   Editor creation: in-game?
  Hi everybody...I'm just wandering if you prefer for game development an external editor or if you dream of an-inner engine editor!something that has the appeareance of an editor, but it is INSIDE the engine: just to create the scene inside the environment (and see the results istantaneously)!   
  That depends on the type of game. For games like RTS's, or games which come with an editor, it makes sense to use that editor.   ;  Good...I bet the greatest problem is the multi-platform development: to get the real feel of the final result you have to be in-game and on-platform!   ;  There are definitely some nice aspects to having an 'in-engine' editor in terms of iteration time but as you say it is a problem for multi-platform development. Personally I prefer a separate editor that uses the game systems to provide quick and accurate previews within the editor but that keeps code only required by the editor out of the game runtime code. This makes porting to other platforms (particularly consoles) easier and generally gives you more efficient game code. Quick iteration/previewing on target is also very useful though and the editor and game systems should be built to support that as effectively as possible.   ;  seriously, please, do not embed your editor within your game codereasons why.1. your game code will be littered with #defines for when its running the editor. making it hard to edit, maintain and extend.2. while the game, and the editor should share  rendering  code (to allow WYSIWYG editing). the rest of the code is pretty much application specific. by making your renderer a DLL (or something similar) and getting your editor to load it, will let you use the same editor framework for whatever renderer your working with.3. splitting the editor, and the game, means that you can generate game content using whatever you want, without being tied to a specific editor. it also means you can use the editor for multiple game engines too. the key is the data pipeline which integrates the two. this can be as complex, or as simple as you want (or need). being able to do all sorts of crazy processing on your data before it hits the game can be very very useful, and something which is difficult to achieve if the editor  is  the game.  4. you can still do "live update" of data from the editor to the game as its running, by carefully implementing the content pipeline, and allowing ad-hoc updates.5. Itll make your game executable a shitload smaller if you split things out. you dont need to deliver your entire toolchain to the end user6. means you can use whatever you want in your toolchain, avoiding legal issues of distributing various bits of code under different licenses. 7. one of the biggest reasons is that editor data, and game data, typically are  very  different, and have  very  different applications. your mesh data at runtime doesn't care about the name of the file it was originally stored in, who edited it, or what format it was in, but the toolchain might. being able to have different data descriptions at pack/editor time is a very huge win, and will make writing your editor and toolchain a lot easier than having to deal with runtime data at edit time.;  Although it is nice to have a separate toolbox (like editor, converter and other utilities), I can't agree with all your reasons, Matt_D:1. you don't have to have a lot of confusing #defines if you organize your code properly (editor can be just another layer to your engine code)2. you hardly ever share only the rendering system across the projects...what about the geometry, materials, textures, core subsystems, like terrain, vegetation and so on?3. you can still have a functionality in your game to load both: deployed/optimized game data and free resource loading (extremely useful for debugging purposes)5. editor layer might be stored in a separate DLL file6. you can still use other tools to manipulate your data7. as said before - editor can be just an overlayGenerally, whether to use or not build-in editor strongly depends on the game complexity you're working at. I found very useful to have in-game layout (GUI objects) editor!   