Dungeon Editor Progress

Talk about creating Grimrock 1 levels and mods here. Warning: forum contains spoilers!
User avatar
gambit37
Posts: 218
Joined: Fri Mar 02, 2012 3:40 pm

Re: Dungeon Editor Progress

Post by gambit37 »

Thels wrote:If you want to make an interesting dungeon, you really need to bring in some advanced logic for your switches and doors. I can't see how that's done in GUI without making the GUI more complex than the scripting.
You really should check out the RTC and DSB editors. They both provide building blocks within a GUI that can be strung together to make all sorts of interesting puzzles and gameplay mechanics. DSB is ultimately more flexible than RTC as DSB also has a built in Lua scripting engine, so you can customise it beyond what the GUI offers. RTC on the other hand has no scripting, but it has a lot of special ACTIONS thta can be invoked through dungeon mechanics for doing cool stuff such as interacting with the players experience gains, etc.

Looks like I need to do a video of these editors so people can see how they work. You'll soon understand that with a decent GUI, you can indeed build interesting dungeons without needing to write code.
User avatar
takis76
Posts: 78
Joined: Wed Apr 04, 2012 4:01 pm
Location: Athens - Greece

Re: Dungeon Editor Progress

Post by takis76 »

In my level editor , I will not need any script , everything will be visual from GUI. Even complex puzzles.
User avatar
HaunterV
Posts: 676
Joined: Mon Apr 16, 2012 9:54 pm
Location: Barrie, Ontario, Canada

Re: Dungeon Editor Progress

Post by HaunterV »

takis76 wrote:In my level editor , I will not need any script , everything will be visual from GUI. Even complex puzzles.
if wishes were fishes. :P
Grimrock Community 'FrankenDungeon 2012. Submit your entry now!: http://tinyurl.com/cnupr7h
SUBMIT YOUR ASSETS! Community Asset Pack (C.A.P.): http://tinyurl.com/bqvykrp
Behold! The HeroQuest Revival!: http://tinyurl.com/cu52ksc
User avatar
Patch
Posts: 97
Joined: Tue Apr 17, 2012 11:19 pm
Location: Seattle, WA

Re: Dungeon Editor Progress

Post by Patch »

takis76 wrote:In my level editor , I will not need any script , everything will be visual from GUI. Even complex puzzles.
There is no spoon?
User avatar
Curunir
Posts: 332
Joined: Fri Mar 30, 2012 11:19 pm

Re: Dungeon Editor Progress

Post by Curunir »

Admittedly, even ZDoom required extensive scripting for its puzzles.
I just hope the "put object X in niche" puzzles don't require too much coding, so that I can give hints in Russian, transliterated in Latin letters, so you have to go look it up on google before you know what item you need :lol:
User avatar
Patch
Posts: 97
Joined: Tue Apr 17, 2012 11:19 pm
Location: Seattle, WA

Re: Dungeon Editor Progress

Post by Patch »

Curunir wrote:Admittedly, even ZDoom required extensive scripting for its puzzles.
I just hope the "put object X in niche" puzzles don't require too much coding, so that I can give hints in Russian, transliterated in Latin letters, so you have to go look it up on google before you know what item you need :lol:
Games that make you go outside of the game to solve their puzzles are simply poorly designed games.

I'd suggest if you do something like that, you have a scroll/page that gives you letter translations that the player can find.
User avatar
Dynosaulo
Posts: 15
Joined: Sun Apr 22, 2012 6:24 pm
Location: Brazil

Re: Dungeon Editor Progress

Post by Dynosaulo »

Patch wrote:Games that make you go outside of the game to solve their puzzles are simply poorly designed games.
Oh, you should play "Ouverture Facile".
But yeah, I know what you mean.
User avatar
gambit37
Posts: 218
Joined: Fri Mar 02, 2012 3:40 pm

Re: Dungeon Editor Progress

Post by gambit37 »

Indeed. Player knowledge is quite different from character knowledge. Keep puzzles internally consistent within the game world.
pabrams
Posts: 12
Joined: Fri May 04, 2012 12:28 am

Re: Dungeon Editor Progress

Post by pabrams »

gambit37 wrote:
Thels wrote:If you want to make an interesting dungeon, you really need to bring in some advanced logic for your switches and doors. I can't see how that's done in GUI without making the GUI more complex than the scripting.
You really should check out the RTC and DSB editors. They both provide building blocks within a GUI that can be strung together to make all sorts of interesting puzzles and gameplay mechanics. DSB is ultimately more flexible than RTC as DSB also has a built in Lua scripting engine, so you can customise it beyond what the GUI offers. RTC on the other hand has no scripting, but it has a lot of special ACTIONS thta can be invoked through dungeon mechanics for doing cool stuff such as interacting with the players experience gains, etc.
I played with RTC for a few months creating my own dungeons, and I often found myself wanting to work with the configuration code in a nice syntax editor, instead of doing everything with the Gui. Importing objects one by one and associating them to each other using the Gui was unbearably tedious. It was possible to work with the files generated by the editor, but that was problematic. To me, Xml-based configuration as an alternative or supplement to using the GUI is a no-brainer.
pabrams
Posts: 12
Joined: Fri May 04, 2012 12:28 am

Re: Dungeon Editor Progress

Post by pabrams »

Thels wrote:If you want to make an interesting dungeon, you really need to bring in some advanced logic for your switches and doors. I can't see how that's done in GUI without making the GUI more complex than the scripting.
As someone else mentioned, RTC did it without requiring any scripting, by encapsulating various required behaviors in predefined classes of objects. For example, it had something called a repeater. Another thing called a relay. These objects could be combined in various configurations to produce a large number of custom effects in custom dungeons, all without any scripting. Unfortunately, the gui itself was unwieldy, in my opinion.
Curunir wrote: I just hope the "put object X in niche" puzzles don't require too much coding
This kind of thing shouldn't require any coding. You're just configuring properties. You have a niche, and you give the niche a trigger, and you specify which object fires the trigger; then you specify a type of action and a target of that action. All the coding is done, you just provide the details. Of course, that doesn't mean you use a Gui. It takes a long time to write a good Gui for this kind of thing; I'm not sure most people appreciate just how difficult it would be to provide a Gui for editing all the details that's actually useful, for example provides very rich copy/paste capabilities (RTC's seemed broken). I'd be much happier waiting a lot less time for xml-based configuration, or whatever they already have backing the game's content (not coding/scripting, I hope, just configuration... maybe that's not how they originally set it up, though, in which case I think they are going to have a hard time with the editor), combined with a way to visualize the result without running the game.
Last edited by pabrams on Fri May 04, 2012 1:17 am, edited 1 time in total.
Post Reply