More updates
- You can now 'paint' tiles into the level using the tile painting tool
- You can now 'paint' scripts into the level using the script painting tool
- I plan to add a 'Check for Errors' button, which will point out common issues

Nah, it'd be no problem!  None of the existing files would have to know these things.  It'd just be another file containing some specs (which the game could output itself, now that I think about it).

Alrighty, should be no problems.

I'll add in my 2 cents, for what its worth, there would be quite a number of problems shifting to OpenGL at this stage anyways. For a start, the dimensions of most bitmaps right now are weird sizes.

So even if you were to change all that and make all bitmaps powers of two, it will be a pain in the ass for everyone else.

If you were to load bitmaps, then cut them up in memory to power of two chunks, you would wind up with a lot of texture handles (Some of the large tilesets may produce a hundred or so texture handles!) and this isn't really an efficient way of doing things.

Texture sampling is also going to be an issue. Ideally with the way OpenGL works and so forth, you will probably see a lot of bleeding issues. I generally give a 1 pixel border on a lot of my OpenGL resources so that I don't get this problem, although you can some what fix this by using different sampling methods.

I don't believe the switch to OpenGL is going to add much, and will probably be a big gigantic head ache for you. I can understand why, you may have liked to do it ... but certainly it would have been better to have done it from the start.

My next 2D engine for my game (which is still in documentation planning) will be using OpenGL however, so feel free to chat to me about it at any time!

 

Ah, neat.  I think paint-style drawing would feel a lot better, yeah.

Yeah me too. It's not until I started trying to use this seriously that I realized that the method I was using now wasn't very efficient.

I forgot to mention how much I liked your icons for the different tile types!

Thanks. I did them pretty quickly actually. I'd prefer to color them some how, but I'm not sure what colors to use yet to make them work with everything else.

I'll work with you soon to externalize more of the game's engine for this editor.

Sure. Most of everything is reasonably flexible in this editor right now, requiring subtle changes to allow some of the hard coded values to be in a config or whatever.

It'd be great to allow for defined tile size, type names, screen size, etc.  And perhaps there could be a larger set of icons that could be picked from the tile type file.

Certainly, but that would be quite a big change to your file formats, no?

Changed quite a few things. I changed the way the tools work, and they're no longer in the main frame's tool bar. They are now within their own tool frame, which hovers above the main frame. I've decided to change the way the tile assigning system works by using a paint brush system instead. So now, you select the tile you want to use and you just paint it on the level. This is also the same for placing scripts in the map.

Other than that, I sat down and made some new icons for the tools menu as well. I probably will make some colored tiles for the tile types as well. Another release may occur at the end of this month.

It's pretty difficult to copy right a game mechanic, however it is possible to get a parent for it. However, patents aren't universally accepted and there are a lot of stupid software patents that do exist (they are stupid because they are so vague and generic, thus being as broad as they can possibly be).

Copy right exists in my belief to offer some rights to the hard work that is developed by a person. It is his / her right in how that creation gets used whether he / she decides it is for public use or whatever else.

Patents on the other hand are tricky. I mean, I could come up with the same solution to a patent as well that was totally independent to the current existing patent. Still, I suppose if patents don't exist the sheer fact of innovation / invention wouldn't exist. But, I think patent laws need to be looked at when it comes to software.

As I was reading that, it almost sounded like a Death March project.

My first game that I started developing was actually a match three game clone, and the only real comments I have on that is that I didn't particularly enjoy developing it. Clones I suppose are one way to try to develop a game and get it out there to the people who already enjoy those sorts of games. However in my case, I never played these sorts of games before, so I had no real idea on how to design a fun and interesting match three.

So I suppose, you'll have to ask yourself if it is actually a good idea to do something which you may have no interest in (I don't really have an interest in match three's at all). Development may 'seem' easy for these titles, but it really is quite a lot of work still.

Developing a clone for the pure sake of money isn't a viable business model in my opinion, but then again it has worked for some companies.

You should start a thread for bug reports and feature requests and such.

Aye, this is what Mantis is for

I got it now. Simple and clean. Very slick too!

Thanks! I'm still working on it, but I wanted to release something to get it out there and to get feedback. Isolated development isn't very good!

I can't get it open. I try to open it and it tells me to reinstall it...

