Andor's Trail

Tomcat wrote:

sdevaney wrote:
That is pretty much how it works. The only part left out is that the online content editor is used to create all the non-map content. It basically takes your input from the web page and turns it into an XML syntaxed file. Which as Tomcat so excellently pointed out the app gets the bulk of its information.

Although we are currently looking at options to standardize our resource files so that it is easier to both add and extract data.
We are looking to simplify the maintenance and upgrades of the files. As well as hopefully cutting down the time it takes to create the content.

sdevaney

Is there documentation on the content editor? I've seen a couple of development tutorials that seem out of date. Even just a list of definitions of the field would help ... Many are self explanatory to the average player, but others are harder.


For instance on the Monster tab, what are Size (dimension of icon in tiles?) and Faction? Looking through the monster type xml, I don't see Faction anywhere, and Size is always either blank or rarely 1x1. Also, I figured out what "spawn group" is, but only because I've been poking around in the map file spawn layer. The average player us likely at a loss what to put here.

Anything I can do to help?

There is no documentation for the editors yet, but it is on the list of our high priorities.

Size means tile size. Allowing support for different default tile sizes.

Fraction will be used to make several groups of mobs hostile under certain circumstances.

Maybe we could add a CSS pop-up tooltip for each input area. A simple one or two line explanation of what to put there. It is not a replacement for full blown documentation but should help clear up the confusion.

sdevaney

sdevaney wrote: There is no documentation for the editors yet, but it is on the list of our high priorities.

Size means tile size. Allowing support for different default tile sizes.

Fraction will be used to make several groups of mobs hostile under certain circumstances.

Maybe we could add a CSS pop-up tooltip for each input area. A simple one or two line explanation of what to put there. It is not a replacement for full blown documentation but should help clear up the confusion.

sdevaney

I don't recall seeing any multi-tile monsters yet. Is this tested well enough to start using in new maps? I'm thinking about putting together a Hill Giant area, and a double tall icon could work nicely, with perhaps a 2x2 boss. I want to make this a really tough one.

Tool tips would rock. Also, in the places where you put in a name from another list, like where you select an actor condition that a monster hit causes, having a drop-down of the currently available options would be very helpful, in addition to just typing in the value.
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Perhaps it's because I'm using my phone browser to look at it, but when I try to define a new monster, I don't see where any output of code to insert into the xml is created. What am I missing?

Tomcat wrote: I don't recall seeing any multi-tile monsters yet. Is this tested well enough to start using in new maps? I'm thinking about putting together a Hill Giant area, and a double tall icon could work nicely, with perhaps a 2x2 boss.

IIRC, we only have one monster that does not use 1x1 tilesize, there is one boss down under Flagstone prison that uses 2x2. But the code is definately ready for using monsters with larger size, provided we can find graphics that look good and that we can use in a project like this.

Tomcat wrote:Tool tips would rock. Also, in the places where you put in a name from another list, like where you select an actor condition that a monster hit causes, having a drop-down of the currently available options would be very helpful, in addition to just typing in the value.

Good point. We'll look at adding tooltips. About having a dropdown, there should be a basic jquery-completion available, but I think I set it to only trigger after one keystroke. Might be a bit buggy though, the editor isn't the most production-critical code

Tomcat wrote: Perhaps it's because I'm using my phone browser to look at it, but when I try to define a new monster, I don't see where any output of code to insert into the xml is created. What am I missing?

Use Export in the upper right hand corner. That output goes into the res/values/content_** -files. Intuitive, isn't it

Tomcat wrote:I see that the ordering of layers isn't necessarily always the same. The spawn layer is mostly second, after keys, but sometimes this varies, and in some maps there are multiple spawn layers for different groups of monsters and/or NPCs.

Does the order matter, since those layers are not visible?? What is the purpose of splitting the spawns? Performance enhancement?

The ordering of the tile layers (ground, objects, above) is important, but the ordering of the object layers (keys, spawn, mapevents) is not that important. As you noted, some maps have multiple layers of spawn. This is for two reasons; first is that some spawns are so large that it would be a pain to work with the map if we couldn't hide a spawnlayer. Secondly, this is intentional when dealing with unique (non-respawning) monsters due to the fact that monsters are spawned in the order of the object layers. That way we can make sure that a unique monster is spawned before a non-unique monster.

Hope that answers your questions!

Oh, btw, have you seen the nifty stuff that you can do with the new versions of Tiled? Excellent little program that.