Developemtn - Editors Are Not Easy

[SurvivorSean]

With all the new game engines I'm finding out the hard way that adding a world editor is NOT easy. I believe Trainz game engine was developed internally and likely the same can be said for MSTS. I'm not sure how Open Rails is doing it. Having GUI's (graphical user interfaces) isn't the hard part. It's actually getting a game engine to recognise those new creations and bringing it into the actual game.

I know a while back someone mentioned about how most simulators are missing what made MSTS and Trainz so powerful and long lasting is user content, and I agree. But from where I'm looking right now it's going to be hard to find a way to make it happen from a development end.

I'd be curious how other developers get around this, or how they go about doing it.

Thanks

Sean

[eric]

Having an editor means abstracting just about everything into a structure, be it files or a database. With distributed game engines, that content almost needs to be file system based. Streaming or Steam based games can do more with databases or other structures tied into the game engine....

My guess is that the people creating the games are great at the modeling and physics/animation. File systems and data modeling?... not so much.

ORTS and TSRE had the advantage of a file/database structure that was well known when their respective projects started, so that heavy boring part of the architecture was already done.

Can't speak to how Run8 or others like Zusi and SimRail do it, but it appears to be a closed system where the devs of the engine and the route Builders are coupled tightly to address shortcomings where the original architecture wasn't planned to accommodate certain needs or features.

[SurvivorSean]

Yeah it's very discouraging I'm afraid. This is where the bigger development teams have the advantage to explore building their own game engine. Of course those wanting to make money on DLC will likely avoid the business model of providing editors. I'm not really concerned about the money in DLC, I just want to create something. My prehistoric programming skills are fine when it comes to database fundamentals but way behind when it comes to 3D modeling, and vibrant looking worlds.

I think I'll try creating my ugly baby, and get the features I want until someone more experienced comes along and gives it a facelift

Thanks

Sean

[seagoon]

Ref: Trainz.
The original game-engine was Auran's proprietary Jet Engine and was created in-house.