So after Ildave1 and I banged out part1 of the Project2 story, I decided it was now time that we had an editor.

After some careful thought I revised my plan for doing an in-game editor, while this would have been optimal, the required UI components needed would have been horrible.

So instead, much like for Flare3 we will have an external editor, but unlike Flare3 this editor will serve multiple purposes.



The Editor is called Quill (cause it's the Story Scripting Engine, get it? heh. heh. (as shakespear would say,
"what's in a name?")) it is a being developed in C# as a MDI Application, this will allow multiple maps to be open for editing at once, and it will allow other tools to operate in the same program, the current list of tools we are likely to have are:

The Map Editor

The Sheet Generator

Dialogue Tree Editor

Script Helper(maybe)

The tool you are seeing is the map editor, it uses our Context Panel based editing layout (that was used in the Flare3 map editor) with the editor you will be able to:

dimensions of the map

load and sculpt it's topography

load and apply materials

paint splats

create static entities

create nodes, and node networks

specify initial environmental properties

it is coming along well, and hopefully I can have it feature complete by the end of the week, if I hustle.


P.S.

We have chosen XML as a map file medium, this will save tons of headaches over a binary format, small yet large scale tweaks can be done by a text edtior where through the map editor would take longer. since maps can only have a max of 32x32 tiles (each tile is large in-game) the extra size of XML does not seem to be an issue.

The current layout for the map format is somthing like:

working directory (editor only)
cols
rows
tileDensity
heightMap
heightScale
splatMap
materials
tiles
nodes
links