You may have asked yourself, “can a map editor be written in a day?” It’s a question I asked myself. The answer is, in this case, not entirely; but let’s see how far we’ve come.
I spent some time yesterday teasing apart my mapping code to disentangle it from the “playing surface” and to get a head start on the XML serialization for loading and saving maps.
In the editing module, you can load a reference 2D map and draw directly on the surface.
I did quite a bit of sketching to determine the “hot spots” on the grid that indicate what walls are being added: north, south, and so on. Walls are added by clicking on a “hot spot” and dragging to add wall sections. If you change direction, the wall is continued in a logical fashion, wrapping around the corner.
A significant amount of work is still outstanding, but the ground work is laid for a fully functional editor. The Big Map that I spent an afternoon entering, can now be created in a few minutes.
Unity Map Editor from C. Lewis Pinder on Vimeo.
Cool. I notice all these wall don’t seperate rooms. Will it still be “a wall for each side” in those cases?
I’m not sure if I follow exactly, but if you’ll notice in the follow-up post, the editor does add both sides of the wall now.