Map editor dump part 2
Okay the next day I wrote about the tile pane. Here you’ll be able to select tiles, and create new tile sets. Oh by the way a tile is essentially any image or section of an image… let’s just say map element. I call it tile because of the old way of tile based games. In fact one of the goals is to be able to emulate tile based map editing, so you can still work that way if you wish. I actually wrote this yesterday, even though I’m posting this on the 20th. I’m dating each piece to see the changes.
Here’s the text:
November 19th, 2008:
The tile pane will consist of a list box of tiles which are image elements or other tile chunks. beside each list element there will be a small thumbnail, and the currently selected item will have it displayed above the list. It will have these options, Import Tileset, Export Tileset, beside the actual selected tile will be a new tile button, an import (over current tile) button, and a delete tile button. If a tile is not selected then and import or delete is selected it should return a message that you need to select a tile, however, it will be coded in such a way as there is always something selected. If you hit import or delete, a dialog box will popup and ask if you’re sure. There will be zoom in and out buttons, so that you can zoom in to the tile currently selected. If new is hit at any time, the create new tile window will come up. It will ask for a filename (probably use a file selector box), to load the image from, then will allow you to select what part of the image to use. Three buttons in the image selection is, whole image, this will simply import the whole image as the tile. By tile size, will load in all tiles from an image based on tile size and image size, which will create seperate tiles for each. This is so you can still do standard tile based maps if you want. default will be based on display size (window/screen)… It will act like normal tile based access and you need simply click on the tile you wish to import. Drag+Select will allow you to “freehand” drag a rectangle over the part of the image you wish to import. Once you’ve hit ok, the tile will be in the tile list. Import will replace a tile set with another. If there’s not enough tiles in the tileset for the map, those tiles will be removed from the map. Export will save a tileset seperately. This is different than saving a map which includes tileset info. You should be able to create a new tileset within the current map. So you could have seperate tilesets if you wish.
End of Text.
I’ve drastically “retooled” the tile creation window. Simplified it in places and made it possibly easier for the user. I won’t really go into detail here, but this was the idea of the tile pane along with the tile selection window. In the near future I plan to put up some mockups.
Keith