Welcome to the Sandbox Editor Programming section!
Here we go over the resources and knowledge that are necessary to work with Sandbox Editor code and to develop Editor Plugins that are fully integrated with the Sandbox and its most advanced systems. Do be aware that the 'Sandbox Editor' is often referred to as just the 'Sandbox' - hence the terms Sandbox Editor and Sandbox are completely interchangeable.
We are looking forward to contributions from the CRYENGINE community to strengthen and supplement the tools that are offered with CRYENGINE.
Sandbox relies primarily on Qt and in particular QWidgets. Please get familiar with this library as all the new UI code must be made using Qt.
If you are not familiar with this, then there are plenty of very well documented online resources. You can also download the Sandbox Editor source code to help to debug certain issues.
From CRYENGINE 5.0 onwards, the Sandbox has been partially rewritten using Qt and its architecture has been restructured towards a more modern and modular Editor while supporting extensions for the various Editor and Engine plugins.
This was an extremely ambitious goal, so we decided to focus on the core of the Sandbox whilst still allowing certain modules within the Sandbox to remain unchanged. Some of these modules still use some MFC UI components (MFC was used in pre-CRYENGINE 5.0 versions of the Engine), hence MFC only remains in modules that haven't yet been converted to Qt.
So the main takeaway is that even though new modules should be made according to the rules laid out in these documentation pages, you may still encounter code that does not follow all of the rules and still uses MFC components and parts of the old architecture. The Sandbox code is still going through a major transition and while the interfaces should remain stable the core code is still subject to major changes as we continue the conversion effort. When operating in "legacy" modules make sure that you only fix bugs as necessary and in general avoid copy-pasting code as legacy modules no longer follow our new conventions.
All of the following are MUST-READ documents for every Programmer that deals with Tools code. These guidelines need to be followed for any contribution to the main Sandbox code or the official plugins. We recommend that 3rd party developers also follow these guidelines to ensure quality and consistency in the code and user experience.
In order to program in the Sandbox you must generate the projects using the CMake option OPTION_SANDBOX. It is also useful to have the OPTION_SAMPLEPLUGIN turned on if you want to use this as a template to base your plugin on.
For more information on CMake, please refer here: CMake 5.5.2
If you are developing for the Sandbox, then the chances are you are trying to do one of the following common tasks. If so, follow the process below.
In general, new asset types and associated tools should go into one separate plugin. In this case you only need to focus on editing the content of your asset type, the Sandbox should provide the rest of the functionality such as file management, source control and integration with the Asset Browser.
EditorQt: It is the core of the application itself but still contains some legacy code.
EditorInterface: All the public abstract interfaces provided by the Editor. These will be replicated to Python/C#.
EditorCommon (Plugins/EditorCommon):
Reusable components and utilities for Editor programming. If you are making something reusable, then write your code there and not in your plugin.
Implementation of some interfaces. Some systems are fully implemented in EditorCommon, but their instantiation and management are done in the Sandbox.
Sandbox (EditorQt):
The executable application itself. Implements and/or instantiates all the systems from the interface and loads all the plugins.
Sandbox is host to all the level editor code and logic.
No other package should have a dependency towards the Sandbox.
Sandbox still depends on MFC for the time being.