New year, new news – and this time everything is different! I’ve been through some interesting discussions with Ben Garney (one of the big guys behind PushButton Engine) regarding how to tackle a general purpose editor beast for PushButton Engine. We came to the conclusion, that we’d rather try a non flash/flex way for the UI (mainly due to possible performance problems).
One solution would have been .NET/Mono, but that didn’t convince us at a first glance. Our second approach is using Qt!
Since Flash can’t comminicate directly with Cpp/Qt, we need to do the following:
- In Flash, we use ExternalInterface to communicate with the outside world (meaning Javascript)
- In Qt, we run a Webview, which loads the SWF and catches the ExternalInterface calls.
- These caught calls are then passed on to Qt
So in short, it’s like: Flash >> Javascript >> Qt and the otherway.
We’ll see how this decision turns out in the end, but it’s an interesting approach indeed (and in case of emergency, there are ways to improve performance)!
For now, I can say, that I got the basic communication working:
It features:
- Entity selection
- Display the as “editable” marked properties of the selected entity, grouped by components
- (W.I.P.)Modify the properties: numbers and strings working, custom data types (like a point) on the way
Next upcoming features:
- Entity Browser: visualisation
- Entity Browser: interaction (selecting entities, adding + deleting components)
Stay tuned!