Wish: Give us an editor for non-randomized custom scenarios!

[Nemesis1]

Hear me, o powerful Darkgod! Imagine a scenario editor with a user-friendly what-you-see-is-what-you-get interface that would let us make simple non-randomized custom levels for ToME4! The Tutorial module would be a good example of what could be made with such a level editor. Here are some more ideas on what the release of ToMEdit could lead to.

1. Challenge maps that give the players pre-designed equipment options and pit them against pre-designed hordes of monsters. Test your skills with Rogue and see how many tries you need before you can survive the monsters and traps of the Gauntlet! Find out which is the best race and class combo when it comes to the Troll Slaughtering Challenge! Create your own challenge, upload it to the internet and see if anyone is smart enough to solve your tactical puzzles!

2. Story-driven adventures. I suppose that the earliest versions of the editor would let the players design plots that are driven by "floor lore" documents and conversations with rather static NPC's with very simple AI - like the quest givers you meet in the towns of Maj'Eyal, but we're a very creative community and you'll be suprised when you see what we can achive even with such simple options!

3. Other tutorials that would demonstrate how the different classes work. As it is now you'll either have to use debug mode cheats or play for endless hours if you want to see what the different classes can do when they've reached high experience levels, which is probably the rewarding, fun and given way to explore the game for many players. But for players with less time on their hands, tutorial levels made with the editor would be a more than welcome way to see the different classes in their full glory. Custom tutorials like these could be a very pedagogical way to show and explain the more complex mechanics of classes like the Paradox Mage.

I'm sure that an editor that would let us do things like these would work wonders on the community! Soon the internet would be flooded by the works of the artistic and innovative ToME4 players! So hear my prayers, Darkgod, please give us ToMEdit!

Important! To all other ToME4 players reading this: Don't just read the thread, think that a level editor sounds cool and go on surfing, opening another forum thread. Take your time to come up with ideas for the editor and discuss them in this thread! Let Darkgod see his enthusiastic community and increase the chance of ToMEdit seeing the light of day soon. Provided that you do want the editor to be released. But I can't understand why any ToME4 player wouldn't want that to happen. Of course, far from everyone would have time to play around with the editor, even if it had a what-you-see-is-what-you-get interface, and I'm sure many of us are content with the Maj'Eyal campaign, but even if you personally don't think you'll be using ToMEdit or playing modules designed with it, you can't deny how much an active custom scenario community would engage many players and make the game bigger.

[bricks]

You know the game is fully editable, right? I'm pretty sure you could do everything you just described with the addons system, though compatibility might be tough. You'd need to learn some LUA/coding, but quite frankly any graphical design interface is always going to either have very limited capabilities or is eventually going to break down into a glossy code editor.

[Nemesis1]

You know the game is fully editable, right? I'm pretty sure you could do everything you just described with the addons system, though compatibility might be tough. You'd need to learn some LUA/coding, but quite frankly any graphical design interface is always going to either have very limited capabilities or is eventually going to break down into a glossy code editor.

I know that you would have to code to do the more advanced things with the Te4 engine, but the graphical (or at least ASCII graphical) WYSIWYG editor I suggested was meant to be a level/scenario editor, not a game creator. The three examples wouldn't be too hard to create with a user-friendly graphical editor?

The main benefits of a graphical editor would be that everyone could make his or her own levels, and get a lot of work done quickly and smoothly. While there would of course be limitations, it would of course be fully possible to do the start and winning conditions, the terrain, the monsters, the treasures, write the lore documents, place some static friendly NPC's that could do things that wouldn't require an advanced AI (like standing around running a shop, initiating a dialogue tree and giving the player a quest and its reward). If the scenario designer wants to add more advanced features to his or her scenario, those could be programmed in LUA afterwards.

Have you played WarCraft II: TIdes of Darkness? That game comes with a simple editor that lets you draw landscapes, place buildings and units, etc. But you can't link your custom levels together into a campaign and it isn't possible to give the custom maps other victory conditions than defeating all your enemies. That didn't stop the editor from being hugely popular - WarCraft II players have made thousands and thousands of custom maps for the game, despite - no, thanks to - the simplicity of the editor!

Even though we shouldn't be pessimistic I guess we would be setting our hopes a bit too high if we expected the ToME4 community to become as big as the WarCraft II community, but I think an editor would greatly help the ToME4 community become to roguelikes what WarCraft II became to real time strategy games.

[Massimiliano Marangio]

Did you try the tiled map editor? There are maps for several special levels in the SVN repository under t-engine4/tiled-maps. You can export the tilesets and use them to create own maps (or just edit the old maps). Use numbers if a tile is missing or for placeholders. By exporting the new map in the t-engine4 format you obtain (unfinished!) lua code that can be used in a module/addon.

See
http://te4.org/wiki/t4modules-developin ... led-plugin

but you can skip the first steps if you use the already made tilesets.

[yufra]

I think we could improve the provided Tiled tilesets to handle a lot of what Nemesis1 is asking. There is no GUI for creating dialog, items, NPCs, etc, but I have no interest in doing that for the short- to mid-term. Take a look and feel free to offer suggestions on the Tiled stuff, though. Cheers!