Games Afoot Software

Well here’s a new update.  Now I’ve got the ability to manipulate the map size, the cell size, and to turn the grid and info on and off.  I had a bear of a time attempting to get the keyboard input stuff working exactly how I wanted and now it works great!  The other issue is once I worked the resize issues out, there was a graphical glitch that caused the selector square to remain where it was even though it was off the map.  Since I’m not really planning on using the keyboard to select actual tiles (at least at the moment) I decided (on advice of others, thanks #xna!) to just simply hide the selector (dark red box on the grid) when it was off the grid.  You can see what I mean here:

That’s sort of unwanted.  However you can see I fixed it here:

And here it is with it gone:

Okay now for the main event, a video of the map editor in action.  Notice it still doesn’t do anything yet because the next thing I will work on is a tile selector panel and then the ability to place tiles on the map.  Note a tile is just an abstract concept for still image or animation that is placed on a map.  A tile can be any size and shape and be put anywhere on the board, just as long as you got the grid off.  With the grid on it will line up with the upper right corner.

Please forgive the quality of the video.  I captured with CamStudio, and then converted it from 1280×720 down to 640×480 (with black bars to keep the aspect ratio at 640×360 ie 16:9)  Anyways it should give you an idea of where I’m going.

Keith

Okay so I decided to just start making the editor, instead of planning out every little detail.  Here are some screenshots and a few notes.

This first one is a translucent block over the background.  This was ultimately scrapped.

The next two are how the editor looked when I had camera problems.  Turns out I wasn’t turning it back into local space.  I turned from local coordinates to world coordinates, and then i need to go back to local.  Essentially the tile (individual grid cell) wasn’t lining up to the map which was world space.

These last two are how they were supposed to look, which was good if you didn’t move the mouse outside the map.

Finally the corrected version.

I just decided I wanted gray on black instead of white on gray.  And fooled around with the grid size.  See this is going to be a bit different than traditional map editors.  I wanted the kind of flexibility a tile map gives you but I wanted the ability to place images of any size anywhere.  So basically whatever the tile grid is set to, the “tile” which is any arbitrarily sized graphic object (will include animations and stuff later), the tile will be placed in the upper left corner depending on what grid cell you’re in.  You’ll also be able to change the tile and map sizes in realtime.  What this means is if you have a big 64×64 texture but you want to put a 32×32 texture directly on top of it in the center, you simply change the grid size from 64 to 32, and you can automatically place tiles in increments of 32.  If you set the grid cell size to anything lower than the minimum (probably 8×8) there won’t be any grid and you can place tiles anywhere on the map up unto the boundaries of the map.  Even if it hangs off.  However the map will be clipped at it’s edges, so if you hang something off the edge you might only see part of it.  This is just a start.  Right now I’m figuring out what keys and controls to use to manipulate the tile and map sizes.

Keith