Re: [Adonthell-devel] Modeller and Connectors

[Kai Sterker]

On Sun, Nov 6, 2011 at 12:35 PM, Kai Sterker <address@hidden> wrote:

> But now I'll really be focusing on mapedit :-).

Filtering by matching entities is in, as well as filtering by tag.
Remains updating the grid based on connectors, if present.

There is one minor issue with that, however. For the connector based
filtering, the object currently used for drawing is used to filter the
entity list. For grid adjustment, by default I will use the last
object placed on the map, to adjust the grid to. That will work fine
when working on some structure, where you place some objects, tab to
the next entity you want to use, place that, tab to the next, and so
on.

But eventually comes the where you want to extend some other part of
the map, and in that case you might want to have the grid aligned to
an object already present on the map. Maybe, by picking an object from
the map, this would make the grid adjust to this object next. In that
case, you'd pick the object where you want to continue building, tab
to the desired matching entity and it will adjust to the previously
picked object.

Sounds like this could work out well enough, after all.


I also remembered that there is the whole topic of grouping objects in
mapedit. Might look into that too, although it will take some time to
prepare. But perhaps more important is making the map file format
better suited for version control and distributed editing. That means
no longer randomly numbering entities each time the map is saved, but
giving them fixed, unique ids.

These should be the same if two developers add the same entity
independently from each other onto the map, but different for
different entities. Maybe a hash of the relative path and file name of
the entity. That would have to be implemented on engine side, when
saving the map.

As an alternative, each entity could get a fixed, unique id at
creation time. That would work more like the connector template ids.
And the case of collision could be resolved easier by manually editing
one of the model files. So that's probably the better approach.


Quite some stuff left to do, but looks like we're getting the editing
tools into a pretty usable state soon. Now we only need users for
them. And good documentation.

Cheers,

Kai