Game Level Editor
Author
Hi, I was just wondering how game level editors are made?
as in, what kind of rendering do they use for the preview windows? GDI, DirectX, opengl.. and how hard would it be to make your own with a custom format and all. Also what is meant by compiling the maps?
Thanks :D
Quote:Original post by munkers
Hi, I was just wondering how game level editors are made?
as in, what kind of rendering do they use for the preview windows? GDI, DirectX, opengl..
That is entirely up to the programmer, it may be easiest to use whatever is used in the game itself though.
Quote:Original post by munkersand how hard would it be to make your own with a custom format and all.
It's not too tricky, the design part is the hardest part.
Quote:Original post by munkersAlso what is meant by compiling the maps?
Some games don't read ... normal map data, or something. They might want some optimized form of the data. The map compiler would optimize the map. Often it's quite tricky to get the map you edit back from the compiled map, so I'd suggest just storing the map... normally :X
I'm working on a Map editor in Java, and the difficulty depends on how complex your format is. The way I'm probably going to do it, is to have a Manifest file in a JAR file, that describes the other files(such as images and character files) in the Jar and where to place them, so I simply read in the Manifest, and render them based on that
Depends on genre too as the level editor for 1st person shooters would be far different from that for a 2d platformer.........
I basically write the game first then decide the format then build the level editor from that design, bit round about but works for me
I basically write the game first then decide the format then build the level editor from that design, bit round about but works for me
hey,
at the moment im making an iso map editor. im keeping it pretty general so it can be used for platform games, rpgs, anything that is possible and you would like to really :) so far it hasnt been too hard and once its finished, ill be able to use the code from it to organise and show my maps in my game without much (or any) alteration.
im using a cross of windows gui and directx for my editor, that way i have all the predone buttons etc. and it is much quicker/easier (for me anyway) to show/update my map as i make changes.
my maps are actually just text files :D as stupid as that might sound, i find it very useful, because if it was an encrypted file, i wouldn't be able to make changes outside the editor in case something went wrong (hasnt happened yet :) ), but i can when its text.
check out my profile signature's site, it has a couple of screens of it from about 7 days ago i spose... looks much better now though...
as for how my editor is made: im using delphi7 with delphix (directx support).
hope that answers all your questions :)
the_moo
at the moment im making an iso map editor. im keeping it pretty general so it can be used for platform games, rpgs, anything that is possible and you would like to really :) so far it hasnt been too hard and once its finished, ill be able to use the code from it to organise and show my maps in my game without much (or any) alteration.
im using a cross of windows gui and directx for my editor, that way i have all the predone buttons etc. and it is much quicker/easier (for me anyway) to show/update my map as i make changes.
my maps are actually just text files :D as stupid as that might sound, i find it very useful, because if it was an encrypted file, i wouldn't be able to make changes outside the editor in case something went wrong (hasnt happened yet :) ), but i can when its text.
check out my profile signature's site, it has a couple of screens of it from about 7 days ago i spose... looks much better now though...
as for how my editor is made: im using delphi7 with delphix (directx support).
hope that answers all your questions :)
the_moo
My own level editor is basically a set of classes that can directly manipulate the level data (and a GUI), and then the rest of it is the engine code itself. The engine uses the same load/save code, same rendering code, same everything (same source files). This makes developing a level editor so easy, because just about as soon as you write something into the game, it's already in the level editor waiting for you to use.
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