3D map editor

[Coldfusionstorm]

Thread fork of https://forum.megaglest.org/index.php?topic=8297.0

Allright, il say this first, im no programmer .....And the next sentence may come out arrogant..

But.

Wouldnt making a (3d) Visual Editor be as easy as copy pasting one text into another text and make sure the text made sense?, i mean seriously?, all the code you need are allready in there?. all you need to do is make it work together.

Redering?, Done in the game allready.
Editing the map files...Done allready.

The thing that needs coding... a different interface for buttons, and if you use the current interface its just making the current buttons do something different. (just got a idea from that).

A different verson of MG,/ build, that contains megaglest code game files ect,ect. and the map editor code, And a filler tech tree. The techtrees only purpose is to make the engine recognise calls to functions. Then in this special build, the game intercepts the calls (or rather the coder have modified the calls to call map editor functions instead of unit calls, like movement ect,ect).

Am i insane?, especially my idea i just got, this seems extremely feasible, and easy to get to work.

This is a very serious question, Mg really needs a visual editor i just recently made awesome map, only to see the egdes of the map ingame not  being wrong and ALL my work being lost in the process and leaving me with the question....how the hell do i deal with this egde thing.

If the coders(silnarm,Softcoder,Titi,Treba). Thinks im exstremly ignortant or overlooks serious c++ knowgelde to speak about this, just tell me, and i will shutup, it just seems to me right now, that we are missing something that would be so easy, and feasible to do.

[Coldfusionstorm]

I mean editing maps in 3d. my bad for being unclear!

Fixed original post.

[Coldfusionstorm]

The point of the tech tree was for the engine to have files it needs before it will start rendering. Then you have useless units but the game will render, Then instead of writing new GUI calls for the map editor functions just "rewire" code to call the map editor fucntions

that way you get around alot of the work with a new editor.

[treba]

i can promise you that, even if everything works fine, it's still gonna be a lot of work.

i'm mean, i personally already took ages to bring my editor this far and it's still not ready yet. sb like softcoder might be able to do it in a shorter time, but looking at the latest svn, i would consider his actual work much more important (like a better pathfinder, which affects all users and especially the servers).

[titi_son]

Isn't this a feature request? why isn't this posted in the feature requests board?

and i like the idea also 

[tomreyn]

Yes, this should have been in feature requests, since that's what it is. I've moved and retitled it now.

It seems quite unlikely that someone will take on it, but that's been said before, and I generally consider the feature requests forum more a pool of ideas than a list of what actually needs to be implemented. This helps a lot dealing with frustrations which would otherwise come up. ;-)

[will]

... the best way to achieve this is to add a 'go into edit map mode' as a choice in the game main menu.

This would start a game which happened to have no units and paused and with additional commands to edit landscape, save and rename, and final finesse being change tileset on the fly (so you can see how it looks)

This would mean a few booleans in some if-statements (like suppressing victory check, not drawing hud nor resources, not allowing unpause) and then new code for editing map e.g. palette.

I am not offering to do this.  I'm just saying how to sanely go about it.

Added: the kind of thing I used to play with:

[Omega]

... the best way to achieve this is to add a 'go into edit map mode' as a choice in the game main menu.

This would start a game which happened to have no units and paused and with additional commands to edit landscape, save and rename, and final finesse being change tileset on the fly (so you can see how it looks)

This would mean a few booleans in some if-statements (like suppressing victory check, not drawing hud nor resources, not allowing unpause) and then new code for editing map e.g. palette.

I am not offering to do this.  I'm just saying how to sanely go about it.

Added: the kind of thing I used to play with:

I'd much rather see a new menu option from the main menu ("Map editor") which would ask you to choose a techtree (for the resources) and tileset. The reason being that starting an actual game to edit a map (which would presumably have to be a pre-existing map) seems to be a bit counterproductive versus replicating a new game (without even creating players at all).

[will]

That's what I meant; when I said "game" main menu, it was meaning the main MG program, and not bundled as yet another tool

sorry it was ambiguous