Editor?

[unmerged(1783)]

I've been thinking about how nice it would be to have a good game editor.

For example, think how much easier it would be to modify the scenarios if you could change national provinces (CB's) by looking at a map, selecting a country, and clicking provinces to turn the shields on and off. Or imagine how nice it would be to edit saved games in a way that wouldn't require looking back and forth at the provinces.csv file and double-checking everything for consistency to make sure the game didn't crash when you loaded it. And so on.

But, before getting started on this, I'd like to know what kinds of things people would want in an editor, how much effort has already been put into design, whether anyone knows the format of the map file (if we can't parse that, I suppose we could just take a bunch of screenshots and stitch them together...), etc.

It would be even nicer if Paradox would let us borrow their code to parse the files, but even without that they'd be pretty easy to handle.

Also, assuming anyone else wants to be involved in this, how should we organize this? It sounds like a perfect SourceForge project to me, under a BSD-style license (to allow people to steal chunks of code for their own projects, and even allow Paradox to stick it on a CD with the game without having to worry about who to ask for permission).

I assume I should dig up my old copy of VC++ and install that, because I doubt anyone else wants to work with Cygwin and the gtk+ port, right?

 

[unmerged(372)]

The kind of effort that it would only be worth it to include such a thing in an expansion pack or sequel. There are a few cool utils downloadable right now like the freeid calculator, GC country selector, and Random-Scen generator.

 

[unmerged(1783)]

Originally posted by driedcow
The kind of effort that it would only be worth it to include such a thing in an expansion pack or sequel. There are a few cool utils downloadable right now like the freeid calculator, GC country selector, and Random-Scen generator.

I think you misunderstood me. I wasn't suggesting that Johan do the work to provide an editor. He's already done more than enough in making all of the data available to us in human-readable text files. I was suggesting that a group of us start an open source project to build an editor ourselves.

Since I was considering using a BSD-style license, Paradox would be free to take this editor and package it with an expansion pack or sequel, or borrow all the code and build it into the game, or whatever else they wanted--but that would be entirely up to them.

 

[Cockney]

Does anyone have a link to GC country selector? it will save me all that file editing

 

[Doomdark]

Does anyone have a link to GC country selector? it will save me all that file editing

You will have to download the 'Improved Grand Campaign' to get it, since I have not made a separate version (sorry about that). The link is in my signature.

 

[Cockney]

Ok I haven't got round to downloading the IGC yet becaus I want to finish my current knights game first, is Granada available with the ICG?

 

[Hartmann]

Originally posted by Cockney
is Granada available with the ICG?

Yes.

Hartmann

 

[unmerged(2150)]

When I'm thinking about the editor, my first idea is to provide map of provinces. This map will look as wire model: adjacent provinces are connected. All data which is neccesary is in the game: province coordinates are in /DB/province.csv and province adjacency table is in /Map/adjacent.tbl. Yes, this will be really big piece of work!