Work continues on the map editor upgrade. It's been a long overhaul and now I'm finally seeing some light at the end of the tunnel, because I'm getting close to parity. Which is a fancy way of saying I'm nearly back to where I started, but with the new renderer.
Despite how long it's taken this is honestly great news. I've managed to cut out so, SO much old code that was weighing the map editor down, and now the main display is totally free of the old imagelist approach. I'm finally near the point where I can add in support for filters and overlays, and then get to cool stuff like plane filtering and plane master support.
Another big item on the to-do list for this map editor project is to replace the "pop palette", the object list over on the left, with something much better. Right now it doesn't give a lot of information about which pop is which or how it's been edited from the base state, and that should be possible to change. If I switch that stuff over to use the new display code, then I can harness the power of maptext.
514 bug work continues of course. There's an issue I need to look into with particles that use icons, and I have a fix already in the can for the next maintenance release. So I'll probably get another maintenance release out next week sometime, depending on how the bug situation shapes up.
I want to give a huge thanks to everyone who stepped up to support BYOND last month. We did better than usual on the fundometer. So thanks to all of you, and also to the Patrons and supporters on SubscribeStar whose steady support means an awful lot.
Now that October is here, it's gonna be harder than ever to resist the call of donuts. But there's good cheese and apple cider instead. The heat is on (for now) in my house and it's looking like fall is ready to take over. Get moving on your Halloween games!
ID:2720716
 Oct 1 2021, 9:45 am
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Oct 1 2021, 9:55 am
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Kozuma3
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Lummox JR wrote:
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There's a feature I've been meaning to suggest for the map editor for a long time. I wonder if now would be the time. Short summary just in case it's not feasible and I can get shot down early: Format painter. Copy the formatting of one atoms' vars and "paint" it onto other atoms with that var. Makes it so you don't have to right click and edit lots of different datums with the same vars to use the same values (or defining lots of subtypes with that var set appropriately).
Also apologies if it's not cool to mention it here. | |
I've long thought that it would be nice for the map editor to be more like the scene/level editors that the current most popular game engines have. Most importantly, an Inspector/Properties panel that's always visible and automatically populates with the variables of the currently selected object, or the shared variables of multiple selected objects. Transform handles to move/rotate/scale things by axis. Object parenting and an instance hierarchy/list of all instances on the map, not just the variations list of a specific type, to make selecting and renaming easier. Play-in-editor with limited hot-patching or live-editing variables in the inspector...
If you've ever tried anything like Unity, Unreal, Godot, etc. (there are so many more examples), they all have had this style of world editor basically since the beginning, and everyone using them (most game developers) is familiar with them. There's also the differences between scenes/levels in other game engines vs BYOND maps... having a tilemap should be optional, negative coordinates should be allowed. Maps shouldn't have edges at all, so different maps shouldn't have to be the same size, and they should be loaded/unloaded at runtime. These differences all involve the very core of the design of the engine (besides the code-less networking which is mainly what people care about), but any step in the right direction is worth celebrating, which upgrading the editor renderer definitely is. That said, the client's tile map renderer isn't exactly the most powerful either. There's a hard limit of 71x71 tiles, with frame drops at the limit already (i.e. below 60fps, don't forget that games these days are expected to run at least 60fps, if not much higher); worse when there's more on screen than just tiles. It's not a lot of tiles if you consider games like Terraria where the tiles are tiny, or Minecraft where the blocks are not only multiple polygons each, but also stretch hundreds of blocks out. | |
A properties sidebar would be nice, although I doubt it'll be in the nearish future with all the other stuff I want to throw in. Yet I'll see what I can do.
I've spent so long getting the map editor actually working after switching renderers that I don't want to derail completely either. | |