[Adonthell-devel] Re: Map editor progress

[Kai Sterker]

On Sun, Jun 7, 2009 at 7:20 PM, Kai Sterker<address@hidden> wrote:

>> * Only objects already on the map can be picked and placed elsewhere.
>
> Object browser will be the next feature.

A proof-of-concept object browser is in place. But it's not in any
shape to be committed, so here's just a screenshot. For some reason,
all thumbnails are upside-down and otherwise screwed up too. Also,
there is no functionality to it, other than displaying all the
entities already present on the map.


There are a couple of things for discussion, since I only have vague
ideas at best.

First, the actual adding of new objects to the map. Due to the
internal map structure, map objects are not added to the map directly.
Instead an "entity" is created from them first, which can then be
placed on the map. There are different types of entities (anonymous,
shared and unique), which is what the second column in the entity
browser displays. Shared and unique entities have an id assigned to
them (which can be seen under the file name in the first column for
the two characters). The difference between shared and unique entities
is that former reference the same map object instance, whereas latter
have distinct map object instances. The question is, how do map
objects (somewhere on the file system) get to be an entity that can
show up in the entity browser? I don't really want to pick them one by
one with a standard file selector. Merging them into the entity
selector is the best I can come up with, possibly marking them as
external (and using a grayscale thumbnail). One should be able to
specify additional directories that are scanned for map objects. Once
an external map object is dragged onto the map, an anonymous entity is
created, which can later be changed. (Also, the files should get
copied to the game data directory, if they aren't there already).
Sounds like a plan, or does somebody have other suggestions?

Second the tag-based filtering. I have no clue yet how to present the
tags to the user. I believe those will be an important part of the
editor, as it will allow to narrow down the object list to those
objects required for the current scene. So I'd like to keep them
visible all the time. They should also get plenty of room, so that
plenty of tags can be displayed at once, so that switching between
different objects using tags becomes actually convenient. If you have
to scroll for the right tags first, it's already too awkward. Any
ideas here would be appreciated.

Kai

mapedit.jpg
Description: JPEG image