Dungeon Master Forum

Hi George,

Can I make a suggestion for the editor which I don't think would be hard to implement, would look very cool in the editor and would also make things a lot easier.

At the moment, to add something to a tile you right click and select edit - you have to do this for every tile you want to add something to. This is fine for editing the existing tiles but not very intuitive for quickly adding items to the dungeon. I'd like to suggest that, in addition to the current right-click edit menu, you could implement something along the lines of what you have in computer languages such as visual basic:

Have a floating palette on which all the basic floor icons are listed. All the user has to do is click one of the icons, say a door, and then start clicking on the map to place doors. Then he clicks on a "no sleep point" on the palette and starts clicking on the map to place "no sleep points", etc. If the palette would be too big, you could group things together - the user clicks the door icon on the palette and a sub menu pops up listing types of doors to choose from.
This would be a lot easier to use than having to right click and edit every square in a big area - much easier just to click "door" once and then start clicking away on the map.

Items placed by clicking would, of course, be simply added to existing items on the tile and the user would still have to right-click edit to change the order of items or orientation - although it would be really cool to have a compass button on the palette which selected the default orientation of each new click until changed.

Further to this, the actual clicking on the map would be a toggle, so you wouldn't have to have separate icons in the palette for open or closed doors for example.
If you've selected a door, clicking on a tile will place a closed door. Clicking again on the same tile will toggle it to open in the same way that currently clicking toggles between walls and no walls. This would be applied to all items (invisible/visible, etc).

It would also stop people (unless right click editing) from accidentally placing two doors on the same tile!

It might also be usefull to be able to toggle a larger number of tiles simultaneously by drawing some square by holding the left mouse button while moving the mouse, i.e. you could quickle make a large area of fake walls like 5x15 tiles and then set a couple of pillars into it, rather than setting a couple of pillars and then set manually 70 fake walls around the pillars.

PS: I like the idea CA describes above very much .

Once a palette has been implemented in this way, it actually opens up the usability of the editor no end. At any point, new features can be dropped onto the palette and they are easily available to the user.

Besides the compass button I suggested for changing the default orientation of clicks, you could have a "delete" button which makes clicks delete everything on a tile, an "edit" button which brings up the right-click edit menu for a tile just by clicking it. In fact, the user could change the way he edits completely. It would be very intuitive and George could just drop extra buttons onto the palette as features are requested, sort of like adding an ActiveX control to the palette in a computer language.

Lets not get too carried away though. Implementing a palette would be, IMHO, quite simple - you just need to create a new floating window with buttons on it. Clicking a button sets a variable which says which item is active and then clicking sets whichever item that is (or toggles it).

This gives lots of future possibilities but lets get the palette implemented and then add features to it later. Otherwise poor George's head might explode!

@George: From the lack of a reply here, I'd assume that this idea never came to be... I'd like to second CA's opinion here, I feel that a "palette" would be a GREAT idea. It'd speed up dungeon creation a lot. Can you please respond so I know your thoughts on this topic?

Hi Lord_Bones. George isn't partaking in forum life at the moment and we don't know when he'll be back. It's probably safe to assume that any new suggestions aren't going to be implemented for a long time, if at all.

Bugger.

That's not good at all. Would George ever consider letting someone else have his source code (or at least some of it) to continue his work while he's away?

I think that's doubtful. We've had this discussion before and George is keen to keep RTC as a personal project, which is completely understandable.

Lord_BoNes wrote:Would George ever consider letting someone else have his source code

HAHAHAHAHA.

That's another way of putting it.

I know that it may have sounded stupid, but I'm starting my own Blitz3D dungeon crawler, and I thought that George could be of assistance.

On top of that, he has hardly been around for quite a while... I thought that he may wish to continue production while he can't do it himself. But, I understand that he wants to keep it personal. I'd think the same thing about my "pet projects".