Basically, these are the most often used formats, and all of them have non-binary formats (they can be opened via Notepad). So, editing them is not so difficult, but making a program to edit them is more complex.
I decided that making a full 3D viewport was overkill for me because it doesn’t even make sense.
The first tool that was done is the Loading Editor; this tool provides features to create screenshots on the map and add loading screens along with icons and descriptions. It was the simplest tool, but I had to learn the basics of Python and Qt.
After a brief pause, I started to work on the Soundevent Editor. A soundevent is a description of how sound files should play, where, and how loud the volume should be.
But then I realized that my programming skills weren’t enough to handle the KV3 format. As I said, it was my first programming experience, so making a custom parser for an in-house format was difficult.
At the same time, progress on Sanctum continued, and Rainless and I started making the content. Often, we needed a huge number of variations for the models, and importing all of them into the engine was slow… That was the time when AssetGroupMaker was born. To speed up the process of importing similar assets, I created this tool.
For instance, you have 200 models with different variations, but all their settings are the same except for a few. You create one file, which should be the reference for all others. The program will look at this reference file and update all those 199 files in real time. But if you have a few different models, you can add them to an ignore list. Also, you can filter input files by extension.