dMZX Forums: Custom Creatures, Items, Terrain -> MegaZeux Feature Requests -> Tracker

In a future release of MZX, I think it could be worth investigating the possibility of customizing Creatures and Terrain still behaving like built ins.

The reason for this is that for custom enemies, they must be robots and you have a limit of 256 on a board. However, with creatures and terrain, you can put as many as you want all over the place. Not only that, they have really EASY to use menus to get them to do stuff or variants have their own basic version without settings to be made at all (like currents...).

The implementation concept I have (and made mockups for) is to basically have the option to replace any built in with this new 'meta creature' or 'meta terrain', which has all of the options of each class of object arranged somewhat sensibly. It doesn't necessarily need every single bit of nuance of every built in, but a nice variety would be excellent. I think you'll even see on the mockups, in which I don't have to care if it works, I just have to show what it *should* have, it can't even 'technically' create all of the built ins (i.e. there's no stealing option on the mockups...but I think I forgot to allow dropping bombs, which I think should be included...oops!)

https://drive.google...iew?usp=sharing
https://drive.google...iew?usp=sharing
https://drive.google...iew?usp=sharing

I have extremely low hopes of this ever seeing any support, but I thought I'd just throw it out there as a concept to consider. It's from a purely 'Vanilla MZX Editing' point of view and I'm not sure how much that's important to anyone anymore. I suspect, looking at the output these days, no one's really interested in vanilla style mzx anymore, but I argue that this could open up vanilla again to be fresh and quick to tweak the baseline gameplay.

Thanks for reading.

P.S. Alternatively, I thought of a side solution while posting this...
...Exposing the built-ins behavior AS Robotic that could be edited directly would another solution, but I like menus. They're fun.

The pictures are not displayable on my computer. (If you provide a direct link, or an attachment, then it should be compatible with more computers.)

However, I think that adding some kind of "synchronous code" (separate from Robotic; both can be used in the same world for different purposes) which is global for the world, would be a better way to handle custom kind of elements.

Menus could be used to define built-in attributes (the A_ definitions in the C source code), as well as other stuff such as number of damage (the menus included in MegaZeux can already be used for this purpose), etc. Perhaps, some simple functions will be definable using the menu that will not require the use of synchronous code. Furthermore, some built-in things are hard coded to check for specific kind of elements rather than using these attributes, so additional attributes could be added for this purpose (perhaps extending the attributes to 32-bits).

If the end result is easier to handle and more customizable, hell yeah.

I would assume maybe a configuration file of some sort could handle the changes to the editor along with handling possibly something like 'boiler plate robotic' in order to get the menu selections to actually take hold...

I could see it even being useful in normal development so that menus can be changed to streamline whatever the current task requires.

That all said, this could get way out of hand easily...