Just an update:
Finally got my hands on my PC yesterday for the first time in like 5 days (damn women!).
Features at the moment are:
- Select tile type from (at current) 10 different ones
- Placement of start locations for up to 10 different civs
- Placement of resources on tiles (max 1 resource per tile)
Still to add:
- Support for more display modes (currently only looks reasonable if you are using 1024x768)
- Placement of event triggers
- Saving of the map and it's data (I am still trying to decide this as I am intending to use this as the map editor for my game-in-progress so a standard has not yet been decided).
To make this useful for other people who might be making isometric games (I am sure there are some here), how would you like the data from the editor to be outputed?
Currently, the map data is an array call Map(Xsize, Ysize, Misc) where Xsize and Ysize are the horizontal and vertcial dimensions of the map respectively. Misc stores additional data about each tile. For instance, If Map(1, 1, 0) = 1 then the tile at location (1, 1) would show the image for tile number 1 (currently this is designated as an empty tile). If Map(1, 1, 1) = 5 then the tile at location (1, 1) is a start point for civ 5. Similarly, if Map(1, 1, 2) = 0 then there is no resource present at tile location (1, 1). I'm not sure if that makes sense?
What i'm not sure is whether to go about making the output of the editor an array. Would people prefer for me to save the output as a text file of some sort? Also, at the moment the user is able to choose the number of civilisations catered for by the map (max. 20) at the start of the program. They are therefore displayed in the toolbox as simply generic civ 1 through 20. Would you like me to include the ability to name each civ and output this to the save file? Or would you prefer for me to just designate each civ as a numerical value?
This might become more clear once I release the in-game engine (which I assure you is faster than the map editor engine). I hope to release a tech demo soonish.
