On 21 February 2010 10:44, Mark de Wever <ko...@xs4all.nl> wrote: > Can you please tell me what you exactly want to do in the editor and > what not. also responding to: > <Ivanovic> personally i would love to see a list of *all* the stuff that you > want in our "editor" (yes, i leave 'map' out of the name by purpose!) > <Ivanovic> then we can add what the editor (the map editor) already has to do > these days, since it is in fact more than mere "place tile at ABC"
I hope I can accurately summarise what we have so far. What user tasks are currently possible in the editor: 1) creating or editing a map by drawing terrain and other means, 2) placing starting positions. That's pretty much it. Most of the features of the editor are sub-items of 1 -- brushes, copy/paste, random map generation and all. 2) is very close to 1) in how the data files look (it's also in the map_data string), but logically I'd say it' separate. Maybe the lighting settings previewer could be considered a separate task, but it's a minor thing that doesn't affect what's written in the map files anyway. What we would like to add to the editor: 3) defining, editing named map areas for use in scenario WML, 4) placing map labels, 5) placing scenery items, 6) placing sound sources, 7) placing units, 8) setting initial village ownership. Item 3 is the most important one, as it will allow scenario makers to do all the others with a named area and some WML in the scenario. However, the items listed later have (can have) a strong visual aspect to them that would be very useful to have directly available in a GUI tool. For instance it will be very helpful to be able to place labels and make sure they look good without having to launch the game, same with scenery items. Sound sources could have a colored overlay to indicate their area of effect, etc. I'm actually not yet fully convinced about units, because I fear that feature would add a significant amount of complexity, and I think this part should be delayed. Initial village ownership could be a reasonable counterpart for setting the starting positions. The critical question for inclusion in the editor seems to be: "does it have anything other than a location that can be displayed in a helpful and meaningful way?". Also, some of us strongly feel that it is important to try to avoid having yet another tool for this, and to avoid having files that are edited both by hand and by a GUI tool. I agree wholeheartedly with that. It already takes three programs to work on a scenario (map editor, text editor, game), adding more tools to be used all the time won't help. By extension, adding more separate files to be managed won't help either, so everything edited by the GUI tool should end up in one file, and all the rest should be in the scenario file. -- ilor _______________________________________________ Wesnoth-dev mailing list Wesnoth-dev@gna.org https://mail.gna.org/listinfo/wesnoth-dev
