The Dink Network

New map editor?

February 5th 2014, 10:09 AM
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yeoldetoast
Peasant They/Them Australia
LOOK UPON MY DEFORMED FACE! 
Hello everyone. As you may know, I have criticized WinDinkEdit and its variants in the past for being clunky, buggy, slow, and overall very limited map editors. Eventually after waiting in vain for HJDinkEdit and that other one that never went anywhere, I decided to make my own. Over the last month I have been writing my own map editor purely for myself so I could make maps for Dink 1.09 which doesn't have a bundled map editor.

It runs from the command line and is definitely not designed to compete with Tiled or Ogmo, but at this stage the most important features are implemented (load/save, viewing properties, and creating/deleting screens) with export to JSON partially implemented. Actually editing map screens is an incredibly arduous process as you can't really see what you're doing, and it requires a surprisingly large amount of RAM to work.

However, if more than a few people were interested I would definitely consider cleaning it up and releasing it for the general public along with documentation after properly testing it. At the moment it's targeted at *nix platforms that have a Python 3 interpreter as I doubt any Windows users would want to bother with it. If you think this suits your tastes or you would like to know more then do express your interest.
February 5th 2014, 10:14 AM
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Kyle
Peasant He/Him Belgium
 
I don't think I'm awake enough to understand what's going on here.............. What is Dink 1.09? DinkHD?
February 5th 2014, 06:57 PM
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shevek
Peasant They/Them Netherlands
Never be afraid to ask, but don't demand an answer 
Hmm, if a large amount of RAM isn't a problem, are you sure you don't want to use my editor? It saves all its settings in text files, so if you don't like the graphical version, you can just edit everything in there, in a format which look a lot like what you showed.

That also reminded me I should try to make it usable on a Raspberry Pi. I just did that, sorry for not doing so earlier. Please try it again. Get it from Github

Anyway, the main reason I'm writing it is for myself. If others can use it, that's cool, but it's not my reason for working on it. I would advise you to do the same thing.

I haven't heard of Dink 1.09 before. Is that something I could add to the output I generate with my editor as well?

if more than a few people were interested

I'd need to know more about it before I know. Why do you think I should be interested? What features does it have that other editors don't have?
February 5th 2014, 07:23 PM
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magicman
Peasant They/Them Netherlands duck
Mmmm, pizza. 
Dink 1.09 is indeed Dink HD. As in: The DinkC command get_version() will return 109 in Dink HD.

February 5th 2014, 07:29 PM
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shevek
Peasant They/Them Netherlands
Never be afraid to ask, but don't demand an answer 
But Dink HD only runs on Windows, right? Why would you make an editor for a Windows-only program that doesn't run on Windows?
February 5th 2014, 07:31 PM
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leprochaun
Peasant He/Him Japan bloop
Responsible for making things not look like ass 
DinkHD runs on Macs too.
February 12th 2014, 12:30 AM
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yeoldetoast
Peasant They/Them Australia
LOOK UPON MY DEFORMED FACE! 
>>DinkHD runs on Macs too.

Indeed it does, hence the screenshots. There's no editor at all for OS X so I am basically pitching it to those people, although sadly there don't seem to be any.

>>Hmm, if a large amount of RAM isn't a problem, are you sure you don't want to use my editor? It saves all its settings in text files, so if you don't like the graphical version, you can just edit everything in there, in a format which look a lot like what you showed.

The learning curve was a bit steep for me, but I may give it another try. I originally was going to not target Windows since I was using GNU Readline but it isn't essential and it works fine on Windows when I take it out. Your editor is obviously a lot better, it just has quite a few more requirements.
February 12th 2014, 12:55 AM
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leprochaun
Peasant He/Him Japan bloop
Responsible for making things not look like ass 
I would use an editor on OS X. But the problem is I kind of need a graphical interface.

Actually editing map screens is an incredibly arduous process as you can't really see what you're doing

Seeing as how mapping is usually the thing I enjoy most about making dmods. Having something that makes that process arduous doesn't sound appealing.

I really would like an editor I could use on my laptop. It's just I'm not going to use an editor that isn't more or less on par with windinkedit+ seeing as how that's the one I'm currently using and I don't really have to go out of my way to use it.
February 12th 2014, 02:14 PM
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iplaydink
Peasant He/Him Sweden
Hmm.. 
I too would love an editor for OSX, but without visual feedback I would find it very annoying to work with.