Mordante asked me to summarize some design goals arrived at in a
recent IRC discussion of enhancing the map file format to
contain static objects.
By "static objects" I mean three different kinds of things:
* Text labels associated with a hex
* Named locations or areas (hexes or sets of hexes) that can be
referred to by name from scenario WML.
* Scenery or item images.
There are two main goals associated with these features:
A) What *can* be edited visually *should* be, in the map editor,
in order to reduce the complexity of (the quasi-procedural part of)
scenario WML.
B) Scenario WML should never have to speak numeric coordinates; it
should always be possible to reference named locations instead,
with the name-to-hex(es) mapping carried in the map file itself.
These design goals enable the following meta-goals:
I) As much of the complexity of scenario design as possible should be
moved from hand-crafted WML to representations that can be
visually edited, to simplify the design task.
II) Cases where editing scenario WML or its map in ways that can cause
them to fall out of sync should be eliminated. Where they can't
be eliminated, they should be detectable by automated checking.
Note: I don't think it's required that we be able to place entire
events or active items in the map. As long as the map editor can
handle representative images and location tags -- the parts that
are actually visual - that's sufficient.
On the other hand, I think it *is* important that all the
static-object annotations associated with a map live in its .map file.
If they're separated from the map data, editing them and keeping
the map and annotation parts in sync will get messy and attract bugs.
The roadmap needs to look like this:
1. Design an enhancement to the map file format that allows it to
contain annotations for the three kinds of static objects.
2. Make the map editor able to display and edit these annotations.
3. Enhance the WML engine so that scenario WML can aee the placed
labels, scenery/item images, and named locations.
--
<a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/";>Eric S. Raymond</a>
Rapists just *love* unarmed women. And the politicians who disarm them.
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