Forums » Impact Engine » Integrated in-web javascript Editor

This is my first week developing in ImpactJS, I've been very impressed with how well its structured so much so that I've started work on an editor to improve my development speed a bit more. An integrated web based javascript editor to help with the creation/editing of entities without having to have another application and syncing the files every second. I'm not done with yet. but when its complete it will be posted as an open source project developed by Handyman Studios.

Heres a preview.
http://handymanstudios.com/home/images/scriptEditor.png


our homepage for reference:
http://www.handymanstudios.com

That's a great idea, can't wait to see the finished editor!

Just tweeted the first version of it, its quick and dirty only worked on it a few hours, but it already feels alot faster!

check out our tweet feed for the link and info.
http://www.handymanstudios.com/

I already see an issue with that version, cant create a new entity when you have no entities at all :)

any suggestions would be helpful, you can post them here and I'll see about adding whatever features people would like to see.

Some stuff I plan on doing,
Fixing some bugs (cant create new entity without an entity selected, miss-labeled buttons)
Tabs, so you can have more the one file open at a time.
warnings for if you browse away without saving.
Autocomplete text for all of the impact internal classes, and entity methods.

I'm not entirely sure why an editor is needed... at least one editor out there already (Komodo Edit, free) can already perform auto-complete on the code, and tabs. I save the files, refresh the browser (so I avoid the browser reloading caches) and I'm done.

Don't get me wrong, it's great that there are tools being developed, but beware of reinventing the wheel.

Do you know how to get Komodo Edit to perform auto-complete with Impact?
I would very much like to know.

I tried to get Komodo Edit to auto complete properly with Impact but didn't have much luck. If I missed something I'd like to know also.

I've been trying out Sublime Text 2 with much delight. It does do auto complete well and learns as it goes (or so it would seem). It's picked up on Impact and my own game functions.

Um, it just sort of works? Or at least it did for me without any prodding...

It shouldn't "just work" - how could it? It definitely needs to know where the impact source code is somehow, where the modules are, etc... not exactly sure how, but I'm pretty sure you have to do something to make it work. Doesn't make sense otherwise... Or does it? Maybe I'm wrong. I'm on mac, maybe that has something to do with it?

I was using it on a Mac too, but I had the other files loaded too...

Mind you, I find auto complete to be more irritating than helpful so I stopped using Komodo and swotched to Notepad++ (natively on Windows, via CrossOver on Mac)

I don't know... I love autocomplete in Eclipse when I write in Java, I can only imagine it'll be just as nice to be able to use it with Impact without going back and forth checking the exact wording in each file.

What do you mean by "I had the other files loaded too"? What other files?

I think standard auto-complete features get tripped on the fairly non-traditional way that the impact code is formatted.

Well, I had Impact's files loaded in the editor as well. But honestly, 20 years of programming and I find auto complete far more of a pain than it's ever helped me.

Kinda like the old paperclip in MS Word? ;)

"It looks like you are trying to code a tower defense game. Would you like some help?"

I hope that this doesn't step on anyone's toes but there is an opensource cloud editor that you could probably deploy on your server and save yourself alot of work.

https://github.com/ajaxorg/cloud9

There is also this project:

http://www.akshell.com/

You would probably need to have your git repo on your server that runs PHP since I don't think they host PHP.

Just wanted to mention these incase people were looking for a solution. There is also the ACE editor which you could use to build your own custom IDE if your an independent distributed game studio.

https://github.com/ajaxorg/ace