Quote:Originally posted by gannon

I am hear to poke Maped 3 into activity. Dreams of brushes will not leave my head. Your tool is great but the lack of brushes slows down the game making and saps energy that could be better used to make the rest of the game.

Thank you for your time and if you want you can poke Maped 3 too.

I too would really like to see Maped 3 finished. I think that one way this utility would get done a lot faster is if Verge 3 and Maped 3 both became open-sourced. This way, someone other than the main v3 devs can improve v3. Of course, we'd want to watch out so to not repeat the Verge 2 era that had 230945 billion versions. And, whenever we make a release, we could be sure to call it 'unofficial', so that the dev team doesn't get blamed for erroneous additions to the engine. I'm sure that many skilled coders of the community would help improve the engine if Verge was open-sourced. I bet with some outside help, the compiler could optimized greatly, to make such additions as nested structures and speedy string handling.

chr file format is known and the vsp and map formats are mostly known.

I swear that once I make VOpenCHR have more tools (not all that high on my priority list right now) then I'll use the framework to make a tile editor, which will basically give you VSPs. That is, unless Maped3 does it first. Well maybe I'll do it anyway but I doubt anyone would use it when it's built into maped3.

It's a time thing. You just can't be a working stiff coding 60 hours a week for $$$ and then try and squeeze in that free code on the weeknights and weekends. It's unbearably difficult. Either someone else on the devteam will pick up maped3 and make it not suck, or it will have to wait until like.. I dont know. a while. when work settles down.

Currently I'm putting in a lot of hours because of a new API rollout and I really dont have the time. Sorry.

It's not only an issue of splintering. No offense, but I don't want inexperienced people touching a codebase that is rather large and complicated. ME3 will get touched someday and I don't want it all buggered up when that time comes.

If somebody can hook me up with format documentation, I might be able to do something.

Maybe.

I'm curious, what's on the todo list for maped3?

I have said in other posts that if someone else makes the interface in wxwidgets that I'd be happy to contribute a tile editor and code that edits the map, etc. That still applies. Also if you're not comfortable with open source that's fine with me. It's just really hard to compete with the interface in maped3 (it's really good tat!). .NET is the trouble. Although I have nothing against it being used in principle, I don't want to learn it or use it myself, and so would totally be useless on such a project.

I'd like to see a tile 'mover', allowing the user to re-order individual tiles. Perhaps a simple drag-and-drop tileset editor would do.

I think a simple tile editor would be nice too, with a multi-tile preview. Like the old one. That was fine.

It would be great to have custom pre-built assemblies. Like an assembly of a 3x3 set of tiles in the shape of a house, that could be easily picked up and dragged onto the map. Would be good for things like trees, buildings, large landscape segments, etc. A simple tool to assemble the sets, and store them on their own 'preview sheet' from which they could be easily dragged and dropped onto the map...? I can't seem to come up with good terminology.

I'd like to be able to switch it to different resolutions, but that's not to terribly hard. Higher res maps might make the 'pre-builts' thing I mentioned above a little more important.

Perhaps a direct image-to-map feature, where you could import a graphic and drop it right on the map directly. I know you can pretty much do this now by converting an image to a tileset, but it might be nice to be able to go straight from a graphic to the map. This might be related to the 'pre-builts' thing I mentioned above.

Going along with a few other people's comments, I'd love to see a cross-platform Maped. I use a Mac a lot, and would love to use it for building maps. Even if the engine didn't run on it, it can't be that hard to build a map-editing tool that could work on it. OpenGL might be a good solution here. zlib is available for every platform under the sun, so that shouldn't be an issue.

Also, just a note on porting with .NET... anyone ever looked at MONO? http://www.mono-project.com/about/index.html

I want map to psd!

Anyway... MONO is ok in the porting sense, but I'd still have to learn the language to make a map editor, I don't have the maped3 source, AND I wouldn't be surprised if tat and the dev team don't want it ported.

This is my impossible dream: VSPs with tiles larger than 16x16. I hate having to paint four tiles just for one 32x32 tile.