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wheybags / freeablo

[ARCHIVED] Modern reimplementation of the Diablo 1 game engine
GNU General Public License v3.0
2.16k stars 192 forks source link

level editor #41

Open wheybags opened 10 years ago

mewmew commented 10 years ago

Tiled has more or less become the defacto map editor for open source games with isometric maps. It uses the TMX file format to represent 2D maps, which includes information about tilesets, and optionally objects and other metadata.

Adding support for TMX maps would allow freeablo to facilitate already mature tools such as the Tilted map editor. I think that creating a level editor from scratch should be seen as a last resort.

Flare is a great example of an open source game which uses TMX maps. Here's an example map and its tileset:

wheybags commented 10 years ago

For pure map editing this might be quite good, but I'd be concerned about a few things. Firstly, freeablo will support scripting, so the level editor will have to support adding scripts to the level. Also, the editor will have to support diablo image file formats as well, which I can't are happening with this. On 24 Aug 2014 01:19, "Robin Eklind" notifications@github.com wrote:

Tiled http://www.mapeditor.org/ has more or less become the defacto map editor for open source games with isometric maps. It uses the TMX file format https://github.com/bjorn/tiled/wiki/TMX-Map-Format to represent 2D maps, which includes information about tilesets, and optionally objects and other metadata.

Adding support for TMX maps would allow freeablo to facilitate already mature tools such as the Tilted map editor. I think that creating a level editor from scratch should be seen as a last resort.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub https://github.com/wheybags/freeablo/issues/41#issuecomment-53171752.

mewmew commented 10 years ago

Firstly, freeablo will support scripting, so the level editor will have to support adding scripts to the level.

The maps, tilesets, tile within tilesets, layers and objects of TMX maps can contain properties which allow arbitrary data to be stored. Flare uses this to support sound effects, tool tips, custom values used by the engine, and the embedding of submaps within maps. An example is given in averguard_academy.tmx:

<property name="intermap" value="maps/averguard_atrium.txt,9,57"/>

One could play with the idea of adding the path to a Python or LUA script in one of those property fields. This should be sufficient for adding scripting support as far as I can tell.

Also, the editor will have to support diablo image file formats as well, which I can't are happening with this.

Point taken. If this would later be determined to be the only thing holding us back from using Tiled, I would suggest forking it and adding support for rendering CEL and CL2 images. This would allow us to take advantage of the countless of hours put into developing Tiled.

wheybags commented 10 years ago

Hmm, properties would be a good enough solution for this I think. Does tiled support extensions? CEL support could be added via an extension if it does, and I thin it would probably need some other freeablo-specific stuff added too. It would be nice to do all that in an extension instead of a fork.

On Sun, Aug 24, 2014 at 1:31 PM, Robin Eklind notifications@github.com wrote:

Firstly, freeablo will support scripting, so the level editor will have to support adding scripts to the level.

The maps, tilesets, tile within tilesets, layers and objects of TMX maps can contain properties https://github.com/bjorn/tiled/wiki/TMX-Map-Format#property which allow arbitrary data to be stored. Flare uses this to support sound effects, tool tips, custom values used by the engine, and the embedding of submaps within maps. An example is given in averguard_academy.tmx https://github.com/clintbellanger/flare-game/blob/master/tiled/averguard/averguard_academy.tmx#L350 :

One could play with the idea of adding the path to a Python or LUA script in one of those property fields. This should be sufficient for adding scripting support as far as I can tell.

Also, the editor will have to support diablo image file formats as well, which I can't are happening with this.

Point taken. If this would later be determined to be the only thing holding us back from using Tiled, I would suggest forking it and adding support for rendering CEL and CL2 images. This would allow us to take advantage of the countless of hours put into developing Tiled.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub https://github.com/wheybags/freeablo/issues/41#issuecomment-53191019.

mewmew commented 10 years ago

It does have support for plugins, but I'm not sure exactly what their capabilities are. Definitely worth investigating.

wheybags commented 10 years ago

If you wanted to investigate it, that would be much appreciated... :3

On Sun, Aug 24, 2014 at 3:37 PM, Robin Eklind notifications@github.com wrote:

It does have support for plugins, but I'm not sure exactly what their capabilities are. Definitely worth investigating.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub https://github.com/wheybags/freeablo/issues/41#issuecomment-53195383.