I have decided to start a blog to track my progress on the Forge project by writing a blog. I figure that I can use this to track my progress on the editor as well as track my knowledge as I build new features.
For this post I should talk about how the Forge editor started and where it is currently so there is a good baseline moving forward.
This project started as my final project for my masters degree. I chose to build a level editor after doing some research into tools development. Coming from being a software engineer for the web I liked the analogs between building tools and building components for users. I liked the added graphical integration and thought it would be an interesting area to explore.
After doing some looking around I saw that building a level editor was a good first tool to make. I decided to build it from scratch with C++ and dear-imgui after seeing how commonly used those technologies are. I also knew that building it in these technologies would strengthen my C++ skills and allow me to have full control over the editor. With the tech stack decided the next thing to determine was the initial scope of phase 1 of the editor.
For the first phase of the editor I wanted to focus on basic tools to create a simple but usable editor for creating scenes. This meant that I would need the ability to add objects, manipulate their position, rotation, and material properties, as well as some sort of saving and loading system to export and import scenes to and from the tool so that they can be used in other workflows.
Currently I am wrapping up shadows and moving to rendering settings after that in anticipation for the defense/demo of my work.
As the blog progresses I plan to talk about my design decisions and the motivations behind my actions for each part of these systems. I will start chronologically with the editor decisions and eventually catch up the the work I am implementing.
As of now that is the state of Forge and I hope to have more updates soon!