Dungeon Editor Progress

[Darklord]

Please can you give us any screens?
I´m really interested in the design.

I was vaguely hoping we'd see some for today's Friday Blog, ah well next Friday maybe!

Daniel.

[Curunir]

If we're begging for screens itt, I'm all for it

[MadGiraffe]

I wonder how i could place 4 x 99 Berserkers into my Bards Tale Dungeon...mhmmmm...

That's easy! 4x99 Berserkers fills only about 39% of a default size LoG level

So that's...just a little over 1000!? Woa. And that's 'default'.

[InfiniteState]

Great to hear ab out the progress on this. I havent looked forward to doing level building in a long time.

[pabrams]

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.

I don't disagree with you. RTCs GUI has a lot of problems and could have done with some serious streamlining. But that wasn't the point I was making: I was simply trying to turn people onto the idea that you *can* build dungeons using a GUI, you don't *need* to script anything if the editor gives you enough building blocks in the first place.

Yeah... actually I agree with you. RTC is a great example as a proof of concept. As you say, it just needed some serious streamlining. I wasn't really trying to dispute your point, but add to it. The strength of RTC is the small number of predefined objects that can be combined and configured to produce infinitely complex results; this is just as useful in text-based configuration as it is in a gui, in my opinion.

[pabrams]

]I never said it was impossible.

What I said was that it wouldn't be any easier to understand/work with than code, considering all the options it needs to support. Sure, people may think GUIs are more convenient than code, but provide enough options, and that's no longer true at all.

I agree with this, sort of (it's possible to make the gui easier than the text-based configuration, but this would be a much bigger undertaking by far - not worth the trouble, in my opinion), except I think it's important to clarify what is meant by 'code', in this case. This 'code' is not programming code, it's configuration code. To me, all that really means is that you're doing a lot of typing and reading instead of clicking and looking, and unless the gui is done very well, the typing is, for me at least, a lot less time consuming than the clicking. If you want to call text-based configuration 'code', then fine, but this is not programming, and it's not even scripting. People are much more afraid of it than they should be.

If you also provide an app that will render your configuration visually, all the better. But the part where you replace most of the typing with clicking... that's very difficult to do well.

[lastsaves]

Todo:
- How to select single entity if a square contains multiple entities?

What about right-click which shows all of these entities and then choose one by left-click...
But, I don't know whether there aren't some other functions mapped to right-click...
Just a thought...

[Dynosaulo]

How to select single entity if a square contains multiple entities?

How about making it so a dropdown menu shows whenever you click on a square that has more than one entity?

[Isaac]

How to select single entity if a square contains multiple entities?

Fallout had an interesting UI method. Perhaps you could use a similar idea. A prolonged left-click is used to open a context menu; where vertical mouse movement is used to select the menu option, and the release of the left mouse button then confirms that selection.



** And I see that my post is similar to what Dynosaulo has posted above.

[krayzkrok]

How to select single entity if a square contains multiple entities?

How about making it so a dropdown menu shows whenever you click on a square that has more than one entity?

Or even better, so you don't have to hold buttons / right click, just have a permanent "Entity type" box somewhere on the screen which shows all entities in that square, any of which can be clicked on to select if needed. That way you can scroll your cursor / move your mouse around the screen and see all the entities in a particular square quickly and efficiently.