[Castlevania]

Just out of curiosity, does there a exist some sort of MZX board designer that lets you design boards outside of mzx? Something with the ability to import chars and palettes, copy/paste, zoom in/out, you know, all the usual image editing stuff but with chars!

no? I thought not, somebody should design this right away, if not just for my benefit!

what yall think?

[hob nado]

It's a cool idea, but not sure what the reason for it would be outside of being able to expand the window and see more of the board. Wouldn't it be kind of a pain to have to switch back and forth from that to MZX to play-test a board as you built it?

[Castlevania]

I'm thinking about the more complex board designs, you know multi char textures and the like. Or how about this, LAYERS. Yes, layers, obviously when converted mzx will flatten them but in the editor they could prove very handy... imagine how easy animations could be.

[LogiCow]

Using OpenGL scaling, you could make an editor where you could zoom out and view the entire board without having to scroll.

Plus, random level generators could make a basic layout really fast, and you would only have to fine-tune the details.

And it'd manage board transitions, to make sure the solid and non-solid blocks match.

[ajs]

Obviously if MZX3 was ever to materialise, completely separating the game and editor engines would be one of the first things to do. The game should integrate into the editor, of course, but that's easy with a refactoring.

--ajs.

[Sai'ke]

Are you thinking of starting a new game Ems? Or is this just a random suggestion?

[Galladin]

This actually sounds pretty useful.

How about an editor, where you can actually see ALL the boards at the same time, or at least boards linked with each other? Then you could zoom out and see where the boards connect etc etc...more or less what LogiCow mentioned.

[asiekierka]

What about he wants to finish NONSENSE 3?

[Castlevania]

Sai'ke, on Nov 19 2007, 01:28 PM, said:

Are you thinking of starting a new game Ems? Or is this just a random suggestion?

More of the latter but if something like this were to come along then I'd defnitely check it out.

[Koji]

Galladin, on Nov 19 2007, 09:56 AM, said:

How about an editor, where you can actually see ALL the boards at the same time, or at least boards linked with each other?

There is an obvious problem with THIS particular idea because alot of games boards, when connected together this way DEFY SPACIAL RELATIONS, even Caverns does.

You'd have to come up with an algorithm to detect these spacial imposabilities and display them in another empty section of the omniboardmap or something.

Anyway, I think just a board editor that scales and an easy way to navigate the board connections would be interesting, like when you're zoomed all the way out of the board, pressing left with load up the board connected to the left.

Of course that idea wouldn't work with robot connected boards.

Anyway a board with a paint mode, with layers and what not would be cool, HOWEVER you'd have to save the works in progress in another format.

On another note, I think it would be wise to make a release before hand that does little more than reformat the .mzx file to allow for more characters colors, etc. which could be something as simple as allocating words instead of chars for color and char information.

As for expanding overal graphics, I think the option of loading a bmp file as a char map, and loading 8x16 chunks of the bmp that correspond to char+color*(1>>16) (assuming we're working with words here) would be interesting. But that's another matter.

On the division of the mzx player and the mzx editor, I think this was only really needed back when memory was limited, if ever memory becomes a problem this would be a good idea, however I don't see a good reason for it.

[nooodl]

It could also include a Robotics editor that is a little more easy to use. (for example, pressing enter in the middle of a line to get the right half of it on the next line does not work in Megazeux's editor.) And maybe being able to add comments in an easier way without those quotation marks! (it's annoying when you want to put a " in your comments, it turns out as \")