Presenting Anima - a new tool for BfW artists

[rhyging5]

yeeeeeaaahh, this is it. I work only in Photoshop for all artistic process, just use Anima at the end, to test and set only the technical aspects of my sprites, like TC or others....this being difficult for me.

[Lx_121]

new to the forum, so maybe someone is already working on it, but:

how about packaging all these tools into a proper developer's/editor's kit, that's more accessible to the average wesnoth user/would-be designer?

we already pack the map editor with the game; would be nice to have the whole (neatly organized) toolset, at least as an option.

[beetlenaut]

What you ask is already done. There are a lot of tools packaged with Wesnoth already, but only the map editor has a pretty interface, because only the map editor has to have it. What you actually want is a graphical editor for everything, but graphical interfaces are very time-consuming thing to write, so it's a low priority. (AFAIK, Broodkiller is the only one working on it.) Actually, some of us feel it's a negative priority. If there was a trivial learning curve, everyone and their cat would create content. Most of it, garbage.

[Lx_121]

no doubt, but among the trash, there would be some jewels from unsung geniuses.

i don't think it hurts the project to increase accessibility; the main servers don't have to host everything that's submitted. if "official" wesnoth is in a position to pick & choose "the best" from an active community that's constantly submitting new things, so much the better.

if these tools are already packaged in the stable distro, how does one access them/where do i find the tutorials on the site?

[Lx_121]

btw; i do not have a cat (currently), but if i did, it would be very insulted!

[beetlenaut]

if "official" wesnoth is in a position to pick & choose "the best" from an active community...

They do! That's where all but one official campaign came from.

All the tools that exist are in wesnoth/data/tools, but I'm not sure what you are expecting to be able to do with them. The only tools you need to make a campaign/era/unit/map are the BfW map editor, a graphics program, and a text editor. The last two already exist, so the BfW developers haven't made any. The packaged tools are only useful in specific circumstances. They are for cutting graphics into castle tiles, team-coloring units, making a web page of all units, upgrading old campaigns, and things like that.

A graphical editor for automatically coding a BfW campaign is possible, but would be a huge project. If you want one, you will probably have to make it yourself. If you insist that it's too hard, then you will understand the developers' position!

btw: That's not saying much. Cats are very easily insulted.

[Gambit]

The cat comment is also known as the SPORE Effect if that makes it less "offensive".

[Lx_121]

SPORE effect?

i'm a writer & sometimes a visual designer, not a coder; but think of this in terms of the end-users:

the game becomes more accessible (& more interesting) to more potential players, if we make it easier for them to create stuff.

right now, doing a map is relatively easy, but anything beyond that & you're into command-line & various other painful things...

it's WORTH the effort of making easy-to-use tools, if the project is about making a game that everyone can enjoy & use fully

otherwise we're just playing by ourselves.

also; if we make better, easier-to-use tools, it helps the serious designers as well. if it takes less time to do the "work" when you create a campaign (or a character pack, etc.), that means more time for the creative part, & more time to dream up new ideas!

[Boucman]

With such an easy language, anybody will be able to code, nobody will need to learn it anymore

from the inventor of FORTRAN about his new language

guess what... that's not true.


The basic problem with any game editor is that it's a hard problem. WML is a very open language that allows a lot of stuff and that can't really be dumbed down to an interesting subset...

there has been Summer of Code proposals to do what you suggest, but so far none of them has been accepted because nobody has been able to convince us that their project are realistic...

the best coders usually realize that this project is very hard and build proposals on other projects...

[SFault]

UI programmer's opinion; There could be a program that would make the basic information (music playlist, daycycle, teams etc) but having a program doing the events would be A) very complex to do or B) too simple to have any relevant use. In the end either using the program would be quite like writing code or most of the code needs to be by hand outside the program. Therefore the program isn't really worth of the effort. I would rather see GOOD API of WML.

[pauxlo]

UI programmer's opinion; There could be a program that would make the basic information (music playlist, daycycle, teams etc) but having a program doing the events would be A) very complex to do or B) too simple to have any relevant use.

... or C) you would have to click each WML element and attribute individually, making the use not much easier than typing in a text editor. (And it would not allow macros or auto-expand them.)

[DEATH_is_undead]

I think I found a bug...
OS: Windows XP

When I tried to load a CFG file, it crashed. Also, when I tried to Terminate in Process Table, it wouldn't.

If someone could verify this problem, that'd be great.

[Lx_121]

more info pls:

what all was running & especially what CFG file did you attempt to load (include copy?)

[DEATH_is_undead]

more info pls:

what all was running & especially what CFG file did you attempt to load (include copy?)

This unit from Era of the Future.

[Jetrel]

With such an easy language, anybody will be able to code, nobody will need to learn it anymore

from the inventor of FORTRAN about his new language

guess what... that's not true.

Dead right.

All forms of programming stuff in an editor are isometric to programming them by hand.
You're transforming it, you're not making it any easier. No matter how much it's changed, it's still just as complex to do certain things. If we put it into the editor, we'll effectively have invented a graphical programming language, and will have simply wasted a bunch of time for no net gain.

In fact, it might even be a loss; as text-based code, we get enormous benefits from existing toolchains. If we come up with some nutty graphical language, most of those benefits go away (assuming we no longer had a text-based version which I'll admit is absurd and unlikely).



Roughly the only things that make sense to specify in an editor rather than by hand, are things that are inherently graphical, and which are really a matter of data entry, rather than code entry. These are things which are grossly benefitted by being done with a mouse (or in my case with most of my level editing - a tablet). Laying out a map is a key example which we've already implemented.

There are others I can think of, though:
1] laying out named paths for scripted events to call on
2] naming keypoints for stuff to go to
3] placing units to be encountered
4] laying out named regions for scripted events to call on