Wanton Hubris

So since I got LevelEd working again with my threading fixes, I’ve started reworking the interface a little. The texture browser is now a floating window that can be resized and placed wherever you want it. It also supports multiple WADs now which is really nice. This frees up that bottom right pane to become another ortho viewport so you now have 2 of those. Here’s a shot to show which direction things are moving!

I’ve also refactored the input code so that it’s very flexible now. I’ve changed the default controls for LevelEd to more closely match UnrealEd (which is what I use all day at work). This makes it easier on me and now I can add alternate control schemes without too much trouble since it’s all nicely abstracted.

The new input code has allowed for some nice features like allowing easy zooming in the texture browser. It works just like it does in the ortho viewports!

It’s hard to believe that someone hasn’t come to my house and taken away my compilers yet. I’m serious.

Remember how I said that LevelEd was broken under Snow Leopard and I wasn’t sure how to fix it? Right, well, it turns out that the problem is that I had the renderer running on a thread but there were multiple threads making calls into OpenGL. This causes major problems, including Kernel Panics (hard lock on a Mac).

So once it dawned on me that the threading was probably at fault, I put in an NSLock to control access to the OpenGL drawing routines and now the editor works again.

What I don’t understand is – How did it ever work on Leopard? Why does Snow Leopard expose this problem where Leopard didn’t? It’s either software gremlins or maybe Leopard had a much more relaxed approach to threading or something.

At any rate, work can now continue on the endless project known as the ToeTag Editing Suite.

OK, I think I’m done with this wacky idea of writing a cross platform level editor. It’s just way too daunting. In my youth, I would have dived in and starting coding up a storm but my current self looks at that mountain and wonders, “Do we really want to climb that again?” Python is interesting and I’ll probably keep learning about it and writing programs in it, one of them may even be a level editor, but it’s going to take a back seat to actual creative work. Being able to load up GTKRadiant in a Windows boot partition and make levels when the whim strikes is far better than having to wait another 6+ months until I can get enough time and energy together to make a new one. Again.

So I blame Apple for whatever they did to break my editor. I blame myself for not being smart enough to deduce what the problem is and work around it.

Blame for everyone! But at least it’s pushed me to realize that I need a break from coding. Now to push some brushes around…