I'm just gonna shoot a couple of questions off;

Will the editor
- be color customizable?
- have customable toolbars (drag and drop and move around)?
- HAVE A VERTEX TOOL?
- auto update when you guys release a new version?
- feature modding of the editor itself?
- be a separate tool from decoda or will you merge the two?


Finally my name suggestion for the engine: "The Unknown Engine".

I am not Max, I do not write the editor, I do not know.

But I can guess:


Yes - depending on what you mean by "color customizable".
If you mean giving different groups of brushes different colors - Definitely.
If you mean giving buttons and menus different colors - I am not sure.

I think the UI is done with wxWidgets, which in turns uses the native controls of your desktop environment. So I would expect the editor to follow whatever theme you are using.


Nope - But I don't know.

I think this is the kind of chrome you can get away with when the editor itself is the goal, but Max has an engine to code as well.


Yes.


Nope - Again, chrome. This editor will presumably have a fairly small, fairly adept audience, easily capable of keeping software up to date themselves. The additional code needed to have the editor auto update (and the servers needed to make it happen) simply won't make enough of a difference to enough people to be worth the trouble.


Nope. The source code might be released at some point, but any modular structure would probably arise from Max's coding style - not because the editor is designed with this property in mind.


Two separate programs.

The two domains in question (Lua code and map data) have nothing in common, so merging the two programs would make no sense.

Generally the editor is pretty customizable. In a future blog I'll talk some more about the engine goals, but one of them is to let content creators work the way they want to work, and customization is part of that.

The editor will include vertex level manipulation of geometry.

Everything we release will include auto-updating functionality. The auto-updater code that Decoda uses is a separate library we created, which we may also release for other developers to use. Programs that don't auto-update are an annoyance!

The editor is uses a plugin-type architecture for importing/exporting and the tools, but I don't know that we will actually support 3rd party plugins in the first release. Mainly because that would require us to release a C++ SDK. If we end up using Lua in the editor (we aren't currently), that's more likely.

The editor and Decoda are separate tools.