PyGTK track editor idea

[thelusiv]

I've been doing some PyGTK programming lately, and I've found it's fairly easy to set up a pretty good GUI using it with Glade to design the interfaces. It is pretty fast and ports to OS X and Windows very easily. There are bindings for Python to OpenGL as well as SDL, PyOpenGL and PyGame respectively. How's that for link saturation?

So what I propose is to set up a GUI around a sort of viewport that will basically have inside it the track editor we already have. The gui would have lots of buttons to do things easily, like for instance add objects, move and edit them, set track parameters, export tracks to in-game readable format, etc.

The "viewport" code could either consist of the C++ code we have for the track editor now, converted to Python, or it could be set up as an external C++ library that is used by Python. Python has bindings for lots of languages so this shouldn't be too hard. However it might make the code a little more managable to just convert to Python.

Farther down the road we could probably even write code to generate road models based on user-input dimensions, and perhaps even import them directly into the editor. Perhaps we could get some ideas on how to do this from the Java-based open source TORCS track editor that generates roads.

So, what do you guys think about Python and GTK? To me, the biggest advantage for Python is how easy it is to develop things quickly, and for GTK it's the cross-platform interface designer (Glade).