Our editor has picked up a lot since September: painted terrain, kits of ready-made pieces, places you can play the moment they’re saved, and an AI assistant that can work in the editor alongside you.
Alderen’s places now start life in our editor, the Index Engine Editor. Levels and the rooms they’re made from are scenes you open, change and save, and a node graph shows how one level leads to the next. A new scene opens as an empty plane, ready to build on.
Art arrives as kits. A kit imports as a set of pieces and ready-made prefabs, so a street of houses or a dungeon hall can be laid out from parts. Any saved place can be played straight from the editor, and F5 builds and runs the whole game with a menu of places to start from.
Terrain has a new core of smooth shapes with collision, and it can be painted in strokes that undo like any other edit. A rock generator adds tiered cliffs, rubble and spires. Painting terrain straight onto the 3D view, with a brush for each kind of ground, is the next step, and we’re building it now.
The biggest change is how the editor works with AI. An AI assistant can open the editor alongside you and make changes the same way you do, and a whole script it runs undoes with a single Ctrl+Z. You choose whether it can only look, can edit, or has full access. A status light shows when it’s working, and one click stops it. When you start dragging or typing, its edits wait for you to finish, and it can never save over work you haven’t saved yet.
Big places are much lighter to work with too. Aster’s Reach used to take three and a half minutes to open in the editor, and now it opens in about 18 seconds. Drawing a large scene costs about a fifth of what it did, and playing the town uses about 1.9 GB of graphics memory, down from 6.9 GB.
The renderer underneath runs on Vulkan and Direct3D 12. Its device layer is derived from the Godot Engine’s MIT-licensed source, which our credits page lists along with the other libraries we build on.
