Nero Game Engine

[NeroGames]

I'm still using ImGUI,  The great thing about it, is how easy it let you update the UI, you can remove or add any part of UI at each Frame. This is good for applications where selecting or removing an object updates the UI.

The downside is that it isn't very intuitive, sometimes you don't know where to place items like popups and windows inside your code.

The best UI system would be a traditional UI like (SFGUI and QT) that provide some ImGUI widgets. This way you build your UI traditionally and if part of your UI needs to be updated regularly you use ImGUI just for this part.

[NeroGames]

Project Status

Hi everyone, Happy new year.

After a long break, I'm happy to announce that the development of the Nero Game Engine v2.0 as resumed, you will be getting regular updates as usual 



Engine Update

Here are the latest Engine updates

# Editor Views

Up until now, all the Editor UI was contains in a single class EditorUI. This approach made it easy to start with ImGUI. But as the Editor grew, it became difficult to manage.

During the past couple of months, I worked to split the UI into multiple small views. And there we got it, All Popups and Windows have been moved into their own class. As of now the Editor is divided into 46 different views, took a long time to create all those classes 



# Notifications

The Editor is now able to provide notifications after completing certain task. The notifications appear in the bottom right corner of the Editor. By default, each notification last 3 seconds.



Right now, the Editor will notify you when it finishes reloading your game DLLs or when it Auto Save your project.

The Notification API is pretty simple to use, here is some code.

// Default 3 seconds notification timeout
m_EditorContext->getNotificationManager()->notify("A Notification");

// Custom 10 seconds timeout
float timeOut = 10.f
m_EditorContext->getNotificationManager()->notify("A Notification", timeOut);
 

# Create, Compile and Play your Game Level.

Each time you create a new Game Level, a new C++ class will be generated for that level. The Engine Editor is now able to compile, reload and play your Game Level class. A full demo of this will be done in another post.

The button to create a new game level is now located on the Toolbar, right side.



What's Next

While the Editor can play your Game Level class, it's not yet able to generate your game level Scene Graph. Meaning, if you add some Sprites and Animations to your level and hit the Play button, you won't see anything. For the next weeks and months, the focus will be on generating the Game Level Scene Graph.

That's it for this post, have a good day !