Driftmoon Map Editor

13.09.2009

By popular demand, I'm going to reveal a bit about the map editor in Driftmoon. All Notrium modders will know that editing the text files for any more advanced features was a pain. In Driftmoon I've made the map editor do everything that has to do with actual gameplay. You lay your terrain by painting it, and then you put your walls where you want them. Then you can just press play and test play the map.

At the moment there are five types of objects you can place in the editor. Lights, bots, walls, items and objects. The most advanced of these is the object, which has controls for graphics, animations, scripts and physics. In the image below we are editing a plant. We have defined it to have physics, which is the blue circle. We can make it any weight, or we could attach it to a wall with a string or a hinge.

At the moment we're editing the graphics, and we have created the plant's pot and the trunk as 3D objects, and the leaves as a sprite. We can also change their height, because the game is actually 3D, just from a top down perspective. If we wanted to, we could make the leaves move in wind by animating them. And we could for example script this to be an object the player can activate to find a key inside.

I will be telling more of the editor later, so if you have any questions about modding and editing in Driftmoon, comment.