Quote:Original post by Basiror
i wouldn t start with the engine and especially i would share the same renderer for the editor with the engine this makes things too complexe
before starting with an engine or a editor i would build a library which features most of the things needed to get something going
e.g.:
- a file system with pak file support
- a general purpose image loading class
- several manager classes that coordinate the core of the engine
- a network wrapper if you plan to integrate a network at all
- math library vector2d vector3d matrix plan bbox cylinder sphere...
- math library with several other implementations you might need to in your future projects
- a pool allocator implementation compatible with STL list and STL vector
- bitpacking class for fast bitpacking of network packets
- maybe a compression lib huffman .... whatever you like
- a shader implementation that allows you to specify how to use a certain texture in your renderer
these are a few things most engines need and designing them properly with a consistent implementation will spare you are lot of time and trouble so you can start of with your engine/editorproject without interupting your work for a ton of side by problems to solve
I considered that to be part of implementing the engine, though you´re surely right most of these things are not strictly part of the engine itself.
Quote:Original post by markr
Sounds like, one way or another, it's basically a tile map.
Therefore I strongly encourage you not to write an editor, instead use another tilemap editor, of which there are several already installed on your machine (I promise) if you think laterally. Candidates are notepad and mspaint (Assuming you are using Windows - if not, you will have equivalents anyway).
There is likely to be some map-editing which is not easy enough to be done with notepad or paint, but you can probably worry about that later (setting object coords, properties etc)
Write the game (or at least the main bits of the engine) first. In the meantime, have a hard-coded map which you create at runtime (could be random too, or generated according to a pattern).
Mark
good point to use some small "hard-coded" map or some extremely simple map format which can be stitched together in notepad or something like that. But I´m quite positive there are lots of things I´ll need an editor for when the engine and the game progresses, e.g. placing triggers, items, NPCs, logic entities and so on around the map. Also I want to use seperate meshes for the background of the tile and the platform (i.e. floor / ceiling) in that tile, which would be quite painful to do with something like notepad on the long run.
Oh, and yes, it will definitely be a tile map. Though it´s not 100% settled whether we need a simple 2D tile map, or perhaps we need a 3D tile map, because we might want to be able to connect 2 different halls in the Z-direction, would add something to the game... but that´s not settled yet and is probably something to be added quite a time later on.
At least that simple "handcrafted" map will serve well while implementing the most basic features of the engine.
Thx for the input!
@evolutional:
A nice idea, too, I think. So you essentially fire up the game app and enter some kind of "edit mode" where you´re able to change the map the way you want it? Will have to think about that when the complexity of the game itself becomes more clear, don´t know yet, whether it´s a feasible approach for that project, since it might well include many scripts... but an in-game editor with scripting functionality would be great :)
