I was using maped yesterday and had set out a pretty good map, but it was simple, no detail. I'm never satisfied with my work, put the lack of professionalism in this instance especially irked me. I wanted to add some detail to my dirt road, add some tracks or rocks, or a pothole or something, and I was overwhelmed by the number of new tiles I would have to make, because if I were to change my one dirt tile, that change would affect all tiles. frustrated as I was I started out anyways. simply coping and pasting is arduous enough in maped, but then I had to edit each individual tile and then check to see if each tile would fit well next to any other given tile. all in all, I was mentally drained.

it then occured to me that a very handy creation tool ( in map making ) would be a drawing tool that let you draw on the created map itself ( in maped ) after laying the tiles down. the code behind this would have to recognize each time a tile was drawn upon, that it had changed and create a new tile that matched what you had just edited inside your vsp. I think it would work better with a "dump" vsp that all of the tiles the engine created could be put into. you would never create with these tiles, you would use your base vsp and then edit it on the fly with proposed tool.

I don't claim to be a programmer, or even have an understanding of most of the basics, I may have just made a complete fool of myself with my apparent lack of programers jargon, nevertheless..... is this possible, could someone consider integrating this into one of the numerous new engines that are emerging.

to quote a wise verger of the past

"we don't need better engines, we need better creation tools"

-Auroraborealisis

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Behind an apparent aesthetic repugnance for politics sometimes lurks a vulgar conservative sensibility. ...The intellectual, just like any fool, is subject to the influence of his environment, his education and his interests. His inteligence does not op

In programming terms, this *might* be easier to do a different way, though at the cost of bigger map-file sizes.

Rather than creating a VSP with the new "drawing" information on it, there is simply a "drawing layer," like the VC layer in V1. You can place this layer anywhere in the renderstring ("D") Even better would be if every layer was automatically linked to its own drawing layer, but that might be a little unweildy, as you'll see in a moment.

Basically, the drawing layer is a really big masked image that you can edit in maped as though it were PS or PSP (or, god forbid, MSPaint) Since most drawing layers would just be used for touch up and have lots of transparent space, RLE compression could work wonders for these file sizes (though very complex drawing layers could be very bad... maybe an option?)

Personally, I'd like if there were a "plugin" of sorts, where one could use Photoshop tools in maped. Would it be possible to design maped as a Photoshop plugin? (I know that's a really convoluted concept) The plugin would create a tile window in addition to the toolbars, with a VSP editor and option to import images as tiles, plus using PS tools on the drawing layer(s) and save/export the current image as a map, or something that can be converted to a map.

Anyway, I thought of that because both PS and maped use layers in a similar manner, so the parallels are really simple.

I think this would be best served in tSB's engine (notice my skillful avoidance of a name, to prevent a long-dead (?) flame war!) and its new maped.

Even better... link the whole damn IDE to PS or whatever paint program you like, for all the art creation! Then you don't have to program art tools into the IDE. Can't OLE automation acheive this kind of thing in a really easy way? (I'm not a windows programmer, so that's kind of a guess.)

I hope *someone* will consider this. I'm seeing better tools in the future if someone will.

That is all.

--Invicticide

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