Announcement: Remember: you are giving away your fantastic ideas for free, and somebody else might even make money from them (or appear to). That's just how the world works! If you're worried about it, maybe you shouldn't post your ideas here.


Caravel Forum : DROD Boards : Feature Requests : "Relative Link Pasting" Mode for Orb Connections (another tool in the box)
New Topic New Poll Post Reply
Poster Message
Xindaris
Level: Smitemaster
Avatar
Rank Points: 1527
Registered: 06-13-2015
IP: Logged
icon "Relative Link Pasting" Mode for Orb Connections (0)  
For the sake of simplicity I'm going to collectively call orbs and pressure plates "orbs" and doors and toggled force arrows (and firetraps) "doors".

At least from what I can tell, in the level editor connections between orbs and doors are handled as properties "going from" the orb to the door: When you copy and paste an orb it points to the same door location, while when you copy and paste a door to somewhere else the orbs pointing to the old door don't point to the new one. This is not something I'm asking be altered at all, but pertinent to the request.

In the present form of the level editor, orbs point to doors in an "exact" sort of way: An orb's data seems to say "I trigger the door at the exact point (x, y) in way z", so that when it gets pasted it "looks for" a door to be at point (x, y) and if it exists, sets its behavior to trigger that door in way z. For some applications this works fine and is useful behavior, and I don't want it to be removed.

BUT, it would be really nice for the purpose of shifting sections of a room around, or pasting a similar configuration from one room to different part of another, to have an alternate mode where pasting an orb instead has it "inherit" the relative location of its targets.

It sounds complicated, but it's really very intuitive: If an orb points to a door that's 2 tiles east of itself, then pasting the orb and door into another location should make the new orb point to the new door and not to the old one (basically interpreting the orb's behavior as "trigger the door 2 tiles east of myself" instead of "trigger the door at (x, y)"). This mode could be accessed by a check mark in the side panel the same way the "Show Errors" option is, which starts out off (the default state is the current/original behavior) and can be toggled to get this new behavior.

It seems like this should be at least possible to code since to an outsider who hasn't read the source code the orb's internal information looks to contain the location of the orb and the locations of each thing it triggers, so all it would have to do is find the differences between the locations of things it triggers and its own location in order to know what to connect to in "relative" pasting.

One obstacle I can think of to this idea is I don't really know that there's a description of what the mode is that is both concise and intuitive to understand. "Relative Link Pasting" describes it concisely but probably wouldn't make sense to someone doing map editing for the first time.

____________________________
109th Skywatcher

Here are some links to Things!
Click here to view the secret text


[Last edited by Xindaris at 03-03-2019 04:08 PM]
11-02-2016 at 03:02 AM
View Profile Send Private Message to User Show all user's posts High Scores This architect's holds Quote Reply
New Topic New Poll Post Reply
Caravel Forum : DROD Boards : Feature Requests : "Relative Link Pasting" Mode for Orb Connections (another tool in the box)
Surf To:


Forum Rules:
Can I post a new topic? No
Can I reply? No
Can I read? Yes
HTML Enabled? No
UBBC Enabled? Yes
Words Filter Enable? No

Contact Us | CaravelGames.com

Powered by: tForum tForumHacks Edition b0.98.8
Originally created by Toan Huynh (Copyright © 2000)
Enhanced by the tForumHacks team and the Caravel team.