Sunday, January 08, 2012

Announcing a new version of the Gleed 2D XNA tool

I’ve spent some time over the Summer and Autumn of 2011 rewriting the Gleed 2D tool.  This is a tool for editing levels for 2D games and is a very popular tool in the XNA community for games running on XBox and Windows Phone.

Most of the changes in the new version are under-the-hood.  The biggest change has been to make it have a plug-in architecture.  There has also been a few UI changes though; here’s some screen-shots.

The original tool before being re-written:

gleed-original

and here’s the new version:
new-annotated

 

The main reason for rewriting the tool was that I wanted to add more features to it but found that it wasn’t easy.  It wasn’t easy because it was originally written to just handle the basics needed for creating and editing levels.

The features that I wanted to add were for the next version of my game (video here). I wanted to include lighting and shadows and  I wanted to design these on the canvas.

Instead of shoe-horning my changes into the original Gleed 2D source, I decided it’d be best to rewrite it and change it to a plug-in based tool.

So, now everything is a plug-in.  The basic shapes (rectangle, circle, path) and textures are now plug-ins.  Lighting (lights and shadows) is now a plug-in.  There’s also a plug-in for simple ‘behaviour’.

Here’s a quick video showing how to use the basic shapes and textures:

Basic shapes and textures

Here’s a short video showing lighting:

Lights and shadows

and lastly, here’s a short video showing simple behaviours:

Simple behaviours

The tool is still currently a bit rough.  There’s various bugs that need to be fixed, but none of them stop the tool from doing what it was designed to do.  The project is now quick big, so I’m hoping that the community will jump in and add/fix stuff.  I’d like to see plug-ins for physics and particle systems.

Feel free to download the source and play around.

8 comments:

tylerrrr07 said...

Just wanted to let you know I started working with this tool and even from just working with the properties within Visual Studio it is so much easier to wrap my head around than the previous version (and as such easier to work with).

Great work! It's much appreciated.

Steve Dunn said...

@tylerrr07, thanks for the feedback. Glad you like it!

Vijay Pemmaraju said...

This is amazing. I can't even begin to express how awesome you are for making this tool. I was using the old GLEED2D for my game, but this is soooo much better. I mentioned you in a blog post on my game's website so you get credit. My game is still early in the development, but when it's finished, I'll give you a complimentary copy as a way of saying thanks. Great work!

Steve Dunn said...

Really pleased you like the new version. Good luck with the game (http://dimension-game.com/), I'll keep an eye out for it.

beernutts said...

Hi Steve,

Your work on gleed2d looks great. I've used the 1.3 version for some games, and I'd like to use what you have going forward.

However, I don't work with C# (I use C++), and I don't have any desire to get the tools to compile the C# gleed2d code you have provided. Would it be possible for you to include a binary version of Gleed2d for sue on a Windows machine? I'm ok with getting any dll's I may need to get it to run.

Thanks!

Laser Cutting said...

Thanks

Unknown said...

I agree with @beernutts, why not include binaries so people who use your magnificent tool for other platforms like Flash or anything other really, can download and use it, without the need to compile it.

Steve Dunn said...

Valid comments re. the binaries. When time permits me to revisit the tool, I'll include the binaries for each release.