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oh, for my legit non-internet Ultima Exodus play through, i used tiled (mapeditor.org) for making maps of the dungeons of that game (they're step step turn step step turn step turn style). i'm gonna look through it's export formats to see what's applicable.
It offers a variety of export options and map styles. I may just pick a map format from that and use that as the official map editing stuff. It's a free and very competent tool with lots of dev love put into it.
edit: for when this post was originally made, my avatar changed from babe of dan fu to 'kenji'. i'm officially complaining about this :P
Eh, don't worry; you'll stop being Mr. Generic soon enough; LYS uses a really weird system of user5 ranks. Rumor has it that Huo Hu "assisted" him while he was making them…
As for the editor, presumably it'll be easily usable by RoTK2 fans. I know from making a Gemfire mod firsthand how much of a pain it can be. :(
As for RPN, If it's easier to code, how come I've *NEVER* seen it before this past week or so? Even in the old days when we were forced to use 1's and 0' and sometimes there weren't even any 0's, we STILL had regular math. *shakes long white beard and grumbles about lawn-stomping whippersnappers*
Just be glad you're not using the butterfly method!
RPN code calculators have been around for ages ? Early calculators were that way ? Typically apart of uni classes as well (granted, I never went to uni heh). They're also easier to write because they're stack based and left to right (no jumping around within the string to try to figure out what's what).
Tiled (mapeditor.org) is easy to use. I've decided to make use of it and it's "flare map" export format (produces an ini-esque file). I'll have to lay down some requirements on the map format within tiled, but that'll be easy enough to follow and allow mod'ing to be easy and open ended as well. The flare map file format makes use of stuff I won't need… but whatever… it's easily ignored by the end user.
Sadly, this also means I'll need to convert my existing battlescape map format to the new ones, but whatever… either manual labor or just writing a converter heh.
As far as the flare format, I believe it has a map size limitation of 256 by 256, which is quite huge. ROTK2 is 13×12.
Actually… looking at it… ruh roh. Tiled does orthagonal (squares) or isometric (diamonds / overlapping tiles) … but… it doesn't seem to support 'hexagonal' ….
That's… not cool… and… kills the ability to produce hexagonal maps. Damnit.
There's a fork of tiled that supports hexagonal maps.
I'll prolly look into that. using hexagons was always an end-result goal rather than just squares anyway.
looks like i'll need to figure out how to build it under windows :/
Well, we'll find something workable.
And if needed I can simply throw pseudocode at you; it'll need to be converted whether it's normal math or RPN anyway! XD
working on downloading all the preq's for building the fork of tiled with hexagon support under windows.
depending on what this version can export as, might have to write a small util to also parse the default TMX file formats into something more friendly to the dev environment the game is written in.
hopefully all will go well (and if i can, i'll get this version of tiled compiled under osx, and linux as well).
and yeah, when it comes time to getting input or having people try it out, i'll make my email address available and all that. hell, if it actually progresses to a point, might bug LYS for it's own forum branch here on conewalker/lys :)
Got the tiled fork with hexagon map support compiled. it runs, and seems to work / save just fine o/.
doesn't seem to have the flare map export output option, gonna try to see if i can hack it in there.
took some hackery, but flare output now works.
i think this means tiled will be an acceptable editor now <3
Good!
Unless you have a very good reason not to, I plan on using tile numbering like this:
http://img715.imageshack.us/img715/7706/xynumbering.png
That way, not only does it match normal cartesian graphs, but (x,y)'s neighbors are ALWAYS the same six: (x,y-2), (x,y+2), (x-1,y-1), (x-1,y+1), (x+1,y-1), and (x+1,y+1). Yes, there'll be some skipped values (in fact, 50% of the x/y combos are gaps — specifically any spot where x+y is even), but it makes it easier for us to code.
As for individual tile graphics, I urge you to have 0-99 be 0-movement tiles, 100-200 be 1-movement tiles, 201-300 be 2-movement tiles, etc. Again, there'll be gaps, but (1) it leaves room if we want to add more tiles, and (2) it'll be very easy to tell how much movement tile Z costs (specifically, int(z/100)!).
http://unfy.org/misc/tiled-0.6.2-map777-hexagon-with-flare.zip
There's a readme.unfy.txt in there that explains a little bit. Since this will be the editor of choice for the battlescape… yeah. If I do end up updating it to the current tiled source (0.8.x), i'll obviously post updated links.
As far as rotk2-project (i was honestly debating "Way WooShoo!" as a name lol)…
The flare map file lists tile numbers for the map. It's just a string of numbers basically. 1,1,1,2,1,3,etc
Where those numbers correlate into which tile in the tileset they are (1 might be forest, 2 grass, etc).
For the rotk2-project, I was going to come up with some standard tiles to begin with (prolly those matching the original rotk2) as default tiles… and let people expound upon those as they see fit.
A separate ini / txt file would contain "tile 1 = plains, defense bonus 0, takes 2 movement to cross, fire possibility 50" etc. This way if people create new tile types, they just have to have them in their maps as well as adding to the "tile-description.ini/txt" file as well. No "tiles enumerated within this range have these qualities" kind of crap :).
Tile boundaries and linkages, does that really matter to a modder ? Later down with the AI this might become more important ? I don't particularly see a problem with your layout but it's not something i've given too much thought to atm heheh :)
doh, forgot to say that i was going to include map files and templates later for people to get a better idea, but right now that's not available (the zip file does contain an example hexagon map).
proper rotk2-project maps / tiles / documentation would all be down the line. zip is just provided for people to see what tiled-hexagon looks like…. not to actually produce anything useful yet.
damn, haven't crossed 100 posts yet and kenji is still my avatar :(
Be patient, young grasshopper — we all went through a kenji state, save for those who don't post much.
As for the map itself, either we need new tiles, or we have to adjust the hex format; right now,m the tiles overlap. Case in point: http://img515.imageshack.us/img515/5452/overlapwoes.png
But it's definitely more useful than what I had before, plus it's a lot easier to make game-compatible. All we need is to decide which solution we're doing for the tiles.
… your tile graphics need to have a transparency color and the 'active' part of the graphics need to be hexagonal in shape. if you look at the example stuff, you'll see this.
if you're attempting to use full on squares, it won't look good, no :).
i already have the existing rotk2 maps done in a different format, was going to go about making them in tiled-tmx format (since tiled can't IMPORT other formats lol, at least i don't think so).
unless you wanna make them in the tiled native tmx format heheheh :evil:
for now, i'd stick to the 13×12 or whatever size the existing rotk2 maps are before expanding on bigger (since that'd require more code on my behalf). if you supply a tile set graphic as well, that'd be be fine, but since i've not written the battlescape code yet — i dunno what size tiles i'll be using or any of that.
oh, i believe my required transparency color is rgb(255,0,128) … just to put that out there :)
edit: yay, no more kenji!
edit again: png 24bit images btw :)
Too late, I made squares work! XD
42×32* tile size
Actual tiles sheet: http://img521.imageshack.us/img521/3435/maptilescopy.png
And you picked a very garish background color; my eyes beg you to use 64,0,64 instead!
* needs a liiittle bit of tinkering, but…
EDIT: Hmm, it doesn't seem to be 100% perfect; y'know what? I'll make some hexagonal tiles (unless someone wants to provide some first!)
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