Torque 2D: Editor Collaboration

Torque 2D Editor Collaboration

Greetings everyone! It's time to talk about the 800 lbs gorilla in the room. It's no secret that Torque 2D is an awesome engine with a slick API, lots of examples, growing feature set, and amazing community. However, one of the main drawbacks is lack of visual editors. While we have been helping out with 3rd party tool support, like TexturePacker, nothing beats a full editor suite. Before we get into it, here's a little backstory...

The Road So Far

For a while, I've been avoiding getting into a detailed, public discussion about future Torque 2D editors. The reason is because the T2D team needed to discuss a few things internally:

1. What would be our role in the effort?
2. What are potential paths we can lead folks down?
3. What initial research needs to be done to kick off the discussion?

Well, we have finally answered those three questions and have determined now is the perfect time to open it up to all users. Melv and I have had several discussions behind the scenes, so this isn't a whimsical blog. We've gone back and forth on different options, but now we need everyone's feedback.

Editor Shell

Feel free to correct us on this, but we came to the rough conclusion that it is not feasible for GarageGames to make all the editors. Nor is it likely that the entire community can organize and spearhead the effort without our help. This is based on history, our own experience, and the current size/knowledge of the existing T2D users.

What we discussed is the concept of an editor shell. The gist is that we would develop a barebones program that would support plugins. The plugins could be developed by anyone, then easily integrated by an end-user. The hope is that multiple plugins would make up an editor suite, without relying on GarageGames or any other sole entity. Our plan was to release the shell for free, under the MIT license, and allow anyone to do what they want with it. People could submit free plugins or sell them, without restriction. A plugin could be as simple as a sprite viewer or as complex as a level builder.

Unfortunately, that idea was not the tough problem to fix. The real issue is deciding on which technology should be used to create the shell. We discussed three potential options:

1. Torque GUI/Script
2. Qt
3. wxWidgets

We quickly eliminated wxWidgets. That left either Qt or the existing Torque 2D GUI/Script system. Either tech offers some major hurdles. Qt is our preferred framework for generating an editor without question. It would enable some very nice features, not least of which would be consistent cross-platform experience, window docking, plug-ins and the use of ECMA-JavaScript for extensions. We could even integrate things like Scintilla for script editing and debugging right inside the editor itself. 
 
The major hurdle we're facing right now is modifying T2D to work in a multi-viewport environment as would be required for an editor. T2D is setup to be a single-window framework. It needs to be more like T3D with a multi-window, texture->device setup, but work without problems on all existing platforms.  Without that, the only option is to generate an editor using Torque itself and TorqueScript, something that we'd do but with great, great reluctance. After all, TorqueScript was designed to control games and not larger-scale applications like editor suites. Small tools yes, scalable editors, not so much. 
 
One major failing of that approach is the GUI system which is inconsistent and just plain bad.  Additionally, the font system is pretty old.  A complete overhaul of the GUI system to include powerful layout for multi-resolution devices and the use of a font library like FreeType2 would be one possible solution to use T2D itself.

Now

Well, you have all been asking about them. Here is our reply. Now it's time to discuss! We obviously would like to hear preference, but we are really hoping we can get some back and forth going on the technical details. What would be amazing is if we could even get some folks to speak up on possible collaboration, because even the editor shell is no small effort. So what say you, community?

Regards,
Mich