LÖVE

I was wondering about the community's general feelings about this subject. I assume this sort of tool would be useful to developers in love (especially for, say, platformer devs ), but as it stands, love's relatively modern use of 2D graphics and physics isn't very well suited for integration with (it seems) map editors already out there.

Some thoughts:

• A lot of features (per-pixel collision, tile-by-tile collision) that were well suited for the job in older days would be inefficient with hardware 2d rendering and a full-blown physics engine modeled after 3d physics.
• A lot of cool things (guiltless translucency and sprite scaling/rotation, efficient arbitrary convex hull physics) can be directly incorporated into features of the map editor. Like maybe we can specify a map's collision scheme using large polygons and such?
• This sort of editor could be useful for compiling some sort of sprite object thing (as specifying convex hulls for an arbitrary sprite by code can be tedious...)
• Tiles are cool. But then again, does it even need to be tiles?
• Possibility: You could specify a map file output with lua and directly include it in a game's source. In that case, you could even precompile it with luac...
• Heck you could write a map editor in LOVE, but that means working with the restricted file system subset.

Discuss?

Sides question to this topic about Luac.. I tried to compile some basic modules and then include those in love project but that didnt seem to work and error message was something like cannot locate file.. Same piece of code worked in standalone lua thou..

rasjani wrote:Sides question to this topic about Luac.. I tried to compile some basic modules and then include those in love project but that didnt seem to work and error message was something like cannot locate file.. Same piece of code worked in standalone lua thou..

Does standard require() work? (Not to be confused with love.filesystem.require()).

Maybe a map editor similar to the Soldat map editor.
Soldat is a polish game or something, which is basically a OpenGL or DirectX Liero-clone, with more players and with fancy polygon based graphics with textures on them.
I haven't played it in ages.
http://www.soldat.pl/ - is the website, the map editor is polygon based, the game is actually great, not sure why I stopped playing it.
If maps where made like this, they would work perfectly well with the physics system, and Soldat actually has a similar physics system.
Well, it could be something to base a map editor on anyway.

Beore we go about creating a tile/map-editor, we need to create a map format. What do we want from the map object? How extensible should it be? There are lots of clever software design people here, so I'm sure we can figure something out.

Ideas:

• Layers
• Animated tiles
• Event callbacks? (EnterTile, ExitTile, etc)

Greets! First post... and a thought...

Perhaps, instead of re-inventing the wheel, you may consider supporting or adapting to either/and/or Mappy http://www.tilemap.co.uk/mappy.php or Tile Studio http://tilestudio.sourceforge.net/

Both are excellent tile and map editors with huge feature sets. Mappy also has the advantage of using LUA as a scripting language for extending its functionality... Both are free, though Mappy has some advanced features if you purchase the "pro" version for $19.00US but the "free" version is very good as is too.

Just a thought... Cheers!

@sardtok: That's really cool! Yeah, something sorta similar like that. Well, a personal preference of mine has always been to use tiles, though, since I'm oldskool like that, but yeah, that seems like a good idea to check soldat out.

@rude: Definitely, a format would be really useful. Some more feature ideas:

• A tileset
• Rooms
• A way to name certain tiles so programmers can refer to the tile later in code
• Tile orientation tags
• Layer size, offset, translucency, and parallax

@retroman: Welcome!
Yeah, I've actually explored Mappy and Tile Studio, but the way Box2D works doesn't lend itself well to either's collision scheme. I mean, they're great editors, and Tile Studio's export-to-lua thingy is really nice... I would totally use TS, but in this case, a tile-based collision scheme, which both editors will probably continue to support, is not as natural to LOVE or Box2D as a polygon-based one.

@all: Anybody here familiar with GUI programming?

Thank you for the welcome!

but the way Box2D works doesn't lend itself well to either collision scheme.

Ah... yes. I hadn't thought of that at all... back in the "old days" physics engines in 2D didn't exist per se... I can see I need to revise my thinking a bit...

A tile editor would be rather easy to make in LOVE.

Kaze wrote:A tile editor would be rather easy to make in LOVE.

It should probably be a "real" application. The filesystem support is quite limited.