Re: [Adonthell-devel] Re: Map editor progress

[Enrico Kochon]

Hi Kai,

keep up the good work. A long time has passed since I sniffed a little
air of adonthell. Since then I lurked on the list, doing nothing else
than passivly reading (and even not all mails - sorry if I missed some
point in this mail). There is obviously progress and I hope its speed
could even be improved. 
Thus, here are my 2 cents just as comments concerning the map-editor:
- if the target group of the editor are programmers, there is nothing
wrong with it. However, if you plan to release it to the average
non-programmer, the concept of different entitytypes could be to
complicated. Why do you want such a high customizability?
- there are several applications which provide good samples of tag-based
filtering. Unfortunately, the most of them are webapplications. They are
not so easy to implement in a clientapplication. Keep things simple is
my advice. For instance what about a Widgets containing clickable text
as text and the filtered Objectbrowser? After a click the corresponding
text gets colored and the filtering is applied to the objectlist. Of
course should the tag-categories for all objects be prebuilt if a
built-in object set is used (which I would appreciate).

Best regards,
Enrico


Am Montag, den 15.06.2009, 00:04 +0200 schrieb 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
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