors. Or, if you work on a single monitor and like using external windows, it's your choice.
• Cross Platform. Want to edit on a Linux or Mac? As this is written with the Qt library, this program can be compiled to work on all main Operating Systems.
• High Performance. Because Natural GM is coded in C++, it is very faster than C# (which GM:Next will be written with).

Planned:

• Preprocessors. I'm not sure if I would be able to implement this, but imagine the possibilities! The program would be able to remove/add code depending on the OS or even if you're debugging or not.
  Single object text editor. You'll be able to edit multiple events at once. There will be options to use the original editing scheme.
• An easier room editor. I would like to create something like GMare combined with the current GM:Studio room editor. If possible (and really don't know if it will be), I will attempt to add a 3D room editor.
• Interval-based Backups. The same thing that current versions of Microsoft Word has. Every few minutes, the software makes a backup that you can retrieve if anything happens to your project.
  GMX project folder clean up. In the current version of GameMaker Studio, if you start removing resources, they stay in the folder. I will add built in support to clean up the folder.

Recent Screenshot(s):


Other Screenshot(s):




Download:
Downloading is not worth it. It sucks.
Windows: Click Me!
Linux: Coming soon!
Github: Click Me!

I am not responsible for any damage that this does to your computer. This application saves a settings file to %appdata%/DHtheProgrammer for now. That is subject to change.

Notes:

• At the moment, you cannot save, create or modify resources. You can load and modify scripts, however.
• If you have any loading errors, be sure to open and resave the project in GM:Studio first (an older project might have different structures).

Current Issues:

• Right clicking on a empty resource tree will cause a crash.
• The object structure is not correctly loaded.
• You cannot load two different groups of the same name properly.

Help Me:
If anyone also wants to help me, don't hesitate to send me a PM or speak to me in the IRC! There are a lot of things I can get help with including, but not limited to:

• Programming. You must know C++ and/or Qt in order to help me in this field.
• Graphics. Some of my graphics and/or the free graphics I find on the internet might not be the best. You can help me improve them.
• Compiling. I need someone with a Mac to compile a Mac version, otherwise I cannot make one. You must have Qt and QScintilla installed (you can install them pretty easily).
• Ideas. The most simplest of what you can do. If you have an idea, I have the possibly to add it in. Or, if there's anything you don't like, don't be afraid to post about it here.
• Beta Testing. You can become a beta tester to help me see if you get any errors. It doesn't matter which Operating System you're using. You get to use this early while confirming to me that this works!