Dungeon Master Forum

<Starting a new thread off instead of posting to one with a misleading title>

Just a quick post to say that in response to your many requrests in place of writing out full specifications for the dungeon format, I will endevour in the next few weeks (i.e. hopefully before Christmas) to knock up a quick GUI editor to help show what items can have what attributes.

To be perfectly clear however, it is in no way intended to replace the fledgling editors already being written by Andy et al. Just a simple way to layout walls / floors and then edit each item with lists of each possible attribute it can have (kind of like DMute works). I have every confidence that someone else will be able to come up with a more friendly interface, which will become the editor of choice for RTC dungeons. Additionally I do not intend to provide a "how-to" guide - it's all very well knowing that a trigger can take such-and-such an attribute, but it's quite another knowing how to string a few of them together to produce something like Zoooom or other complex puzzles and traps, so there's plenty of scope there to for all your fantastic work so far.

In fact I hope that this editor actually spurs others onwards as it might help speed up the "decoding" process of the RTC text files as you'll be able to see how changing something in the GUI changes the text file and vice versa.

Please let me know what you think - I'm sure you'll have plenty of comments, ideas and suggestions to add below of your own ;-)

Hmmm, rather than a full fledged new effort for a new editor. Why not just combine some effort with Andy who by far has made the greatest level of effort towards this goal of an RTC editor. If you two share the effort either via the board or via private email I'm most certain that you will complete an editor in at least half the time with greater functionality.

It just seems to make sense to me.

As an example.. and this will be fairly rough as I'm not a programmer.. would it not require less time for you to write a sub section (don't they call them librarys) of code that handles serving lines of text in return for requests from what Andy's code sends to it?

Rather than building the GUI and working out everything. Grab a list of what's been done and just add to it.

I'm not sure if I'm being very clear but I'm sure you get the basic idea of sharing resources. (I'm not talking about RTC core code as I know that's a no no) I just figure the community will get something back faster to use and stop whining and you both will have to spend less time and effort as you are both busy people.. it benefits everyone.. no?

moo

Seconding the notion. The disadvantage is that both of you would have to make compromises in certain areas but instead of creating another new tool a combined effort on an already developing editor would profit the community a lot more than two tools.

Also, if there's questions about how things work for andyboy (and I'm sure there must be!) they can be adressed during that process more easily when communicating directly within a shared project.

Regards, PitD