Resuable Tools

Someone in the forums decided to make a GUI editor for their engine a couple of days ago. It got me wondering about something that I’ve been wondering since I was working on GWEN.

Why isn’t there a GUI editor that has plugins that let you export to ‘your’ format. One editor, many formats. When you think about it most GUI systems are the same. They’re a bunch of controls that sit on and next to each other. A few things might differ like texture format, or font size/positioning, support for docking or control anchoring. But the majority is the same. Panels, buttons, text inputs, checkboxes, dropdowns, sliders, drag zones.

It seems like people are re-coding the whole thing over and over – when they only really need to code the exporter.