Exult Studio Progress

[Smapdi]

I just took a peek over at the sourceforge progress area and checked otu all teh tasks remaining under Exult Studio. I was delighted to see that a weapons/items editor could possibly be put in, but I was also disheartened to see that no progress had been made on its completion. Aftera careful meandering of the FAQ:

1) Is the weapons/items editor a stable idea that you think the team will follow through with?

2) If so, approximately how much progress has been made on its construction and in how many releases do you think we would have to wait for it?

Thank you for reading my post, and once again, thank the heavens for Exult.

[drcode]

I've been remiss in updating the tasks list. The weapons/armor/ammo/monster editor was implemented (though not tested much) several weeks ago.

Assuming you're viewing one of the existing games, select 'shapes.vga' in the files list, find a shape that's a weapon or piece of armor, and double-click on it. Along with generic shape info, you'll also see notebook tabs for weapon/armor/ammo/monster settings, depending on what's appropriate. Note that you can turn just about anything into a weapon using the 'weapon' checkbox.

[Smapdi]

Thank you very much!

[drcode]

Here are some thoughts for further ExultStudio development:

1. It should be possible to edit images more easily. It would be nice if you could right-click on a shape, select 'edit', and have your favorite image-editing program (Photoshop, Gimp, etc) launched with that shape.

2. There should be a 'New...' entry in the main 'File' pulldown. It will prompt you for the top-level directory, create a new game there, and add the info. to your 'exult.cfg'. ExultStudio should also come with a set of initial data files (shapes.vga, palettes.flx, pointers.shp, faces.vga, etc.) that will be installed in your new game. These will really just be samples (maybe containing grass and a stick-figure Avatar) to get you started.

3. The method of adding objects to a game needs redoing so it's more consistent and efficient. The current drag-n-drop looks nice, but isn't practical when you want to fill in 100+ chunks or 1000's of tiles. At the least, there should be a 'paint' mode so any click or drag will create the currently selected shape or chunk. To move things around, you'd switch to 'drag' mode, and maybe there'd be a hotkey (TAB?) to toggle between the two.