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The ProjectMan utility is the place where you’ll spend most of the time creating your game. We will now briefly describe this program. Run ProjectMan by clicking its icon in the Start menu or double click the “WME ProjectMan” icon on your desktop.
The basic interface is similar to most of the Windows programs. There is a menu bar, containing all the functions, and the toolbar, with icons for the most commonly used tasks.
Select the “File->Open…” command and open the “wme_demo.wpr” file (it’s located in your WME Development Kit folder in the “wme_demo” subfolder).
The window is now divided into four panes. The left pane contains global properties of your project.
Next there is the project tree pane. It shows the layout of your project, all the files and folders. You can browse the project tree in a way similar to the Windows Explorer. Most of the functions are available via the popup menu (right click the nodes of the project tree to display the popup menu).
At the right there is a preview pane. It shows a preview of the object currently selected in the project tree pane. It helps you to easily navigate through the project.
And the last pane at the bottom-right is the help/log pane. It displays either a short description of a selected property or a log of certain operations executed by the ProjectMan.
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ProjectMan doesn't use any database for storing the objects; everything you see in the project tree pane is actually a view of files and folders on your hard disk. |
You can use the ProjectMan for a wide variety of tasks but the most important ones are:
In the project tree view navigate to a folder, in which you want to create a new object. For example, if you want to add a new scene, select the “scenes” folder. Right-click the folder and a popup menu will show up. Select the “Add” item. Another menu will pop up, which contains a list of objects you can add. If you select one, a “Template selection” window will appear. Here you can select a template as a starting point of your new object. You can fill-in some of its properties and its name. After you click the “OK” button a new object is created.
You can also add new files into the project by importing existing files or folders. Use the “Import” command in the popup menu. The import command is usually used for importing graphics and sound files, while the WME’s native objects are created using the templates.
Editing the existing objects is very easy. Just right-click the object in the project tree pane and select an “Edit…” command. Alternatively you can simply double-click the objects. ProjectMan will then invoke an associated editor on the selected file. It uses the standard Windows file associations. It means that you can redefine the tools to suit your needs. For example, the scripts (*.script files) are by default opened in the Windows Notepad program. If you prefer another text editor, simply change the .script file association (using the Windows Explorer). From now on the ProjectMan will open the script files in the text editor of your choice.
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ProjectMan isn't meant to be a replacement of the Windows Explorer and some file operations are unavailable. That's why it provides an "Explore" command in the popup menu. If you right-click a folder in the project tree pane and select the "Explore" command, ProjectMan will open the folder in the Windows Explorer. |
If you need to test you game while developing it, you can run it directly from the ProjectMan. Select the “Project->Run game” command or click the “Run game” toolbar button.
Note that you don’t need to compile anything to run the game. The engine will operate directly on the files on your hard disk. You only compile the game when you are about to distribute it (also it’s useful to compile the game from time to time, because the compilation process checks all your scripts for syntactical errors).