Reworking the editor

[CruzR]

I think the map editor could use some improvements, so I started out with planning some features I'd like to see.
I sorted them by the approximated effort it'll take to implement them:

Rather easy to implement:

• Zooming via Mousewheel Done.
• Moving the build-date from the window title to the 'About' menu Done.
• Moving the filepath from the footbar to the window title Done.
• Removing unnecessary information from the footbar Done.
• Adding the current coords of the brush to the footbar Done.
• Highlighting the cells affected by the current brush
• Improving the help file (perhaps display a webpage or text file?) or at least expand that
• Since we have a gradient that is meant for hills, make the regular height change apply that height to the entire radius specified, instead of making a slightly less efficient gradient too
• It would also be nice to see more hotkeys
• Perhaps create a "new map" menu for when the program is opened or the new map option selected, which would let you choose the number of players, map size, etc BEFORE you start editing
• As well, change the menu screens like "resize" to have an "ok" button, rather than having to close the subwindow and wonder if you did it right
• The undo/redo function cannot properly undo/redo map resizes, etc, that should be fixed.

Medium effort to implement:

• Make it possible to create Scenarios, Factions, Techtrees and Tilesets with the editor
• Make it possible to load and save them as Addons

High effort to implement:

• Editing in 3D mode

What do you think about these ideas?

EDIT: Just for clarification, I don't expect the gae devs to do this, I'm shure they are busy with the engine. I rather thought I'd just implement as many features as I can and provide branches they can merge into their master branch if they want to.

UPDATE: Added improvements proposed by Omega to the list.

[will]

A very good idea!

I would advocate making it from scratch using the map rendering and camera control from the game itself to make the editor.

[Omega]

Medium effort to implement:

• Make it possible to create Scenarios, Factions, Techtrees and Tilesets with the editor

I think you may be underestimating the sheer difficulty of mods, as creating them requires several advanced programs that have had years of development. Best to save this for maps, me thinks.

EDIT: Just for clarification, I don't expect the gae devs to do this, I'm shure they are busy with the engine. I rather thought I'd just implement as many features as I can and provide branches they can merge into their master branch if they want to.

You're more than welcome to, and have my whole support.

What do you think about these ideas?

Firstly, I agree with all your smaller changes, particularly the addition of coordinates in the footer. Other things to consider would be:

• Improving the help file (perhaps display a webpage or text file?) or at least expand that
• Since we have a gradient that is meant for hills, make the regular height change apply that height to the entire radius specified, instead of making a slightly less efficient gradient too
• It would also be nice to see more hotkeys
• Perhaps create a "new map" menu for when the program is opened or the new map option selected, which would let you choose the number of players, map size, etc BEFORE you start editing
• As well, change the menu screens like "resize" to have an "ok" button, rather than having to close the subwindow and wonder if you did it right
• The undo/redo function cannot properly undo/redo map resizes, etc, that should be fixed.

And of course, Will has a great idea, though it would be incredibly more difficult (but is effectively your 3D editor).

[Psychedelic_hands]

Sounds awesome! Good luck man! Hopefully it can get some more people making maps.

Just one suggestion, but I sure this isn't just a map editor issue....:
Making the editor load object from the tilesets, instead of just having set type of objects... which might lead to this someday:
https://forum.megaglest.org/index.php?topic=7356.0

[Yggdrasil]

Any contribution is always welcome. Especially when it is about polishing stuff.

Rather easy to implement:

• Zooming via Mousewheel Done.
• Highlighting the cells affected by the current brush
• Moving the build-date from the window title to the 'About' menu
• Moving the filepath from the footbar to the window title
• Removing unnecessary information from the footbar
• Adding the current coords of the brush to the footbar

Sounds good. I merged your branch mousewheel to master. Thanks for your work.

Medium effort to implement:

• Make it possible to create Scenarios, Factions, Techtrees and Tilesets with the editor
• Make it possible to load and save them as Addons

That sounds more like a different program. The map editor is for maps. I'm not against a program which does all these things. It's probably better to start from scratch than extending the current map editor. Some tools which tried to do something similar but never really got finished:

silnarm made GAM some years ago:
https://forum.megaglest.org/index.php?topic=4531.0

treba started working on a scenario editor:
https://forum.megaglest.org/index.php?topic=5586.0

[Psychedelic_hands]

I'm kinda against a program that :
    "Makes it possible to create Scenarios, Factions, Techtrees and Tilesets with the editor"

It seems like a waste of time to me, xml isn't that difficult of a language. Especially since new features are added to the game all the time, plus then they would have to be added to the editor as well  .

[CruzR]

Allright, I'm almost done with some new changes, but there are some design issues I'm still not sure about, so I'll just ask here what to do:

• Should the coord values range from 0-63 or 1-64 for a map of the size 64*64?
• What if the cursor is outside the map? Should the coords just be continued there (like: X: -15, Y: 68)?

I'm kinda against a program that :
    "Makes it possible to create Scenarios, Factions, Techtrees and Tilesets with the editor"

It seems like a waste of time to me, xml isn't that difficult of a language. Especially since new features are added to the game all the time, plus then they would have to be added to the editor as well  .

The idea behind this was to have one tool with which you can change all aspects of the game, similar to the warcraft III world editor, because I think that's one of the reasons why war III was that successful.

_{Edit by Omega: Merged double post.}

[silnarm]

Should the coord values range from 0-63 or 1-64 for a map of the size 64*64?

0-63. Of note, the right most and bottom most rows are only used for height data, the 'tiles' don't actually exist in game.

What if the cursor is outside the map? Should the coords just be continued there (like: X: -15, Y: 68)?

It would certainly be nice if you could use the edges of a brush from 'off the map'

I'm kinda against a program that :
    "Makes it possible to create Scenarios, Factions, Techtrees and Tilesets with the editor"

It seems like a waste of time to me, xml isn't that difficult of a language. Especially since new features are added to the game all the time, plus then they would have to be added to the editor as well  .

The idea behind this was to have one tool with which you can change all aspects of the game, similar to the warcraft III world editor, because I think that's one of the reasons why war III was that successful.

I have similar ideas, but dislike the idea of doing it all in C++, the GAM and the more recent g3dhack and associated projects are a starting point (not so much the GAM, but the g3dhack solution has all sorts of stuff in it now, including much of the shared lib and the 'prototype' classes from the game, with some work done towards being able to display it all in a PropertyGrid.  Not sure if C# interests you at all, but if so clone the g3dhack repo and take a look.

[Yggdrasil]

I merged your changes to master. Thank you again for your work.

[Psychedelic_hands]

The idea behind this was to have one tool with which you can change all aspects of the game, similar to the warcraft III world editor, because I think that's one of the reasons why war III was that successful.

Well, we already have tools for those things.... So my suggestion would to at least leave them for last  ...

[Psychedelic_hands]

This might not be cause of any of your changes, but in the 0.4 beta 3 I notice that the Show Map feature isn't working. No errors come up or anything, just it never finishes loading.
Can anyone comfirm that it's not working for them either?

[CruzR]

Allright, I looked into this, and it seems this isn't a bug in the editor, but in gae. I'll open a bug report ...