HOW TO CREATE YOUR OWN GAME EDITOR HOW TO
HOW TO CREATE YOUR OWN GAME EDITOR MANUAL

HOW TO CREATE YOUR OWN GAME EDITOR HOW TO

In real life, regardless of what language you favor, you’ll discover libraries as you research how to solve any given problem, and then you’ll import it into your code and use it. Import įor the purpose of this exercise, you get prescient knowledge of all the libraries you need in advance. For instance, you know this text editor is based around the Swing GUI toolkit, so importing and and other related libraries is a given. However, there are some that are obvious beforehand. In practice, this is something you usually add to as you code because you rarely know yourself what libraries you need. As usual for Java and many languages, the line is terminated with a semicolon.Īfter naming your Java package, you must tell the Java compiler ( javac) what libraries to use when building your code. If you don’t, you can use local as the top level. The typical format for this is to use a reverse domain name, which is particularly easy should you actually have a domain name.

To ensure your Java application has a unique identifier, you must declare a package name. Open the file in your favorite text editor (I mean your favorite one that you didn’t write) and get ready to code! Package and imports In the project folder, create one directory called src to hold your source files.Ĭreate an empty file called TextEdit.java in your src directory: $ touch src /TextEditor.java In this article, I assume you’re programming using a text editor and a terminal.īefore getting started, create a project directory for yourself.

HOW TO CREATE YOUR OWN GAME EDITOR MANUAL

Normally, I use and recommend an IDE like Netbeans or Eclipse, but I find that, when practicing a new language, it can be helpful to do some manual labor, so you better understand the things that get hidden from you when using an IDE. If you’re new to Java and need further information on getting started, read my Guessing Game article first. Writing a text editor in any major toolkit is surprisingly similar, no matter which one you choose. If you want to use a different language or a different toolset, this article can still be useful in giving you an idea of how to approach the problem. For this article, I use Java with its built-in Swing widget set.

There are many to choose from, including Qt, FLTK, or GTK, but be sure to review the documentation first to ensure it has the features you expect. To make this exercise realistic, it’s best to choose a language with a good GUI toolkit. You might find yourself eager to use a tool of your own construction, and the more you use it, the more you might be inspired to add to it, learning even more about the programming language you’re using. As a result, a basic text editor is a surprisingly fun and elucidating, though intermediate, lesson in programming. The components around the text editing, such as a menu bar, file chooser dialogues, and so on, are easy to drop into place. In fact, most programming toolkits already have most of the text editor parts ready for you to use. But then again, it’s also not as hard as you might fear to build a basic one. Make no mistake: building a really good text editor is a lot harder than it may seem.

How to create your own game editor