Level Editors

You can think of a level editor consists of two parts.
1) Modeling part,
2) Game&Level related things(events,properities,scripts etc.) part.

For the modeling part, one can use the modeling packages but the Game&Level related part needs special, mostly written-for-the-project(s) tools. Because mostly games have very different and special Game&Level related things.

Also one can use the modelling packages for doing Game&Level related part with plug-ins.

Also you can read the still going on thread:
generic level design tools?
on
http://lists.sourceforge.net/mailman/listinfo/gdalgorithms-list

Cem UZUNLAR
turing@anet.net.tr

if you have a puzzle game, or something similarly small, you prolly won''t need a level editor, you can just hand-code your levels. for a sidescroller, or any game larger than that, you WILL need a level editor because hand coding levels of that size would make you want to kill yourself. a level editor will take a good amount of time to write, if you are thorough with it. also remember that if you write a thorough level editor with lots of useful functions, you will save much more design time despite the longer time it will take you to write it. an undo function is invaluable. copy and paste are nice too.

to sum it up, do a level editor. you will learn a lot about your game''s structure that way, and even more about programming in general.

dave

--
davidw@heehaw.com
neonstar entertainment

Thanks for the information.

What would be the features of a typical game editor. For eg. take the case of Age of Kings. What would a level editor for this game typically contain of and how would you proceed with the 2 parts of the Level design for this game.
1) Modeling part,
2) Game&Level related things(events,properities,scripts etc.) part.


Thanks
Arun

goto this page,Capn_Midnight''s Zone and download the zip file that contains the game and level editor. It also contains source code so that you can see how it relates together. The soul purpose of the level editor is to make designing levels a whole hell of a lot easier. Many times the programmer wants to encrypt the data for his levels so that people won''t copy and modify his levels, but doing that would be impossible by hand. So, he makes a level editor that encypts as he goes along.

Hi Captain Midnight,

Thanks for the information.
But I am not able to download any of the files from the website. It always says link or file not found and goes to the goecities.yahoo.com search page.

Thanks
Arun