Working on the level editor I realized I’d really like my window size to match the phone format which means there won’t be enough space to fit the editing tools, such as entity list & properties, tile picker etc.

I could open a second window to render the editor stuff using the same renderer as the game and IMGUI is great but I already have some “imgui-style” widgets of my own and feel like mixing them together could lead to some hard to fix problems.

So I decided to use Cocoa, the native macOS UI framework. I’ll make a few floating panels independent of the main window. Clean separation, less trouble.

Starting with a simple entity list:

Grid view for selecting map tiles:

And a very early version of an entity property panel:

(Fields are generated dynamically for each entity type based on the property metadata).

Still a lot of work ahead to put it all together and wire it into the editor system, but already looking much better than my previous attempts.