I compiled this project with Visual Studio 2008 Express, which perhaps indicates that you may need to install the Visual C++ 2008 Redistribution pack.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=9b2da534-3e03-4391-8a4d-074b9f2bc1bf&displaylang=en

Most people have these installed, but most games are compiled with MSVC++ 2005 and have the 2005 version installed.

Anyways, try installing these and hopefully that will make the editor work for you.

Where do I put it?

There isn't anything to install, it is just a zip file from which you can put anywhere. Balding's Quest must exist inside the folder you put it into though, and it has to be named BQ for now. For example,

C:\BqEd\    <- Folder that contains BQEd
C:\BqEd\BQ\ <- Folder that contains BQ

http://www.digitalconfectioners.com/BqEd

I've release a version of BqEd. Other than absolutely having BQ inside a BQ folder inside the editor folder, I'll let you guys have a crack at it. If theres any real serious issues, just post on Mantis at http://www.digitalconfectioners.com/mantis

Finally added in the tile types code. I so far load them and render them, but you can't quite alter them yet. That won't take too long to add though. If anyone has some time to make me some nice icons for the tile types, select and move that'd be much appreciated. I've just made some quick gray scale versions, but they don't quite match the Silk ones.

I may release a version soon, as it has the basic systems in place I feel. A lot of features and functionality is still missing, but it will keep getting better.

Also, I added an About section for Balding's Quest, is there much you'd like to add in there  BMcC?

Oh man, it's looking so complete already!

It's definately getting there, but not quite yet. Theres still a lot of work to do it seems.

I think I asked you this before, but would it be possible to use this for other games made with the BQ engine?  (That might have different resolutions, tile sizes, tile map sizes, etc.?)  I could make any modifications to the engine you'd need.

I believe so. I've hard coded some values in, such as how many tiles are present on the map and stuff, but I can probably put those values into a config file or something. If needed, I could perhaps allow the user to change the tile sizes when making a new map, difficult part is, is that the map file doesn't include the size of each tile at the moment. I only set it to 8x8 as that is what I calculated it to be.

I added the offset parameters for sprites, so that should be just about everything I need to do there. I added some more status bar information such as mouse position and what script you are currently hovering over.

It's good being able to finally load maps into BqEd. More to come...

So,

Box01
9 9 0 0

9 9 is the size of the sprite,
0 0 is the offset?

Ahh fixed it, it had to do with the fact I was renaming the script files internally to more friendly readable names. This caused the look up to go funny since it was looking for exact characters. So it looks like my assumptions were all correct. 

I worked a lot on the selection code today. It's not particularly easy to do all the logic to handle area box selection, alt & control switches (hold alt to remove, hold control to add) ... but I think I got it all working properly. I suppose when people try it out they can complain to me about it.

I also got the level loading finally done as well. It seems that I have a few problems with my script loading, either it isn't parsing properly, or it's not placing them properly, or I made the wrong assumption with how things are placed. I don't know, I suppose I'll have to debug it to figure it out. (I assumed that objects are center aligned, so a 16x16 script sprite has a positional center of 8x8. It seems to work for a few items, but a few others it doesn't work ... so more debugging is required, unless of course, BMcC could help me out here).

Otherwise, a few more things were done behind the scenes which probably won't really interest anybody.

I think to prevent myself from reinventing the wheel, I'll just make it open script files in another application of your choice.

After building the library for handling the scripts section of Balding's Quest, I finally added the ability to add scripts into the map. Looks like everything turned out quite alright there.

There's still the matter of building the toolsets for the scripts however as even though you can add them, there is no way to alter them from that point. You can't move them, delete them or anything like that. So that is the next task of my list of a rather large to do (which is thankfully getting smaller).

I also cleaned up the context menu by making sure it was context sensitive to what you were right clicking on. Theres no point to add the 'edit' and 'properties' menu options if your not right clicking on a selected part, nor is there any point to add a select part if you are already right clicking on a selected area.

Yep, ok I've done that now. I now scan the lua file for two things, either a setupObject construct which I then extract the animation file name from, or from the child_animfile parameter. The child_animfile parameter has priority though, so I imagine if you were to write a script that used both, BqEd would peek into child_animfile first than to construct a setupObject table.