I need a UI-Editor for my custom Direct-x UI

Question

I have developed a custom DirectX UI library equipped with everything from buttons to a gridview.

I need a screen-layout editor of some sort. It just takes too long to do it by hand, whether through a config file or hard-coding.

I could spend a month or two developing a DirectX editing utility, but I don't have a month or two to spend on this. I could possibly justify a week.

Some requirements:

• I need to be able to create a new screen
• I need to place controls such as buttons, textboxes, and containers/windows/etc throughout the screen
• I need to adjust properties of these controls (Name, Text, Width, Height, Parent Container, etc)

Some of my ideas include:

• Using VB.NET's form editor... setting up forms and translating the form's control information into game screens.
• Setting up a web-based editor (seems like this would take more than week... wouldn't it have to be flash based?)
• Setup a VB.NET win32 editor that allows placement of .NET buttons, containers, etc that correspond to my library's buttons, containers, etc.

Is there a best way to handle this?

Thanks

Answer 1

Perhaps you can design using VS WPF designer or Expression Blend, and then write a converter from XAML to your format.

Answer 2

How about expression blend 2 ? You could use Expression blend to generate the Xaml, then you could parse the Xaml manually and generate the UI in DX instead of WPF. Xaml is already arranged in a tree structure, so its not too difficult to relate it to your own custom data structure which i assuming is shaped like a scene graph ?

I once worked on a renderware program which was used in a game. We used a web page editor to make the gui. The editor would output html, which we then parsed to make the gui.