Saturday, March 12, 2011

31 – A little love for the editor

Don't worry, little editor. I have not forgotten about you. I made some changes to both the editor and the underlying system that might not seem as much work, but it was certainly time consuming.

Unique ID system

All items that can be edited with the editor now have a unique ID. I want my editor to be at least as powerful as the Elder Scrolls Construction Kit, but limited in scope to the needs of my game. You will be able to make big master mods, that contain a self sufficient list of items and rules, and small mods, that build upon existing master files. So you need something to identify an object cross mod. A name is not that good because it can clash easily. I have assigned 100 IDs for each category of item. This is only a convention, you do not need to follow it. IDs need not be continuous. Let's see the new plant editor:


New centralized biome editor

As you may have noticed in the above image, plants have less options now. All biome options are gone. I now have a new centralized biome editor, where you can see all the entities that will be used to populate a given biome:


Biome names are a mix of real climate names and short descriptions of the climate. The names are not that important but I'll fine-tune the list. The content is still populated with a mix of DF items and the items that I'll have in 0.1. It takes time to go over the plants, since I am doing them one by one. I would like to have unique content for each biome when possible once the final list of plats is available.

But the biome list is more open than ever. The little buttons on the bottom are just used by me to insert an item in multiple categories. I'll look into how I can make these options more general.


Leaves are stand alone items

Here is the new tree editor:


Pretty barren. Biome options are moved to the new editor tab. Density is gone for good. I have no use for this property. Deciduous is gone, because now we have leaves that have their own seasonal properties. A deciduous tree is just a tree that has leaves that have their “autumn” and “winter” boxes unchecked:


With the new system, you can also create the opposite of traditional deciduous trees, i.e. trees that loose their leaves in spring and summer or any other possibility. I am investigating if I could get some worth wile features from replacing the four season boxes with a month ranges.

This list of leaves also betrays the new list of trees. Add to it saguaro, and you get the items that are both in DF and exist in reality. I'll add a few more trees ans slowly phase out the ones I no longer want.

2 comments:

  1. neat! :)

    so... if i decide to have some trees with leaves (an eventually fruit?) during each season my dwarfs could have food all year long. so there's no need to hunt or grow crops. is this considered cheating? are you thinking to limit these options somehow (such as edible/cookable trees only produce leaves/fruit during one season)

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  2. No! No limits! It is hard to cover all food needs with trees (maybe with a low population of dwarves), but you can get very close. Make all trees have edible seeds, edible leaves with edible seeds, edible fruit with edible seeds. All at once if you wish. For version 0.2 I am thinking about adding flowers that mature into fruit and can be again edible. I don't consider it cheating.

    It is up to the content creator to create something according to their vision. I'll try to create something balanced, but other people are free to create unbalanced rules. So it is the responsibility of the content creator and the responsibility of the user to choose the mods. This also implies that the platform will be even remotely popular and you can find any content there :). But if it is, there will be ratings and user comments to make it easier for you to filter the content.

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