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

[Kai Sterker]

On Mon, Jun 15, 2009 at 10:15 AM, Enrico
Kochon<address@hidden> wrote:

Hi Enrico,

thanks for the input :-).


> 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.

Valid point. While I would not want to change the way things are
coded, I think there are some assumptions we can make that will hide
the details from users not willing to understand the inner workings:

* Scenery objects are always anonymous entities.
* Items are always shared entities.
* Characters are always unique entities.

There is another group of objects (doors, switches and containers
mainly) that need to be unique too, but I guess in that case, people
will just have to read up on how to make a working door.

I haven't looked at that many game creation tools (mostly the Elder
Scrolls Construction Set so far), but I think it won't be possible to
make something simple enough to use it without consulting some
documentation first. I'll try to add some helpful tooltips ...


> - 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.

I probably would have made each tag a toggle button ... but I'm not
sure where in the GUI to show them and which layout to use.

> Of course should the tag-categories for all objects be prebuilt if a
> built-in object set is used (which I would appreciate).

Yes, that's a given. Tags will basically be precomputed from the
directory a map object sits in. I.e. if you have a map object
"map/ground/outside/grass/grass-tile-1.xml", it'll get the tags "map",
"ground", "outside" and "grass".

Kai