So, I'm trying to set up some UIs with the editor, to make the job of previewing them nice and easy, but i'm coming into a problem - I can't seem to grab the controls via name in code. I can easily grab by index, but this leaves little maintainability when I want to add buttons or such later. Is this on purpose? Or am I missing something to do with the Names each control is given?

Assuming I'm not missing something, I plan to once again modify the base engine to support this, so a heads up or any advice there will also be appreciated n.n

Biggest usefulness is names - a close second would be an easier time loading a scene from a derived class, so as to put the code that sets up bindings with the content itself, as I'm trying to do as we speak. This could eventually go as far as making code-generation for the UIs and having users define partial classes - though that I see as being a long, long way off.

We had a much more verbose format in older versions of the Delta Engine and switched to a binary format (custom) in v0.9.x, later in v0.9.7 the BinaryData was used and it made a ton of code and maintaining UI controls a lot easier. However there were a lot of changes in controls, which did not go through the version numbering of scenes and some mistakes where made, so the mess is a bit bigger than it should have been.

Maybe some kind of mixed solution would be useful. Each class saves its data and if anything changes just some fields are not set, or one single control does not work anymore while the rest of the scenes loading still works fine. We should be able to improve the BinaryData system easily to accommodate this (btw: writing out into Xml data from there is also not very difficult, just a few methods would have to be overwritten, the rest of the logic can stay the same way).