Dungeon Editor Progress

[SpiderFighter]

Without accessibility (GUI), the modding community will be completely restricted. Doesn't matter if writing a bit of LUA is the easiest thing in the world. People are not going to want to write the code to create basic dungeons.

I don't necessarily see this as a bad thing. When Duke 3D came out, the editor was so robust and easy to use, that literally hundreds of crappy one or two room "maps" were released within the first 48 hours. People didn't care if their map wass playable or not; they just wanted to show that they could create an empty sector with the teleporter tile flooded onto every floor, wall and ceiling, slap the end boss right at the player start point, upload it, and then challenge the world to "b347 mY m4p!!" (beat my map, for you non-leet speakers)
Adding the lua scripting will help eliminate some of that junk.

Not sure why this is a debate, I'm pretty sure it was already confirmed that they're developing a visual interface for the layout and scripting for events. Why are people whining at each other?

It has been implied that to make even the simplest door work, we'd need to write a function.

Ready? Here it is, straight from the code of the first map: "addPullChain." I'm not trying to be a smartass; I'm just trying to show you that it really *is* that simple. Don't count yourself out of the things you can achieve before you even get the chance to see whay you can do.


A general point to everyone and no one:
The bottom line is this: People are panicked and stressed when, as of yet, there is no reason to be. The thing hasn't even been released yet!! Let's wait to see what we've got first, and *then* start jumping on the devs. Just don't forget that it's FREE and it's a GENEROUS GIFT that they didn't have to release at all. Let's also not forget that the original game was entirely code. No GUI. At all! They are busting their butts creating something completely new for us to use. How about some gratitude instead of jumping all over them?

My 2 cents. And please, PLEASE note that I am not picking on any single individual in here. It's just that the whole vibe of this forum has gone from something positive to negative in a matter of days. If I were one of the original devs, I'd be wondering right now why I was even bothering.

[Darklord]

challenge the world to "b347 mY m4p!!" (beat my map, for you non-leet speakers)

I've always like description "Toddler Talk", to describe the babble those people come out with!

Daniel.

[Curunir]

I don't necessarily see this as a bad thing. When Duke 3D came out, the editor was so robust and easy to use, that literally hundreds of crappy one or two room "maps" were released within the first 48 hours.

If you think Grimrock has the average age or the sheer numbers of the Duke 3D player base, you must be mistaken. This sort of argument against accessibility is just silly.

[Thels]

I've got to agree with Curunir here, and not just because of the ages of the average Duke Nukem 3D and LoG players. If you reduce the number of maps being produced, that does not mean that you just prevented all the crappy maps and keep the good maps in. The ratio will remain the same or perhaps slightly worse.

Other than that, I agree with SpiderFighter.

[Ahmantti]

As for GUI>Scripting part, RTC, a dungeon master clone, had actually both. 1st you could make the dungeon with Notepad from a-z. or you could use a GUI editor, which actually made a scripted file according to the selections you did on the editor. Im sure a guy with enough time and resources can make a editor mod, that has predefined stuff like a dropdown menu for a simple pullopened door. or a pressureplate that asks which door where should i open, sir? and stump the code in there.
RTC-editor had stupid things because of the GUI-only approach, mostly for handling the puzzle mechanics depending of more than one thing, or timed stuff(you needed to place a function in one of the tiles, then open it, fiddle with the parameters and pointers, make countless other ones to fiddle more and the counters... meh). With direct script handling inside the GUI you can handle those with more speed and versatility.

Problem with predefined stuff is that its predefined. It does one thing, and thats never the one you want.

[Bees]

If you think Grimrock has the average age or the sheer numbers of the Duke 3D player base, you must be mistaken. This sort of argument against accessibility is just silly.

Duke 3D and Grimrock have more or less the same player base, they just grew up during the 15 intervening years.

Done:
- Initial planning
- Script editor
- Design for entity serialization in game readable format
- Integrated dungeon editor into game code base
- New IMGUI implementation
- Clean up global variables in code editor
- Map view
- Tool bar
- Selection tool
- Wall drawing tool
- Place new object tool
- Asset browser (with filtering by tags)
- Object inspector

Work in progress:
- Wappu!

Todo:
- imgui: single line text box
- Object inspector properties for all entities
- Assigning custom object identifiers for scripting, e.g. "treasuryDoor" instead of "iron_door_20_15_0" (need to handle duplicate identifiers gracefully)
- Clean up gui layout and panel graphics
- Entity serialization
- Load/Save dungeon
- Exporting and packaging all files of an user made dungeon into single file
- Add support for user made dungeons to New Game dialog
- Remove "$wallset" support from dungeon objects
- Consider adding new entity type, door frame?

You're a machine!

[Crashbanito]

Making maps and learning coding techniques. I would have jumped on this as a kid.

[Darklord]

Wow that is some hardcore work for one week Petri!

Are you sure you don't have an evil twin or something helping you out?

Daniel.

[Akatana]

maybe you can give us any screenshots from what you have done so far?

[Darklord]

Maybe on Friday!

Daniel.