When I said a Dungeon Editor needs to be accessible and easy to use, I meant just that: the
Dungeon Editor. I'm not talking about all the modding abilities that come through writing custom code.
If you want hobbyist designers to be able to
create dungeons (not mods), you need a visual Dungeon Editor that is capable of constructing all the game's basic mechanics: the map layout, doors, switches, alcoves, monsters, pads, torches, items, etc. I linked to
DSB earlier, this works exactly the same way. The editor has a GUI for building all the basics, and you don't need to write any code. But if you want to add new assets or do some custom puzzles or whatever, that's when you need to write code. It is the best of both worlds for all levels of designer/coder, and hundreds of other games have editors that work the same way.
You can't expect hobbyist designers to root around in code to build a basic dungeon. It would frankly be nuts to code a dungeon by hand. Yes, I appreciate the LoG team did that, but they didn't have the time or resources to build an editor, so it was the most cost effective solution for them at the time. That doesn't mean it should be the approach for a future editing tool though. Even if the editor pumps out a bit of Lua for activating a door or whatever, this is much better than making the user have to write that code.
Without a visual editor, it will limit who can make dungeons, and therefore it will make the modding scene for LoG so exclusive as to be unattractive to most hobbyists.
Generally speaking, designers have a visual mindset and work best with visual tools, they aren't so good at coding. It's the whole left brain/right brain thing. Programmers who say programming is easy for anyone simply don't appreciate that different people think in different ways: what's easy for some, is devilishly hard for others.
If you force designers to have to code, you are massively restricting their creative output. And that's the death knell for your modding community.
petri wrote:Creating complex puzzles with a graphical system would be a huge mess and you would be ultimately limited to the logical building blocks we provide (e.g. timers, delays, counters and whatnot). Once you can place the walls and dungeon objects with a GUI, you only need a very limited amount of Lua code to implement the remaining logic for puzzles.
E.g. opening a door should be as simple as writing:
treasuryDoor:open()
^^^ Are you saying that the editor won't even link a switch to a door without coding? Every editor since the beginning of time allows that, I'm not really sure why you wouldn' build it more intuitively? Have you checked out the DSB and RTC editors? They do all this stuff in the visual editor, there's no need for the designer to write any code for basic mechanics. In fact, even really complex stuff can be done in the GUIs of those tools.
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TL;DR
Visual, easy to use tools = a vibrant and extensive dungeon building/modding community
Code based tools = a limited, exclusive modding community with few releases to enjoy
