Ryandor.com

Punt,

A suggestion for the transition editor that would help in our efforts to complete the transition sets for Map Gen 2. Currently making transition sets is a slow process and it requires an understanding of how the hashes and other mechanics of the program work. We need something more intuitive that virtually anyone can use.

My suggestion:

Keep all the current features, but in addition, add a visual interface as well. Described as follows:

1. The top of the interface is similar to the current transition editor. This is basically the "manual" part of the interface where you can type in changes, just like you can now.

2. Below that, on the right side of the interface, is a scrolling list of all the terrain tiles.

3. On the left side, a grid representing the 9 tiles for the hash. The current tile being transitioned appears in the grid and is unmovable (or at least gives you a warning if you try to move it, since that means yoy are making one of those non-standard transition sets).

4. User can drag and drop terrain files from the terrain listing into the grid. The actual grid markings can be turned on and off so that the player can actually see what the hash looks like, and visually see whether or not the transition looks correct. The top "manual" portion of the interface automatically updates itself when you drop tiles in (and conversely, if you make manual edits to the transition, the appropriate tile appears in the grid editor).

5. Then a "generate" button that basically builds the xml based on what is in the interface.

6. As a "nice to have", transition editor can optionally name/organizae the xml for you based on the names of the terrain you are working with. (Not sure if this would work but it would be a cool feature).

Something like this would make building the actual transition sets extremely easy and I think we could really fly on making them if we had a visual editor like this.

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-= HellRazor =-
Shattered Sosaria is coming!
http://www.shatteredsosaria.com

Definately would be a plus, you could even use a similar interface that the Map Editor and Mul Editor use. This way as HellRazor suggests, you could see changes immediately.

Another feature to this, could even be the ability to save "Mods". This way those of us trying to finish off the transitions, could simply load in the Community Transitions, thus without having the need to worry about overwriting the transitions maybe I wrote specific to my server.

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Demuria Studios

I like very much the idea of a visual editing feature in the transitions editor, it would help me a lot

Well, is this what the people want to work on, versus the next Map editor suite?

I could do either.