I have made a lot of progress with my engine and now it is time to get started on the editor. I originally wanted to go with wxWidgets for the interface but couldn't get it to compile for x64 in Visual Studio 2012. It compiled just fine as 32-bit and the 64-bit pre-built binaries are for 2010 and previous versions of Visual Studio.

I looked at qt next but there is also no 64-bit version available for Visual Studio 2012. I then decided to just use MFC but quickly realized that the learning curve is huge and I would rather spend my time getting the editor working in conjunction with the engine.

After some research I came across WPF and Windows Forms. I tinkered with it and creating an interface literally took a few minutes, but I only know C++ and learning C# just to program the inner workings of the editor would have an even worse learning curve than MFC for me. (My engine is in C++ and I have no clue how it would even be able to interact with a C# application as well)

Having wxWidgets 64-built pre-built binaries for VS2012 would be a dream come true. Instructions on how to compile it as such would be just a good. I am open to any other advice.

Thanks in advance

64-bit pre-built binaries of Qt for VS2012 is on its way

Thanks so much for the replies.

I did consider just using VS2010 in order to use 64-bit wxWidgets, but in the end it made no sense for me to downgrade my tools to accommodate one library. VS2012 has some great features for graphics programmers and this was a major reason I upgraded to VS2012 to begin with.

After going through so much trouble trying to get wxWidgets to compile 64-bit in VS2012, I didn't even think about compiling Qt. It is great to hear that it will compile just fine and that the binaries will soon be released.

Thanks again.

If you choose to compile Qt yourself there are two things that can greatly reduce the compile time:

1. Build Qt on all available cores: By default Qt will only be built on one core. If you have a multi-core CPU, that's annoying. In order to build it on all cores, open up the file <QTDIR>/mkspecs/win32-msvc2012/qmake.conf and find the line starting with QMAKE_CFLAGS. Add "/MP" (no quotes) to the end of the line and save the file (you should do this before running configure).

2. Don't build the examples and demos (you can always compile those that you need later): Open the file <QTDIR>/projects.pro and find the following text:

} else:isEqual(PROJECT, examples) {
     SUBDIRS += examples
} else:isEqual(PROJECT, demos) {
    SUBDIRS += demos
}

change them to

else:isEqual(PROJECT, examples) {
#       SUBDIRS += examples
    } else:isEqual(PROJECT, demos) {
#       SUBDIRS += demos
    }

With those two changes it takes only about 20 minutes to compile Qt on my computer (including webkit). I do have a powerful computer, though (i7-2700K 4 cores/8 threads 3.5 GHz and 32 GB RAM).

There is an "All in one bundle" GTK+ 64 bit binaries for windows.

I use the 32 bit version in vs2012 and it works great!

You can also retrieve window's hwnd with gdk_win32_drawable_get_handle() ..

What kind of game are you making? I would highly recommend against building your own editor if you're interested in actually finishing your game. If you're trying to make a 2D tile game, http://www.mapeditor.org/. It doesn't have some features I would really like to see (like some sort of game object database that you can just search through and add objects to the maps) but it's pretty feature complete in terms of authoring up tile based levels. If you're not making a 2D tile based game, then I would highly recommend searching for alternatives before embarking on this long and arduous quest.

The only people I could possibly even think of allowing a pass and say "Go for it man, make your own editor", are those who are working with a team of programmers and can afford to dedicate one person (or more) to work solely on the editor or those who are very experienced in making games and are already comfortable doing all of the GUI programming.