Traps/objects and the level editor

[Alan]

We should discuss these at the meeting on Wednesday, but here's a preliminary list I've come up with:

• Crumbling floors (can walk over it x times)
• Spikes (die if you fall onto/into them)
• Switches (open/close doors)
• Doors
• Ladders?
• Moving things of some kind

[Christopher Smith]

OK at the moment, my idea of the list of all game elements looks like this:

• Player start
• Space
• Floor
• Wall
• Slope /
• Slope \
• Bottom of ladder
• Top of ladder
• Spikes
• Finish
• Switch + open/close/toggle + id
• Door + id

This is what the editor currently handles (or will when I go to bed(!))

If there are any problems with this (Alan) please post otherwise this is what will be in the editor.

Chris

[Alan]

That looks great. Switches and doors won't be implemented for a while though, so don't make them integral parts of any level.

I think the easiest way to draw the middle sections of a ladder is to have a ladder entity on those tiles, so one of those would be good.

And I haven't yet implemented them, but I really like the idea of crumbling floors - just 4 or 5 tiles in varying states of disrepair.

The only other thing I can think of is an argument to Player to say which direction to start facing in, but that's not really that important.

Good work!

[Christopher Smith]

Right here is the working level editor.
There is one level file (mylevel.txt) which demonstrates all of the features.
There is also README.txt which describes how to use the editor.

Anyone who wants to build some levels / beta test the editor is welcome to do so!!

If there are any problems with it they won't get fixed till Tuesday at the earliest as I have some assignments due in which I should have started a week ago.

Edit: Oh btw Alan, check the new 'levels/LevelDesignFormat.txt' for the tiles/entities that i'm currently using, and mylevel.txt/straightlevel.txt for uses.

Edit: See below for editor download.

[Brodders]

Looks like you're making good progress! Seems pretty complete already too which is good - I did the level editor for Avian Apocalypse and it was ages till a level made in the editor would actually work in-game (and there's still no nice way of playing custom levels... )

I wrote that in VB6 too. Try it out, and if there's any stuff you want to steal I can send you the source code. Just have a look in the old Avian Apocalypse forum, or here.

[Alan]

There were actually some practical reasons for having all the tile ids as numbers - it simplifies image loading (they can be put into one large image in the correct order) and makes it easier for my code to distinguish between tiles and entities.

There's also a temporary practical reason to have the ladder-top and ladder-bottom as tiles but the ladder-middles as entities. Basically the player needs to detect the top/bottom, so they need to be tiles until I properly implement entities. The middle sections can go on top of other tiles, so need to be an entity, but they don't need to do anything, so can just be used for drawing.

[Christopher Smith]

O.K. I'll get that all sorted tomorrow as I don't have any time or my laptop today.

[Christopher Smith]

Right - all done and good - new editor here

Edit: Level editor is in the svn, only works with the rest of the game so no point posting on its own.

[Alan]

Okay, that looks good; nice work.

[Alan]

A couple of issues: whatever filename you give it to load, it always seems to load mylevel.txt.

And there needs to be some way to remove a tile on the four screens (so that the main level is used there) rather than having to replace it with a blank tile.

[Brodders]

And there needs to be some way to remove a tile on the four screens

You can right-click. Surely putting a blank tile in one of the 4 sub-levels would result in a gap there rather than the default tile, right?..

Sorry, don't know why I'm posting here... I'm just a bit bored.

[Alan]

And that's why I should have read the readme file...

The game is now working and all it really needs is levels. These should be placed in the levels directory and then you need to edit index.txt so that the game knows about it.

[Alan]

More bugs:

If you make it larger than 25 tiles in any direction, it crashes.

When you load a level, it doesn't set the textfields for size to the right values.

Also, it would be good if it saved to the levels folder and gave you an option of levels to load from. Maybe it should also write the level name to index.txt automatically too.

[Alan]

Just a reminder that it would still be very useful to make it save levels into the levels directory rather than the Editor directory.

Also can we please make sure that the exe in SVN is always the most recent one; I'm not convinced it is at the moment.

[Christopher Smith]

When you load a level, it doesn't set the textfields for size to the right values.

Also, it would be good if it saved to the levels folder and gave you an option of levels to load from. Maybe it should also write the level name to index.txt automatically too.

These are both fixed now, also i'll try to remember to compile before each time I commit.