Originally Posted By: Niemand
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My language of choice is not C/C++
Fair enough; out of curiosity, what are you using?
Common Lisp. It is pretty obscure, but very well suited to parsing, and I can use C libraries like SDL, Qt, and even Cocoa (but not, as near as I can tell, Carbon... hence my troubles with resource forks) via a foreign function interfance.
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Aside from maintaining the existing editor, my hope had been to write a Mac only editor using Objective-C++, with the core parts being pure C++ and shading more into Objective-C nearer to the UI. The other part of my thought was that good core libraries, like for reading and writing the scenario data and so forth, could be reusable whether one decided to use a cross-platform UI library or not.
The other thing I would suggest keeping in mind is that there is a serious hope in the community that eventually Jeff will make the game code open source, as he did with BoE. Should that come to pass we would like to be able to improve and extend that game engine, and assumedly our editor as well. It's for that reason that I've been working (although admittedly not all that much lately, real work keeping me busy and all) on an improved script engine, and a library to load and save both existing scenario data, and a more flexible format that might be usable in future. (Just to be clear, the former is up to the point where, while not yet able to do many of the things I eventually want, it should about be a drop-in replacement for the existing engine, while the latter is in nothing like a usable state.) Tridash was taking a look at re-writing the 3D Editor's drawing code to use Open-GL, which if done well could assumedly be reused.
For my GUI needs, I am going with Qt, but that will be as decoupled from the parsing and editing stuff as I can make it - because, like you, I think a cocoa editor would be nice. I've used Qt at a job before, and, barring unexpected hurdles, I think displaying the game world actually shouldn't be too difficult, provided I can access the relevant content. Of course, the fact that I can edit .bas files by hand in my Lisp REPL has me feeling unreasonably optimistic right now - the Qt might turn out to be a bigger pain than I thought.
I also share similar ambitions with respect to the game engine, except I think that an open-source clone is a reasonable objective for a couple of people working together.