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[t-recx]

Man, those are some sweet pixels 

[Gregg Williams]

And a few more

   

[Gregg Williams]

Well a good share of hours sunk into MyGUI now.  Neither the OpenGL renderer, nor the resource loading/data path stuff would work properly, and both had to have a lot of debug and re-writes.  Combine this with the source code comments, and documentation being in russian and it was a fun time for all involved.

However, the smoke has parted and things look to be working nicely. It also has an actual designer app, which looks quite promising, which is a big bonus.

Anyways now to see if I can get a level editor working with it.

[chrome-fox]

Love the soft color palette that you used for the game
What platforms/devices will this game be targeting to BTW?

[Gregg Williams]

What platforms/devices will this game be targeting to BTW?

Windows, Mac, and possibly Linux.

[Gregg Williams]

Well started in on the basics of the level editor, and MyGUI is holding up so far. (Thankfully, after the experiences with the others.)

This sadly won't be a quick process, but hopefully I can get the basics of what we need hammered out in the next week or two. Then I'll likely be enhancing, and polishing the editor for the next year or two.

[Gregg Williams]

So a nice unexpected surprise. The internal tool I was expecting to need to build, in order to assemble tiles into pre-fabricated buildings, which the map editor would then allow to be placed, has been scrubbed.

I'm going to be able to use the Tiled map editor for this building assembly functionality. I've already written a export plugin as well for it, though need to finalize the file format.

[Gregg Williams]

So wrapped up the Tiled based adaption for use as M.I.N.T's internal building assembly tool. Things went pretty smoothly despite needing to learn QT data types, streams, and deal with unicode. Little bit of time in the hex editor never hurt anyone though.

Now to see if I can coax a tree list control out of MyGUI to drop into the real map editor.

[seancruz]

really sweet pixel graphics, can't wait to play this when it's done.

[Gregg Williams]

So a scaled down look at the current map editor progress. On the left side I'm currently envisioning a collapsing/expanding tree list broken down by category such as terrain, buildings, units and so forth as well as a mini map at the top of it. This tree would be populated depending upon the environment chosen for the map.

We will no doubt end up with more menu bar items, and possibly a tool bar under that, but I'm trying to keep things super simple, yet very powerful at the same time.

[Gregg Williams]

So still plugging along on the map editor. Got a basic tree view style control working. Hope to have something more to show this weekend.

[koiwai]

Don't know how to say it and not feel stupid, but, somehow, I really admire this devlog, and the way you develop M.I.N.T.

(follow)

[Gregg Williams]

Don't know how to say it and not feel stupid, but, somehow, I really admire this devlog, and the way you develop M.I.N.T.

(follow)

Haha, well cheers I'll be keeping at it, and hopefully as some other projects drop off things will only increase.

[Gregg Williams]

Some more progress on the editor. Basic tree control is working, though ideally need to work in icons on the left side of the items.



Also need to work out an XML spec or something to define what actually goes into the tree, and how these items work.
For instance Roads should act a single brush, but should randomly pull from tile ids 0-20 when painting.

Any suggestions for the editor's name?

I was amusingly considering M.I.N.T.E.R

[Gregg Williams]

So work continues on the map editor.

One of the slowest parts of everything is just figuring out how to break down and organize all the data.

Part of that is deciding how to organize the tile sheets themselves, which then factors into rendering performance and other engine characteristics. I've decided to break down tiles by environment set, and then layer. So you would for instance have a jungle environment, which than has tile strips/sheets for base ground, fringe, shadow, objects and structures, and maybe overhead/foreground.

Each layer than can have its own tile ids starting at 0 and incrementing for however much is needed. This is important since you have properties associated to tiles as well which are looked up by tile id like height for instance. Its also needed in the editor to handle the definition of brushes. Though this does also mean I need to create tile property data on a per layer and per environment basis as well, vs just in a single giant file. Potentially a bit more annoying for us, but on the plus side its not nearly as memory wasteful.

Now I just need to create the actual sheets, and also figure out how to define it all. I'll probably actually use XML for that bit, despite generally disliking XML. Given the early stage of development, being able to easily hand edit some definitions is likely a big win. These can always later be converted to binary or some other format down the road.

[Gregg Williams]

So developed the initial draft of the the data format to feed into the editor.

Its using XML and basically defines an environment, which contains a number of tile sets, followed with a number of brush categories, that contain a number of brushes.

I can loop through and read the brush categories to generate the parent folders in the tree view, and then read in each individual brush and add that as a child.

The tricky part is the brushes themselves, as I need quite a few different types, given you have terrain, buildings, obstacles, units themselves, and even meta stuff like marking deployment zones.

[Impmaster]

This sounds like the game will need to process quite a bit.

[Gregg Williams]

This sounds like the game will need to process quite a bit.

Tons, and its complicated by all the single player campaign stuff, where you want to be able to lay out map triggers, and other junk.

Also we want most things in the maps to be destroyable, so there needs to be alternate graphical states for tons of stuff, as well as associated data like health, armor types, and so forth. (Like infantry machin guns are likely to do squat to a concrete building, yet larger weapons from a tank or a mech, etc...)

[Impmaster]

You guys feel like you're ready for all this?

[Gregg Williams]

You guys feel like you're ready for all this?

Haha well thats an interesting question.

I like to think so at any rate.

Combined I and Kawe have something like 30+ years of experience in the associated fields. No doubt the project will take a good amount of time to do though.