uWED

A level editor for a classic 2.5D game engine, built as a Unity Editor extension on Unity 6 LTS (6.3.1) with UI Toolkit (UXML/USS) — no IMGUI.

uWED started as a project to give the old Acknex3 engine a modern map editor. It's built generically enough that other formats can be added later rather than being locked to Acknex from the ground up — Acknex (WDL/WMP) is just the first one.

This README is for people working on the editor itself. A section for actual map-makers will get added once there's something worth documenting for them.

What it does

You edit level geometry — vertices, segments, regions, ways, objects — through a set of panels and per-object "Manipulator" popups. 2D editing works; 3D is in progress.

Longer term the goal is to run standalone, outside the Unity Editor, mainly to support an Acknex (WDL/WMP) format extension. That's why there's a hard line between UnityEditor-only code and portable runtime code — see below.

Requirements

Unity 6.3 LTS (or close enough). Nothing else beyond what's already vendored in ext/.

Layout

Runtime/   editor-independent code, has to stay UnityEditor-free — this includes Formats/
Editor/    UnityEditor-only code (Unity forces this to be top-level)
ext/       vendored third-party stuff, not part of uWED

Inside Runtime/:

• Core/ — the domain model (Vertex, Segment, Region, MapObject, Way, all off IndexedData), editor modes/drawers, map I/O interfaces, geometry helpers
• UI/ — the editor UI itself: the 2D view, the inspector, the Manipulator popups, the event bus, and the "Binder" classes that wire everything together
• Platform/ — interfaces like IFileDialogService, IMapPersistence, IUndoService, IPrefsProvider, plus Standalone/ implementations with no UnityEditor dependency
• Formats/ — map format loaders/writers (WMP for now). Was originally meant to be top-level, moved in here to get rid of an asmdef circular dependency
• Bootstrap/ — the standalone entry point

Editor/ has the UnityEditor-backed side of those Platform/ interfaces (EditorPrefsProvider, EditorFileDialogService, ...), the asset inspector stuff, and EditorEntryPoint, which is the actual EditorWindow that ties it all together.

There's also a uWED.Acknex/ folder living in-repo for now (own asmdefs already, not split into a separate package yet) — Acknex asset/template model, asset storage, and eventually the Acknex-specific manipulators and WDL format on top of WMP.

Full tree with current TODOs: uWED-FolderStructure.md.

A few rules the codebase follows

• Anything touching UnityEditor lives under Editor/, full stop — no matter how editor-y something in Runtime/ feels. Where that's not true yet, it's marked TODO(platform-abstraction), not worked around.
• Only EditorEntryPoint is allowed to construct the UnityEditor-backed implementations and wire them up.
• New interfaces/events should look like the ones already there (IPrefsProvider, BusEvent<T>) rather than inventing a new shape.
• No half-way folder structures — an explicit TODO beats a "temporary" compromise that sticks around.
• UI Toolkit event phase matters: bubble-phase handlers on children can eat events before a parent-level handler sees them, so system-level input goes on the capture phase.
• Domain reload destroys PreviewRenderUtility instances and code-created materials, even though the C# objects survive — needs an AssemblyReloadEvents hook.
• Fix layout in USS (e.g. height vs max-height), not with hardcoded pixels in code.
• UI elements get built once in the constructor and updated via Bind()/Set()/Clear() afterwards — some of this runs on every mouse-move, so no rebuilding.
• The object-type Manipulators should all expose the same method shapes — no picking and choosing which methods a given one has.

Where things stand

• Domain model, EditorEventBus, and the Manipulator window base are done.
• VertexManipulator is finished. SegmentManipulator works for what's confirmed so far — a second name/texture slot has UI but isn't wired up yet.
• Still in progress: Region/Way/Object manipulators, the 3D mode, and moving the remaining EditorPrefs calls behind Platform/ interfaces.
• The reusable ComboBoxField control is a separate piece under ext/GenericComboBoxField/. WDL/Acknex support is underway in uWED.Acknex/ but the format loader and Acknex-specific manipulators aren't built yet.

Contributing

• Comments and any .md docs are in English, describe the code as it is (not how it got there), kept short.
• Target Unity 6.3 LTS.
• No EditorPrefs/UnityEditor calls outside Editor/ — go through Platform/.

License

CC BY-NC 4.0 — see LICENSE.md.