Well, that's easier said than done, of course. On Linux systems (which is what I develop on, and use), all that stuff is typically already installed so it's not that big of a deal. I don't use Windows so figuring out how to make a single .EXE out of this stuff requires a much bigger force of effort for me to launch that environment somewhere. :)

That said, that is something that I'd like to have happen, and I was hoping to get that done by 0.5.0. (Of course, I was also hoping to get 0.5.0 out before Book 2 was released, which didn't happen. Perhaps this weekend, when I'll be out of town without access to a comp that runs Eschalon well?) So we'll see.

Edit: Oh, and before anyone asks: yes, I am quite likely to have a go at retrofitting the app to work on Book 2 as well, though I want to play at least one full runthrough of the game before I start digging into the game files, so it'll probably be at least a few weeks before I even start looking into that.

do try, please, Python, your editor and me dont work together, how much i try it, always get some error and whatnot, and i dont like installing alot of to me unknown stuff just for one game.

but a mapeditor would add alot of extra lifeforce to the game after i have completed it, since there seems to be alot of unused space ingame.

I am, unfortunately, encountering the same "specified module could not be found" problem. Although, I've never had a good track record with python - I was determined to get it to work, and this is really discouraging. I've gone through every one of the packages listed, and __init__.py is there, but I'm still getting the stop error.

Okay, better late than never, right? When you can tear yourself away from playing Book II for awhile, you may be interested in the 0.5.0 release of the map and character editor (for Book I only, at the moment), available at http://apocalyptech.com/eschalon/

tgz (Linux/UNIX/Mac?/Other) - http://apocalyptech.com/eschalon/dist/e ... 5.0.tar.gz
EXE (Windows) - http://apocalyptech.com/eschalon/dist/e ... _setup.exe

The Character Editor itself is basically unchanged from 0.4.2 (except for the enhanced packaging for Windows folks). The Map Editor, however, has seen a lot of improvements which I think go a long way to making it a halfway decent app - specifically the ability to actually "draw" and "erase" things on the map, and have many of the graphic elements do what you'd expect, rather than having to manually plug things in one square at a time. Rather than enumerate the individual changes here, I'll just say that basically everything in this release was focused on that goal.

One thing to note is that the GUI interface to the drawing functions is, IMO, subpar and nonintuitive. I hope it doesn't cause anyone too much grief, and I'm open to suggestions as to how to make it better. Right now I haven't taken the time to update the website with documentation for the new features, but I should have that up in a day or two. Definitely let me know if you can think of a better way to present all those options to a user.

One final word on this: the Windows build is still pretty new, and while it seems solid on my Windows VMs (and a few testers have reported that it works great for them too), definitely let me know if anything goes awry with that.

Enjoy; hope somebody finds it useful!

I've been poking at extending this for book II, but then I realized I'm probably violating license.txt to do it (with respect, at least, to opening the maps and graphics files in datapak), so I guess I won't do that.

Yeah, I was planning on emailing BW about the map editor at some point (though I figured I'd wait for the immediate Book II flurry to die down a bit before bothering him). Adapting the Character Editor portion for Book II should be fine, though; I've already got the format mapped out, and I'm just trying to figure out whether I want to integrate the Book II stuff in with the existing app or fork it off into its own codebase.

Though I have nowhere near much in the way of the technical background on this issue, my best guess is that you may want to seriously think about going the latter route, as I suspect it'll avoid some issues that an 'all-in-one' character/map editor app might face.

Oh yeah, for sure. There's so much in common, though, that it's difficult to tear myself away from the idea of having a combined base. (You know, common attributes in the base class, subclasses for Book1 and Book2, etc...) I change my mind about it every five minutes or so. :)

Shared. think how much it will save you for Book III, and in not having to cut and paste gui improvements.

"write it once, good. write it twice, meh. write it thrice, I'm a bad bad programmer."

Or mabye a perfectionist...

Errr, I mean to admonish cutting and pasting code, not to discourage scrapping code and writing it again (presumably with the benefit of more experience)

edit: I do not mean "admonish" as "blame someone around here." The phrase is something I say to myself when coding and seeing myself writing a similar-but-for-one-line function somewhere. As soon as I'm tempted to write a third function, I know it's time to combine the first two with a parameter.

I, myself, have often been 'taken to task' under the accusation of being a "perfectionist". But I've always seen 'perfectionism' as being a positive and good character trait, at least for artists . . . even an admirable one. There's just too much half-a'd stuff out there. 'Perfectionism' is good, man. It's good.

(Note: Not that I think Bernie was implying that it's bad; I took his post to mean that he thinks 'perfectionism' is good and admirable, that obsessing over the code and the game interface and so on and so forth is not bad at all but rather a good thing.)

(I'm sure Bernie will correct me if I'm mistaken. )

(EDIT: How come Silverkitty's post claims she (he?) is online, while her (his?) name is not listed at the bottom of the screen? Silverkitty was "online" both before and after I posted, yet Silverkitty's name was not listed at the bottom of the screen either before or after I posted. Is this a common issue, with these forums? I've noticed this many times, actually.)

I'm male, which I mention mostly so you don't keep doubling the pronouns

At the bottom of the screen "users browsing THIS forum" means "and the last action we have on record for them is looking at the Eschalon: Book I->Eschalon Book I forum" - so I'm often "online" but looking at different parts of the overall site.

Ahh... I've never noticed that distinction before. It appears you're right, since I went back to the Board Index and saw quite a different list indeed.

And . . . sorry for guessing that you were female. It's sometimes hard to tell, oh well. Also . . . well, there aren't many females on gaming forums, and one always wants more, whether one is male or female.

All forums should be like the Witcher forum, I think, and note on your post whether you're male or female (if you've so indicated).

They do it with a Greek symbol.

Too bad this forum doesn't have such a feature.

Not being a programmer, it's hard to understand everything going on behind the scenes and properly relate. I do understand the value (in time/convenience) of resuing code. However, I also understand that if the Book II editor is specifically coded for Book II, it'll likely be more stable, efficient, faster, etc. I certainly won't comlain with whatever decision xolotl makes... he's doing a service to the community on his own time (presumably ) which is commendable.

As a writer (albiet an amateurish-wannabe-but-hopefully-up-and-coming writer), I've (more than once) scrapped an entire work and re-wrote it from scratch. By doing so, even if I ended up writing a lot of the same stuff, I was able to incorporate new ideas that presented themselves, making what I re-wrote a better piece. I'm a big fan of that "fresh outlook," even if it is a more time consuming way of doing things.

That's what I was getting at with the whole "perfectionist" comment. There wasn't a particular counter-point hidden in it.