MapView becoming an editor - suggestions please!

Hi fellows,
i m pretty sure almost everybody here knows what MapView is, or at least i hope. Since the most important things about viewing maps already works i m starting to do more and more stuff according to the modifying functionality.

Now i´d like to know how you think it should be.

My thougts:

-It should be easy
-It should be possible to do the same thing to many tiles very fast. (like painting a terrain type over the existing map, press and mouse and drag.)

Since an editor is quite a big thing i would really appreciate if you don´t come up with ideas that aren´t very basic at the start. What i hope to get in this thread is good ideas and comments on how basic things should be done, how to access tools and such things. The details will follow. Once it´s possible to chainge terrain types i´ll switch to forests, rivers, and all this stuff. I think you can guess how this all goes.

Have fun letting your mind flow, i´ll have fun to read your suggestions for sure.

Ready, steady....type!

hehe:

Hey Gr3yHound!

I think the Civilization II editor was very good. Do you have Civ 2 or shall I post some screenshots? It was easy, fast, and had useful tools like Coastline Protect, Autoscroll during paint, and a Grab function. I think it's a good example.

Good luck! It's quite a big thing indeed

Hey Junuxx,
would be great if you could supply some material on that. If you believe it or not, i have never ever touches a Civ editor yet.

I sent you a msg

TBear2520

Hi Gr3yHound!

Okay, here we go. All the functions from the Civ 2 editor in 7 screenies

I put my resolution on 800x600 to reduce image size though.

1. I think layout is pretty good. Menus, terrain controls, world map and status/info screen are all pretty essential in making a really powerful editor, methinks.


2. Okay.. So I've carefully drawn a delicate continent. But I don't want to be all careful when placing the terrain. As you see I've taken a BIG brush that draws 5x5 desert tiles at a time.


3. ...But I selected "Coastline Protect" so only the land tiles were turned to desert. Believe me, this is an extremely useful function!


4. This screen shows both the file menu options and the use of the "Autoscroll during paint" option. I just kept dragging my brush to the side of the screen to draw that line of glaciers, didn't have to recenter. It's a nice touch, not absolutely essential, but still.


5. Yeah. Both hotkeys and menu options to zoom to different levels. Handy.


6. The map menu also has some useful options. While I think it would be a lot of (double) work to add a random map generator*, creating a blank map is easy of course. 'World shape' controls wrapping and 'analyze map'... Well, you'll see.


7. I've placed some starting locations and hit 'analyze map'. Have mercy on the Romans .. ^_^


That's quite closely all there is to know about the Civ 2 map editor that I like so much. It's windowed and very quick and functional. I don't expect you to completely imitate it, just hope you can use it as a guideline.

* I was thinking, maybe when both our projects are finished, we could combine them somehow? Either distribute them together or really integrate them. Tell me what you think

Junuxx

thank you very muchos grande!
very nice!!!!!!!!!!
I´ll try to merge the best options of it and use em.
What i really like is this "Only replace 1 kind of type feature". I think ´ll make something like checkboxes to define what terrains should be overdrawn.

Generating random resources like the civ III editor, would be nice. I hate placing resources one by one. And a bit of randomness adds to replayability.

I'd love to have some randomness options too in two different types. One that randmonises resources all over the map and one option that randomises resources only in places that have no resources (ie doesn't overwrite the resources you have placed manually, if you get my meaning).

Yes! You should do the MapView editor exactly like the Civ 2 Editor! I think the Civ 2 map maker is the best map maker in ANY game because of it's simple and easy to use interface. But I shouldn't think you'd have to do a fully 3D map in the main window or anything considering the computers of most of the people here can't handle the ingame editor, including my poor overworked Duron 1300. Perhaps make some basic art tiles that convey the idea of what the tile will be ingame. Like an overlay to indicate hills and underneth have grassland/plains/whatever.

Instead of an overlay for hills, use code.

From what I've seen in the map customization forum, there are three defining characteristics of a map tile: elevation, base terrain, and terrain features. Elevation is Mountain, Hill, flat, Coast, and Ocean. Base terrain is Plains, Grassland, etc. And terrain features are things like Flood Plains, Forest, and what-not.

So, to show elevation, use code: "^" = hill. "^^" = Mountain. "~" = coast. "~~" = Ocean.

Then you can use more code to represent terrain overlays. (Sorry, I can't think of any off the top of my head.)

Thus, with this all clustered to the left of the tile, the bulk of the tile (which can be color-coded) is open for cities/ruins/barbarian huts (center) and military unit stack (right).

The idea is to keep it simple. All the fancy graphics will show up when the game is loaded. We just want to be able to edit more than two tiles per minute. (Okay, an exaggeration, but it took me two hours to edit 300 tiles, and I wasn't trying to match some map...)

hey, been away a while. was busy coding.
First i want to thank you for all the suggestions so far.

i´ll see how i can satisfy you with my first try that will come soon.
Since i experimented a lot i couldn´t do much according to the civ2 liklyness yet but from my pov the editor is already very powerfull and fast.

Stay tuned