What is Horus?
An IDE for Lite-C (and other)!


Why i´m doing this?
You surely noticed that the gamestudio community is nowadays small and tiny. So, creating a tool for it is much work for just a little circle of developers. That Horus became such a tool is fortune. I started the development of it because I want to do the following (in this priority):
1. Getting familiar with development lifecycle (sourcecode control of large scaled projects, time/resource-planning, software engineering, etc)
2. Dive into all aspects of Software Development (UI Design, SW-Architecture, Marketing, Deployment, etc)
3. Create a huge application for my portfolio (to say, the flagship) till my computer study ends
4. Creating a useful software which can be needed in practice


History
I´ve started the development of Horus (3rd generation) on 21st April last year. But the idea is older. On July 26th, 2009 I decided creating an editor. This 1st generation is just a simple text-editor, like windows editor, but with a multidocument-interface. The 2nd generation was a WinForms based, more advanced, editor (already with syntax highlighting and some coding-related features). But fast I reached the limitations of WinForms and developing it becomes a mess (mainly about the restricted possibilities of GUI-customization). With a heavy heart I cancelled the project. And then, April 2011, I started a new attempt – now with WPF. And this time I wanted to specialize it to Web-Development, because I was not happy with any Web-development IDE.
In Fall 2011 I saw, that this was the right decision. The editor was growing and getting better and better (for this reason you will find Web-related stuff in it).
On December 12th 2011 Timo Stark cancelled his liteEditor-Project, you may remember. His reason was too much work for a too small community. As I read his postings I got a flash of inspiration: gamestudio is the destiny of Horus. There so many reasons to build it for acknex:
- Serving a market niche: liteEditor – dead, AckStudio IDE – dead, 3DGS EasyScripter – dead. All the enthusiast editor-projects died before a useful release. I guess that DJBMASTER and Michael Schwarz had similar reasons for the cancellation of their projects like Timo. To me, it can not happen, because I never developed Horus for the community, I develop it just for myself . So Horus has the potential to get the world leading IDE for Lite-C development. SED is beatable…
- A finished Version is a realistic alternative to SED. I could need it myself to create games.
- It may help to keep 3DGS alive. With a new WED (if it comes) and a better script-editor, Acknex gets more attractive.
- The community has a greater choice of coding-IDE´s. I read that most users use other tools like Notepad++, Eclipse or something other with a Lite-C Highlighting. Some still using SED and one I saw uses liteEditor. All of them are not perfect. In every IDE there are missing features (like code completion for engine-symbols or its difficult to set up or something else)


My aims with Horus
It’s simple to say: Develop a good software application.
But what do you think is good software? What are the qualities? If you ask me, good software should be…
- …handy: I use software not for fun (beside games, of course), but to solve problems. So the software should serve possibilities to solve them.
- …steady: I REALLY dislike software where I have to be frightened that it can crash anytime and without warning.
- …stylish: I love sexy Software-UI. A cool looking app (especially dark themes) is a pleasure for my eyes and I tend to feel positive about the software.
- …comfortable: There have to be a good workflow.
With Horus I try to meet these requirements. Maybe it takes some time yet, but Horus is still a young bird…


Features of Horus
Now, to have a closer look, here are the features of it:

Key-Features:
- LiteC / HLSL Syntax Highlighting
- Intelligent Type Highlighting: Custom Types defined in your project will be recognized and highlighted
- Code-Completion: Suggestion of Engine- and custom symbols (defines, variables, functions and structs)
- Manual-Binding for Code-Completion: See the manual-content while typing the function name
- Custom Code-Folding: Group your code for a better organisation (like in C#)
- Code-Jumper
- Customizable User Interface (Docking Panels)
- Publish-Option to create exe

Additional Features:
- Multilingual User Interface
- Inline-To-Do
- Copy Declarations: Copy Prototypes and other Declarations to the clipboard
- Toggle Comments
- Engine-Command line in the Toolbar: change the command line options easily
- Engine Syntax-Check
- Go To Definition
- Editor-Split view
- Link to Source-Folder
- Custom Places in File Open/Save-Dialog
- Multiplayer-Run: start the engine twice (with server and client options) with one click




Puh… I think I said enough.
May screenshots put you over the edge…