Versus Software   game + free time = duck

All right, here’s the third editor release.

Download link: vtool (96)

I managed to add three basic functionalities to this editor that I wanted. The first is the ability to move freelly through it’s space, without any scope restrictions. In the Solis editor when you create a new map you set it’s width and height and it remains static. It didn’t really bother me at first, but it’s something that every now and then reduced my design.

The second was the ability to zoom-in/zoom-out freely in each window without any restrictions. Using the mouse wheel you can easily do that. I still need to make the editor center on where the mouse is as it zooms though.

The third is the ability to easily scroll through the map. That’s something I did have in the Solis editor and wanted to have in this one too. Just press and hold the right mouse button and you can move around the map.

To add walls to the world just left click and move the mouse. Left click again and the wall is set. On the next release I hope to have some basic editing functionalities like selecting walls, editing and deleting them, copying and pasting.

Again this project is open to community feedback! Send me an e-mail on what you think about it!

Until then!

Well, heres the second release of the editor and details on how it’s going.

Download here: vtool (101)

Didn’t manage to get as much work done in the editor as I wanted to (kind of a busy week), but I did manage to put in some details that I wanted. The opengl windows now resize themselves as the master window gets resized and I added an automatic resize button. It only works though when the number of windows is a perfect square: 1,4,9,16… Still trying to figure out how to handle the non square situations. I think i’ll do a drop down menu with several choices you can choose.

The top menu now is a rebar also. That means the user can position them as he wishes. I prefer that sort of design more than toolbars because users generally have their own work preferences.

My long term goal with this project is to have a very flexible editor where the user can edit in any way he feels comfortable with, and to achieve that it needs to be as customisable as possible. Ideally I see the user being able to have an environment with windows where he interacts with the “game world” in many ways. For example he can have one master window that sees the world on top where he can edit it, and two sub-windows where he can see on-sight how those changes are ocurring. If this system is robust enough he can change that to any way he wants.

I’m heading towards that sort of design because I think one of my flaws in designing both the Solis and World Train Royale editors is that they gave no artistic freedom for the user. I see artists messing around with Photoshop and they all have their preferences and designs they call their own, not Photoshop’s in itself.

By the way I still don’t know how to properly name this project. Anyone got any suggestions? Also I would like to get people’s feedback on the project. So if you were to use an FPS editor, what sort of features would you want to have in it?

Anyway I guess that’s it for now. My next goal is making the editor more interesting, so I’ll be adding level building next. Until then!

I have thus decided to start a new project. I’m aiming to do something 3D again, since my last project, Train Royale, was a 2D casual game. I’m gearing towards a 3D shooter for now, so lets see how it goes.

However I do intend to make things different this time. You see all my other projects I would only talk about them once they were done. This time though, I intend to talk openly about it through out it’s development.

It’s not that I like to keep things secret. It’s that I always worried about becoming something I usually criticized: talking more about a game than developing it, and in the end have tons of rambling about a never finished project.

But now I think I can go beyond that point since I at least proved to myself I can get a project done, regardless of how much I talk about it or not. So my intention with this new project is to do at least a weekly post about it, displaying how it’s current development is going. And it doesn’t matter how simple or stupid the project is going thus far, the point is talking about it. Don’t really know why, I guess I’m trying to make a social experiment out of this thing,  just to see what happens in the end.

Anyway here is a picture of how the “editor” is going.

To download:  vtool (80)

Basically I intend to do something where you can have multiple windows showing multipler things about whatever you’re editing. I’ll start focusing on that once I get the gist of the toolbars and rebars going.