Level editor INSIDE doom legacy?

[shinobi]

Hello again... its been a long time.

¿Its is technically possible (or at least, easy) to integrate some kind of "Doom Builder" inside the next Doom Legacy?

Can we discuss the pro and cons here?

Besides the obvious GUI issues, of course..

The initial requirements for something like this are:


Works in 320x200
A simple image (tiff,bmp, etc...) import.
Pallete export.
Integrated ZenNode.
Tools for texture-alignment.
Monster-Object editing
Script editing - testing.



And, "multiplayer" editing, using the MP Legacy capabilities.

[Devan]

Good idea! It would be easy for example, to make 3D floors because we could see them. And other things... I think it's good idea...

[Danimetal]

And it´s sure to be terribly difficult too!. For example, if you want to edit the level in read time you would have to do something with the "Write-Read" scheme, the nodes and a lot of things more... Have you tried the free game "Cube", it has a built-in level editor and it´s pretty cool :).

[Hurdler]

And it would require lots of work on the programming side :(

[Danimetal]

So:

¿Its is technically possible (or at least, easy) to integrate some kind of "Doom Builder" inside the next Doom Legacy?

Shimobi here´s your response:

it would require lots of work on the programming side .

[smite-meister]

Legacy is designed to be portable to many different platforms. If we were to include a level editor (or merge Legacy with an existing one), we would need
a GUI for the editing (menus, buttons, toolbars, dialogs etc.). Programming them from scratch means so much work that people usually use existing GUI toolkits and libraries instead, such as Qt, GTK+, MFC, wxWidgets and so forth.

However, all these libs add huge amounts of extra dependencies for the program, make if heavier to run, and are not available for some platforms, which is why we most likely will not include an editor to Legacy.

On the other hand, when the Legacy OpenGL renderer has matured a bit, any Doom level editor project under a GPL-compatible license can take our renderer code and make it a part of their editor if they want to. Of course, there's still the problem of nodebuilding...

[Danimetal]

I´m not sure if it would be actually possible to do what Shinobi suggested (not that I support it but I get his point), specially (as twice mentioned above) because of the nodes thing... Shinobi said something about "integrated Zennode" but I don´t think that´s possible without changing the whole wad structure.

As far as I know nodes have to be built before actually being able to see something decent. Every single change you´d make to a line would have to rebuild all the nodes so it can be displayed... Imagine the waiting times for large maps!.

On the other hand, I´m no expert at Wad structures and nodes but from my ignorance it breeds the probably impossible idea of "partial nodes": splitting the mapspace into pieces and building the nodes of each one of them. Done a change in a section only that section has to be rebuilt... And still takes time. Seriously, I don´t think it´s possible with the current structure and I´m not sure about it - changing the whole game as we know it - being attractive enough to take the task.

[Rellik_jmd]

You'd be farther ahead to modify Doom Builders 3D view window to include drawing sectors and moving structures. Would be very very awesome though.

[CrazedImp]

Doesnt DeepSea already have something similar with Risen3D?

[smite-meister]

As far as I know nodes have to be built before actually being able to see something decent.
Actually you can render a map without the nodes, it will simply be much slower.
Not that it matters in the least if you have a modern GPU and are editing a typical Doom map.

[Danimetal]

Didn´t know that... I guess I should read a little bit about this BSP thing :).

[shinobi]

(arrgggh, wrong post, sorry)

[shinobi]

(arrgggh, wrong post, sorry)

[shinobi]

On the other hand, when the Legacy OpenGL renderer has matured a bit, any Doom level editor project under a GPL-compatible license can take our renderer code and make it a part of their editor if they want to. Of course, there's still the problem of nodebuilding...

That seems a much much better idea...*guitar*

Something like this
(Just for illustrative purposes)
http://img187.imageshack.us/img187/9849/testae5.png
A GUI app with the renderer inside...

