Hey everyone. For a project of mine I needed to use the Mappy level editor (A 2d tile based level editor). I thought it would be cool if I wrote an extension to let MMF 2 use this editor as well (sense so many people seem to want to do tile based games).
I could write the extension to just load the map format that it produces or I could write it to actually handle the graphics side as well.
What do you guys think? What kind of features would you want such an extension to have?
Maybe an editor for the tilesheet itself (not the graphics, but data) - so you can define custom data "slots" for tiles and fill that in. E.g. you could have "terrain type", "obstacle", "movement speed", etc.
Later with MMF you should be able to read that data from the grid again.
Will it support isometric view?
Even with the active picture object, the graphics side is still very tricky to do. No doubt it would help many people to have an extension for that.
Do you have an idea how you could include placement of active objects into that editor? In the end there's always a big amount of active objects that need to be stored as well.. e.g. enemies, nodes, ladders, doors, bonuses, whatever.
As soon as we have a properly working pathfinding extension again, I'm certain people would use that with a tilebased game. Maybe some sort of integration would be nice (e.g. exporting the grid, containing only the obstacle value of tiles, or the movement speed as cost, etc. in some format that can then easily be read again by a pathfinder). Or you could establish some system with pathfinder extension developers - so you can just pass a pointer of the grid to the pathfinder and it'll get the info it needs.
All in all I think it's a great idea!
We already have... The pathfinding extension works pretty well...Originally Posted by Random
Vortex2, I think I've not understand very well your idea... What your extension will do that MMF2 can't already do with active picture object and AssArray/Array object ?
What is "Mappy level editor " ?
Mappy
It would make it easier to create tile based games by taking away the task of needing to make a level editor and level loader. It would load all of the data, and perhaps even help display the tiles and handle tile based scrolling.
"Pretty well" doesn't seem enough..
That's of course other people. My personal problem with it is that it's by far not powerful enough. It's a bit like a play toy.. it works well until you want to go serious with it.
Maybe I have the last version of it which is not actually released (but I don't know why) but all these quoted bugs are the old bugs of the previous version of pathfinding object. All have been corrected in the last version.
But it's not the subject here.
Vortex2, I've just see what is Mappy, but I think developers prefer to program their own level editor than using a third party tool+extension... no ?
It depends. A lot of C++ developers chose to use Mappy over making their own system. I am sure a lot of MMF users will feel the same way.
Making a level editor is a LOT of work and MMF 2 is not well suited to the task at all. Having a plugin to load from this map editor will make development of such projects easier.
Making tasks easier after all is a goal of click products.
I was just about to say that. The time you have to spend to make a level editor (and all the consequences of level loading, which is often even harder) can easily be spent on integrating such an extension.
I haven't tried mappy yet - but how much information can you store with tiles?
You can store a good bit of information per tile. I am using Mappy for my latest casual game and it is going really well so far. I stored movement costs and a passability flag in my tiles already in order to implement pathfinding:
Heavy WIP shot:
Mappy can also be used for Isometric and Hex based games. Many clickers do not have the mathmatical ability to code such things on their own, but my extension would aim to make it easier to do so.
You are right, this kind of extension could be useful for some Clickers. But in my opinion, you have a lot of projects opened and to open another may be not a very good idea...
A lot of users are waiting for FusionDynamics and OverlayRedux2.
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