Elysian Shadows

Entities are Born

As I have said before, EVERYTHING is an entity: warps, characters, collidables, enemies, items, etc. The characteristics and behaviors of each entity are determined by which "components" have been attached to it. At this point in time, only the base Entity is implemented and editable through the toolkit, but I'm planning to dive right into component subeditors extremely soon.

Part of getting Entities implemented into the toolkit involved developing some sort of SpriteManager to cut each entity's sheet into individual frames (as the engine does it). Now that this has been done, I am able to texture the entities in the scene. Check out the main scene window. You can see various entities (the black outlines are untextured entities. I'm going to find a prettier way to render them). Also notice that transforming these entities is supported just as with the engine (scaling, rotation).

[b]Entity View[/b]

Entity View is the widget that lists each entity in your current area (by name) and allows you to quickly select them without having to find them in the current scene. Once Marcel completes the "selection" system, selecting an entity from this view will also cause the camera to center on it within the scene.

[b]Component View (Inspector)[/b]

THIS is my baby. It was heavily influenced by the Unity3D engine. Here we modify all attributes for entities. As I have said, the only modifiable attributes are for the base entity class, but I will be adding collapsable widgets (dynamically) to serve as minieditors for each component. You can set the entity's transform data (position, size, and rotation) from this view OR by selecting it and dragging it around the scene (once Marcel finishes his shit). 

I'm also just about to add edit-able sprite data, so that there will also be a filebrowser to texture any entity (and corresponding line-edits to specify the size of each sprite within the sheet, so that it can be chopped up correctly). There's still a shiiiitload to be done on the entity-front, but I'm extremely happy with the progress so far and hope to get a MASSIVE amount of stuff done on it before the weekend (so that Marcel can continue working while I bust my asshole on the PSP and iPhone/iPad builds with M_D_K for the video).

GOODNIGHT, GENTS! SEE YOU BRIGHT AND EARLY TOMORROW!

Falco Girgis
Falco Girgis is the founder and lead software architect of the Elysian Shadows project. He was previously employed in the telecom industry before taking a chance on Kickstarter and quitting his job to live the dream. He is currently pursuing his masters in Computer Engineering with a focus on GPU architecture.