First of all, congrats for that fantastic game. I'm very excited by the opportunity to create new dungeons/adventures. I myself have a development background so I'll keep it straight to the point with a few explanations for the motivation behind each feature. I guess most of it shouldn't be too surprising
Note that I'd be happy if you didn't release a full level editor GUI, but just provided access to official tools to extract/compress .dat files, change the startup dungeon and an sdk with a couple docs/tutorials. I'm definitely not scared of working with lua scripts to create a dungeon. But I guess it's out of the question, so assuming a full editor:
Assets customization
Importing new dungeon tilesets including:
- wall sets
- decorations 3d models ( like statues )
- interactive mechanisms ( 3d models on which you can attach click triggers )
- monsters ( new art, but also customize monster statistics, select predefined type of attacks )
- items ( new 3d art + inventory icon, customize item statistics.. )
- ability to create custom shaders and assign them to any of the assets above
- sounds/music
Custom rendering
Support for basic outdoors rendering:
- skybox (could be a 3d model that is moved every frame at the camera's position. If not possible, a static 3d model located at the level's center, but with a custom shader that disables fogging/shadowing/lighting)
- changing ambient lighting parameters
- creating a sky/sun light
- changing fog parameters (that way we can fade to gray/blue fog instead of black fog)
Note: most of what I ask above could probably be done with custom shaders too, so as long as you allow us to create custom shaders and assign them to assets, we could work around any limitations)
Custom geometry drawn in lua:
- ability to render custom geometry with lua calls, typically textured quads. This would allow to simulate things such as a water plane ( motivation: I have in mind a sewer level where the bottom of the ground is covered in mud ).
- render some quads to simulate some special effects like lightning/rain ( ex.: dungeon master 2 )
Custom GUI:
- ability to create a textured full-screen quad displayed over the top of the viewport
- ability to pause/resume typical gameplay when such quad is displayed
Motivation: simulation of simple cut scenes, or special points of interests ( ex.: inside a tavern ) like it was done in Ishar.
- ability to spawn some text and buttons on top of this screen
This can also be used to simulate simple NPC encounters. Ex.: you find a dying man, a picture shows up and a text explains that you can either save him or let him die, with two yes/no buttons at the bottom.
I'll complete this list when I find more ideas.
Thanks!
