Official map editor question

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Revenariant
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Official map editor question

Post by Revenariant »

Just so I know I've got this straight, what exactly is the situation with the official map editor?

1) xolotl's map editor with a few changes and updates,

2) xolotl's map editor with a lot of changes such as resources from the previous games or,

3) A entirely different editor developed by BW.

Which is it?
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xolotl
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Re: Official map editor question

Post by xolotl »

The "officially endorsed" editor is going to be "my" editor, yeah, and as support for more modding is added to Book III, the editor will be extended to support those things too. So we'll see what happens with all that.

In terms of game assets, we'll see how that goes. Right now the editor doesn't actually redistribute any game assets - it just reads what's available from the game datapak. Once Book III supports mods adding GUI elements, we'll have to figure out the best way of doing that. If I had to guess, I'd bet that we'd just end up with "graphics packs" or something, distributed here in the forums, which people could load into the editor if they want.
mbrowne
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Re: Official map editor question

Post by mbrowne »

xolotl wrote:Right now the editor doesn't actually redistribute any game assets - it just reads what's available from the game datapak. Once Book III supports mods adding GUI elements, we'll have to figure out the best way of doing that. If I had to guess, I'd bet that we'd just end up with "graphics packs" or something, distributed here in the forums, which people could load into the editor if they want.
Since it reads from the datapak, shouldn't we be able to open the original maps?
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xolotl
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Re: Official map editor question

Post by xolotl »

mbrowne wrote:Since it reads from the datapak, shouldn't we be able to open the original maps?
Yeah - I actually just responded in the other thread, but to summarize here: a future version of the editor (probably 1.1.0) will probably let you load a map from the datapak. At the moment there's nothing actually-useful you can do with them (at least in terms of modding), so it hadn't yet been a priority to add that feature.
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xolotl
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Re: Official map editor question

Post by xolotl »

Although actually, since the editor is being elevated to "officially endorsed" status, I suppose there's probably no reason why we couldn't actually distribute graphic assets in the editor itself, once the game engine becomes capable of taking advantage of that. I'll be sure to bring that up with BW once those balls get officially rolling.

I'd always envisioned that people would basically just have access to the "base" graphic files and could edit+distribute at will, and the editor would just have an area to say "I'm using this set of graphics files for my mod" (which more realistically would just be a part of a larger "I'm working on this mod" feature). And the modder would just be able to edit the graphics tiles in whatever graphic editor they want. There might certainly be some utility in having some kind of graphic-library function in there, were you could mix and match tilesets from larger libraries.

Anyway, as I say, we'll see how things go.
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