[Raptor Jesus]

I wish Doom Builder would actually render exactly how Doom renders it. Would make create some glitchy elements easier and help detect errors and HOM's faster too.

[Danimetal]

I wish Doom Builder would actually render exactly how Doom renders it. Would make create some glitchy elements easier and help detect errors and HOM's faster too.
Doesn´t Doom Builder have a software rendering mode?... Nah, I don´t think so... Anyway, it´s not that hard to get used to OpenGl (despite it´s strange performance on classic glitches) when editing glitchy things.

[g6672D]

It'd be possible to do things that Doom Builder can already do in 3D mode. But then that completely eliminates any usefulness of such a feature. Editing should stay in the editors.

[shinobi]

So far, we agree that is better to use legacy renderer inside another app than using legacy as an editor. So some issues arise.

Its cool to have the renderer embedded inside another app. But for do effective editing, some features would be needed inside legacy. Specifically, the ability to understand some messages, in real-time, as :


Sector height/light up-down.
Sector type change.
Thing add/delete/move and others
Texture offset change
Vertex coordinate change.


Please note, i'm not for asking features or something, just throwing ideas in the table...

[Danimetal]

I think that Legacy could support in some way everything you mentioned except the vertex thing:

-Sector height can be managed with FS, also lighting.
-The sector type can be managed with Boom support.
-Adding, deleting and moving things is possible with FS.
-The offsets can be managed with Boom support.

Anyway, Legacy can do such things but, why would anyone want to use the old Legacy OpenGl renderer to make an editor?.

[shinobi]

BTW , FraggleScript is old stuff by now, right?

[Danimetal]

Not neccesarily... Next Legacy version is going to have a few FS commands that are not available in the current V1.42 so you will be able to do things with arrays, armor and stuff :). Still and as far as I know, FS will keep on being an interpreted language so any problem will instantly shut the scripts down, it will be "prone" to skip commands (as always, only happened to me a couple of times tough) and, well, you know, all things that FS does :)... I´m personally quite happy with FS and I wouldn´t like to see it being abandoned...

...But the next version will also include ACS support. Unlike FS, ACS is a compiled language (damn, I´m learning some stuff at this programming course XD!) that means something like "more stable and fast". ACS will be able to do some things that FS does and some others that it doesn´t but all ZDoom extensions won´t be added to Legacy´s ACS.

Anyway, I see FS and ACS as complementary languages as each one of them can do some things the other can´t so, for me, FS is not old stuff :).

By the way, I could be mistaken in any technical aspects so, please, correct me if I´m wrong.

[g6672D]

The 1.43 CVS build has a few of the new FS commands and additional improvements to a couple of others. Only it generates savegame crashes (apparently because of how the arrays get stored). At least with 2.0, it'll have to add ACS.

But I go off-topic. Adding a few level-manipulating console commands would be useful for debugging. But they should not make permanent alterations. The obvious reason is because you don't want to stuff your IWADs up, nor your savegames.

[lucius octavion]

Doom Builder has only a software 3d mode I think. The best 3d editor I know of is SLADE.

[Macro11_1]

I dont want to hijack this cool thread, but a neat idea could be to have the ability to launch a client//server online mapping program, where people could eddit the same map online.

Like take doombuilder, and throw in 4 extra mouse pointers, and let them all do what they want. *turvy*

I dont know if this is exactily what you are talking about; so if it is, im sorry for restating a good idea.

[Graf_Zahl]

Sounds like some incredibly messy and unusable nonsense to me...

[Raptor Jesus]

Yah. All four people would have to have the exact same idea. This could be done by each person creating part of a map and them just compile them together.

[Aliotroph?]

Only game I've ever seen that could edit maps in multiplayer was Cube (http://www.cubeengine.com/). Neat game. You can be playing it, hit a key and start editing the map. It sacrifices some flexibility for that though.

DB only has a GL renderer, btw.

[Devan]

Multi-person map editing is also very great idea. But client-server isn't enough. I also like splitscreen :)