from your original post, it sounds like your building a game (perhaps as a hobby), and are now working on a level editor.

just get something working as quickly and easily as possible. if possible, use third party tools and / or code to save work and time.

if you plan to release and include the editor, then you can worry about polishing it up.

a built in editor is nice. a stand alone generic editor in a linkable module is even nicer. you can just plop it into all your games, and they ALL have a built-in editor.

editors are basically just glorified paint programs (or 3d modeling programs for 3d level editors). draw the screen, left click = draw with current tool. click on buttons or menu picks or right click to change tools, save, etc.

Does picking a very-high level programming language helps with development of a custom level editor?

Even though my project is very small, the most I can do is creating GUI for the level editor. I wasn't able to implement the editing features I had in mind.

all you need is the ability to clear the screen, draw a tile, and draw text. the only GUI components most games need is a popup menu (doubles as message dialog), and a text entry dialog. everything else is usually some complex game specific custom screen (made simply by clearing the screen, drawing tiles, and drawing text).

its nice when the gui components of a game have a look and feel custom designed for the game.

so one of the first things i do is write menu() and getstring() routines for the game. the code is always the same, except for how they are displayed. that gives me ready to go gui components in the game for use with a built-in editor. my stand alone linkable 3d modeler and animation editor module uses generic menu() and getstring() routines from the low level game library used by the modeler and all the games.

at least it gives me an idea on what I should be doing, rather than what I could add to enhance the editing experience.

are you building games, or editors? Better a cool game with a rough editor than a rough game with a cool editor.

i heard of one guy who spent 3 years building the game engine and world editor, and then used the editor one time, for about 3 days, to build the game world.

Once you have the GUI elements you still basically have to create a mini version of your games' full on rendering.

I.e. for a 2d game you'd have to draw all the tiles in your game to a context in the window, just like the regular game, although it might be a significantly stripped down version of course.

Is it acceptable?

Throw away all code you have ever written in your entire life and start again from scratch.

That depends on what the level of acceptable is. In general, not even a little bit.

But the damage is done. Never do it again.

L. Spiro

Oh no! I wrote two different engines using the same method of graphics rendering for my editor and game. Is it acceptable?

It's not ideal, because you've almost certainly spent more time on it than you needed to, and because you now have two sets of code to maintain; any additional features you add will need to be added to both sets of code, and any bug-fixes will need to be applied to both sets of code. This means it takes more time to add new features, and increases the chance that you'll introduce small errors into one set of code.

However, I wouldn't consider this such an extreme problem as L. Spiro seems to be suggesting as long as it works for you, and in some (often simpler) cases it may even be useful to you if you want to display the graphics in the game and editor in different ways.