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Looking for more efficient level editing

by Darian Hickman · in Artist Corner · 02/13/2007 (9:22 pm) · 4 replies

I've been producing a 2D RTS game called Village the Game for the past 4 months and have been surprised how time consuming it is to create a 64 by 64 tile map. Torque Game Builder has a pretty good interface for laying down tiles, but it doesn't seem to have the intelligence built into it that the Map Editor for Warcraft II has. Is there some feature that I missed where it will blanket the 64x64 map with a default tile like grass, then when I make a river tile it will update the tiles next to it to be mud transitioning to grass? We've created our own set of tiles but even with the tiles already created it takes a lot of time to lay them out.

Basically is there some feature, plugin, or macro to build intelligence into the map editing similar to the intelligence of the Warcraft II editor?

I ignored the lack of a rule based map editor for our demo because we're only building one map to show off, yet even this one map is taking a while. Creating or finding an intelligent level editor is going to become extremely important past finishing the demo.

--
Darian Hickman
http://www.villlagethegame.com
darian@villagethegame.com
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Associate David Higgins
DPHCoders.com
#1
02/13/2007 (10:52 pm)
@Darian, TGB has no 'intelligence' to speak of ... but you could code it into the Tile Map Editor -- given that you have TGB Pro -- I've done some work with Tile Layers, and with the Level Builders 'behind the scenes' code from the TorqueScript perspective (Tile Layer from the C++ side too) and I can say, it is more then possible to do ...

you could create a custom 'callback' in the tilelayer, for whenever the 'setTileData' (or whatever its called) method in C++ is called, which could then call a 'onSetTileData' torquescript method associated with the tile-layer in question --

At which point, you could apply some simple rule-based editting based on that --

as for blanketting the map, you can use the 'paint bucket' tool to lay down a solid brush across the entire map ... from where, you could then assign simple rule-based logic based on ImageMap/Frame ...

If TilePlaced == ImageMap1 && Frame = 2
TilePlacedX + 1 = ImageMap1, Frame 3
TilePlacedY + 1 = ImageMap1, Frame4

etc, etc, etc ...

I have some C++ code you can use to obtain the ImageMap/Frame (as the code stands now, it actually returns a t2dStaticSprite object -- but can easily be made to return an imageMap and Frame in a 'list'/'vector') if you'd like to give this logic-based editting a whirl ...

Torque Owner Darian Hickman
#2
02/13/2007 (11:19 pm)
Hi David, thanks for responding to my post so quickly. Now that I know it's possible I'll have to give some thought to writing up the map update rules. :)

If you got some C++ code to share I'd love to see it.

Associate David Higgins
DPHCoders.com
#3
02/14/2007 (6:35 am)
Code moved to this thread -- sorry bout that -- didn't look at the forum it was posted too ...

Torque 3D Owner Stephen Zepp
#4
02/14/2007 (9:52 am)
Guys, this is a great topic, but source code does not belong in public forums. Please remove the content from this forum and move it to a TGB private area.

Thanks!