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The tool has to be functional, elegant and fun. For that I wanted a special UI for it. I loved what the team had done over at Blade3D and i wanted something similar. Unfortunately they paid at least $300 for thiers, and hence this wasnt realy an option for me just yet

So for now im stuck with an old 2005 style UI. To spice it up abit I decided to add docking panels. I had worked with docking panels before for my ChainReaction project in Java but hadnt done one in C# before. A quick search on sourceforge came up with DockPanel Suite.

It certainly wasn’t as easy to pick up as when I did docking panels in Java, but I eventually got it. The toughest part which I still haven’t sorted out 100% is rendering a XNA window into a docking panel. As XNA runs using a DirectX graphics device its very picky about loosing its rendering state. So if a user undocks the window and moves it about and then redocks it, it doesnt like it due to the loss of rendering state. For now the XNA window has been fixed so that it cant be undocked.

As you can see in the screenshot above I have added some visual properties to the BlueprintEditor so that you can affect how its rendered, its all working beautifully.

The next step is to get the blueprints being placed on the grid so that you can build the level.

Today I added the BlueprintStore and the BlueprintEditor.

Firstly the BlueprintStore has two halfs to it. On the left hand side you have a list of "library blueprints" these are loaded from an XML document. Library blueprints can then be dragged over to the second half which is where all the blueprints that are used in the map are stored.

If you select a blueprint you can then click a button to open the BlueprintEditor. The editor is a separate window with a rotating view of the current model for the blueprint and on the right is a property grid that lets the user edit any number of properties a blueprint has.

So you can see that when a user creates a map they are going to require blueprints. Blueprints can be anything from creeps, towers, trees, houses, anything. Blueprints are the actual objects that that you place in the world and interact with.

Tomorrow will be more work on the blueprint editor me thinks

Mike

Just a quick update on the project, not much to show as of yet. Been working on getting a basic terrain in place with 3D picking so you can place towers on the map.

I realised once I had done this however I was jumping the gun abit, so the next bit im going to be working on is the BlueprintStore. The BlueprintStore lets you create tower blueprints that the player can then use in the game. There will also be a library of pre-built towers that you can just drag and drop and use.