Z# Game Editor - Porting ZGE to C#
Posted: Sun Oct 28, 2012 6:13 pm
Hi everyone!
This is my first post on this forum, and I'm going to start out with a big announcement!
A few weeks ago I stumbled upon ZGE, and I have to tell you guys, it is the best game editor I have ever seen It is very intuitive to use, and it makes game development quite easy. So naturally I wanted to add a few features to the engine, and I was rather disappointed that it only compiles in Delphi XE2. I gave it a shot in Lazarus, but I concluded that a Lazarus port would be pointless. Delphi and Pascal were so great in the past, but now this technology is considered outdated by a lot of programmers.
In my opinion, an open-source project cannot really be open-source if it only compiles in a commercial IDE Therefore I decided to convert the project to a modern and popular language: C#. During the past few weeks, I have converted about half of the core ZGE components and I have put together a decent-looking editor. You can check out the project on github:
https://github.com/petya2164/ZsharpGameEditor
Currently, you can compile the code with the totally free and open-source SharpDevelop 3.2 or 4.2, and you can also use Visual Studio 2008 or 2010 (the Express edition is free) if you like. The project targets the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1. That's your only dependency.
To be perfectly honest, I did not want to do a "faithful" conversion of all the Delphi code, but I used a lot of it. I have also added new features such as SceneGraph management (inspired by Unity and UDK), heightmaps for mesh generation and mouse picking. The idea is to make the editor and the engine suitable for more complex games. C# makes this a lot easier, for example: scripts can be written in real C# and even the users can add new components dynamically (a component is just a C# source file). But keep in mind that everything is compiled (it is not "conventional" scripting) and the .NET framework delivers near-native performance.
The editor is not really usable at the moment (no drag&drop features) as a lot of components are missing, but it still shows its potential, and it is rapidly improving
I started this project for fun (besides writing my PhD thesis) and I think that it has reached a point where it could benefit from contributions by other great programmers! Currently, we are a team of two: my best friend and me. The possibilities are endless, and we believe that the world needs a totally free and open-source game editor/engine to which anybody can contribute with free tools. The ultimate goal is to make the game development experience easier than ever before!!!
We would be really interested in your opinion and if you have any questions or suggestions we are looking forward to your feedback! And if you want to contribute, you are more than welcome to do so!
In particular, if you are developing on Linux or on Mac OS X, then you could try to compile the project with Mono and MonoDevelop. We've only tested it on Windows
This is my first post on this forum, and I'm going to start out with a big announcement!
A few weeks ago I stumbled upon ZGE, and I have to tell you guys, it is the best game editor I have ever seen It is very intuitive to use, and it makes game development quite easy. So naturally I wanted to add a few features to the engine, and I was rather disappointed that it only compiles in Delphi XE2. I gave it a shot in Lazarus, but I concluded that a Lazarus port would be pointless. Delphi and Pascal were so great in the past, but now this technology is considered outdated by a lot of programmers.
In my opinion, an open-source project cannot really be open-source if it only compiles in a commercial IDE Therefore I decided to convert the project to a modern and popular language: C#. During the past few weeks, I have converted about half of the core ZGE components and I have put together a decent-looking editor. You can check out the project on github:
https://github.com/petya2164/ZsharpGameEditor
Currently, you can compile the code with the totally free and open-source SharpDevelop 3.2 or 4.2, and you can also use Visual Studio 2008 or 2010 (the Express edition is free) if you like. The project targets the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1. That's your only dependency.
To be perfectly honest, I did not want to do a "faithful" conversion of all the Delphi code, but I used a lot of it. I have also added new features such as SceneGraph management (inspired by Unity and UDK), heightmaps for mesh generation and mouse picking. The idea is to make the editor and the engine suitable for more complex games. C# makes this a lot easier, for example: scripts can be written in real C# and even the users can add new components dynamically (a component is just a C# source file). But keep in mind that everything is compiled (it is not "conventional" scripting) and the .NET framework delivers near-native performance.
The editor is not really usable at the moment (no drag&drop features) as a lot of components are missing, but it still shows its potential, and it is rapidly improving
I started this project for fun (besides writing my PhD thesis) and I think that it has reached a point where it could benefit from contributions by other great programmers! Currently, we are a team of two: my best friend and me. The possibilities are endless, and we believe that the world needs a totally free and open-source game editor/engine to which anybody can contribute with free tools. The ultimate goal is to make the game development experience easier than ever before!!!
We would be really interested in your opinion and if you have any questions or suggestions we are looking forward to your feedback! And if you want to contribute, you are more than welcome to do so!
In particular, if you are developing on Linux or on Mac OS X, then you could try to compile the project with Mono and MonoDevelop. We've only tested it on Windows