Atlas Scenario Editor

[historic_bruno]

I've been playing around with the Atlas UI, adding controls for some of the settings we use when creating and editing maps. So I added a few to the "Map panel" and then there's a whole new "Player panel" now, which lets you pick settings per player.

I guess mostly I'm just trying to get something basic in place, so that we no longer need to edit the map XMLs by hand. But if anyone has suggestions on what could be improved to make the UI more usable, that would be an interesting discussion.

Map panel:

Players panel:

[Mythos_Ruler]

1. Use IMGUR from now on. You will thank me later, as others have.

2. I like what you did with the Map section. I like the options available and how you organized it. Not sure yet what should go under 'Players' so that will take some thinking.

3. As far as how the UI layout and usability, this is a mockup I did some time ago for the editor. I planned to make mockups for all the sections and panels, but realized just how much work that would have been, when whoever works on the editor is just going to do it their way anyway. But this might give you some ideas.

[Wijitmaker]

Excellent addition

Notice Michael's mockup. The map icon, and the figure by the computer screen? I think it would be great to see those icons included into atlas, and when selected - your menues would pop up.

Aside... I'd also like to see the text buttons that Philip put in place years ago, replaced with icons as well and placed in that toolbar that spans the screen.

[historic_bruno]

3. As far as how the UI layout and usability, this is a mockup I did some time ago for the editor. I planned to make mockups for all the sections and panels, but realized just how much work that would have been, when whoever works on the editor is just going to do it their way anyway. But this might give you some ideas.

Nice mockup! I especially like the "collapsible" option boxes, allowing a larger number of controls in the same amount of space. It reminds me of how some 3D modeling and image editing apps work. That would require a custom control though since it's not a standard part of wxWidgets.

One of the things that annoyed me about AoK's scenario editor was that it was a pain to change settings for all the players, because you had to select each one individually. There could be an "All" tab on the player panel that allowed changes for all players at once, e.g. if you wanted to give large stockpiles of resources.

Setting diplomacy is another tricky task, as clicking a lot of controls gets tiring, so it may be easiest to use the concept of teams. A game I used to play called Neverwinter Nights, though it was an RPG, had a concept called "factions" for the various NPCs in the game: basically how friendly or mean every group was to all the others. 100 might be a group you'd never attack, 0 you would always attack, and the interactions of the game altered the value. It might not map perfectly to a RTS game like 0 A.D. but it does add some granularity to the concept of diplomacy.

Edited November 1, 2010 by historic_bruno

[Mythos_Ruler]

Nice mockup! I especially like the "collapsible" option boxes, allowing a larger number of controls in the same amount of space. It reminds me of how some 3D modeling and image editing apps work. That would require a custom control though since it's not a standard part of wxWidgets.

I also figured those boxes could default to 'open' at higher resolutions like mine (1080p).

[tsukabishi]

can i suggest you improve the layout of the buttons under linux?

and then i'd like to know why you choose wxwidgets what do you think of qt4 (to draw the interface)?

[Ykkrosh]

Qt may be a better choice now, but wxWidgets was the only cross-platform toolkit with an acceptable license (before we were GPL (and before Qt on Windows was even available as GPL)), and porting all the existing code to Qt would be a great deal of work for relatively little gain.

[historic_bruno]

A couple of new things for Atlas. The new map generation has been integrated (roughly) into the UI. I'm trying to keep in mind various comments I've gotten on the layout of the random map controls. It's simple right now, a drop down to choose your map script (this may get replaced by a file chooser dialog or something), then a "Run" button to run the script, and then some seed value controls. Later there could be controls to override things like the base terrain and height of the script. Also it was suggested to allow arbitrary text as seed value, and then hash it somehow into a numeric seed - to make things more interesting.

So the "generate empty map" button is gone now, replaced by a new menu item "New...", which brings up a new map dialog as follows:

It has a very basic layout so far. Maybe the texture selector could be a list, allowing multiple texture selections, in case you wanted a map to start with several blended textures (randomly). The texture preview box isn't working yet, but eventually it will show the selected texture, so you're not picking blindly. It would be nice to have some shortcuts for handling maps like CTRL+N for new, CTRL+O for open, CTR+S for save. I've not looked into how that would be implemented.

[Kimball]

1. Use IMGUR from now on. You will thank me later, as others have.

QFT. Kinda the @#$%.

[Mythos_Ruler]

Some cool things there Bruno. How about when choosing the default terrain for the new map it's actually a panel of terrain previews, similar to the bottom of Atlas when painting terrain.

[historic_bruno]

Some cool things there Bruno. How about when choosing the default terrain for the new map it's actually a panel of terrain previews, similar to the bottom of Atlas when painting terrain.

I can try that and see how it works, but that control seems buggy - if you switch pages enough or scroll around for a while it will lock up Atlas. Also the previews will need to be shrunk to fit in a decent size dialog box. On the other hand I can reuse the code that builds the preview bitmaps, so that's handy.

[Pureon]

Thanks for working on the Atlas editor historic_bruno!

Is it now possible to select more than one object?

[historic_bruno]

Thanks for working on the Atlas editor historic_bruno!

Is it now possible to select more than one object?

Not sure, I'm not working on that

[Mythos_Ruler]

Yeah, double-click and band-box would be nice. Someone (I guess me) should make a ticket.

[Pureon]

Sounds good!

Add these to the ticket: selection box, shift-click to select multiple objects, copy & paste object(s). Imagine how much quicker it'll be to map

[fcxSanya]

Add these to the ticket: selection box, shift-click to select multiple objects, copy & paste object(s). Imagine how much quicker it'll be to map

Ticket for copy&paste is already exists: http://trac.wildfiregames.com/ticket/96 (already 4 years ) Also there is some other opened tickets for Atlas: http://trac.wildfiregames.com/query?status...&order=priority. Maybe it makes sense to plan most important of these tickets to some of next alpha versions.

[Pureon]

I'll leave it up to Mythos_Ruler to decide which of the Atlas functions to prioritize, he uses Atlas more than I do. We could close some of the older tickets in favor of a new basic functions ticket.

[Mythos_Ruler]

As far as BASIC functionality/usability goes, I think these are priorities:

- Double-click selection

- Band Box selection

- Delete brush

- Fix Run Simulation crash

[k776]

I've created tickets for the things Michael mentioned:

http://trac.wildfiregames.com/ticket/678

http://trac.wildfiregames.com/ticket/679

http://trac.wildfiregames.com/ticket/680

The only one I think is important for A3 at this stage (seeing as we have so much other stuff waiting to be started), is the 'run simulation' crash.

If you could provide more details about it in the ticket (#680), and attach any crash logs, that'd be good.

[historic_bruno]

Random maps integrated with Atlas now in SVN trunk. Also some additional modifications to the UI, as seen here:

[Mythos_Ruler]

It'll need an auto-build, right? Looks awesome and I can't wait to play around with the new tools.

[historic_bruno]

It'll need an auto-build, right? Looks awesome and I can't wait to play around with the new tools.

Right

[historic_bruno]

OK, since Atlas is now written purely in C++, I had to scrap my previous JS attempt at the player editor. But I took the opportunity to rework the layout a bit and here's what I've come up with:

Instead of a typical tabbed notebook control I'm using a "ChoiceBook" which means there is a choice box/dropdown that lets you choose which player to edit.

I don't particularly like the player icon, it's an old one from the SVN, I like the one in Mythos' mockup a lot better.

[historic_bruno]

I'm considering moving the "number of players" control from map to player panel, at least duplicating it, but the code becomes simpler if it's on the same panel.

Would a reset button be useful: so you could reset the player data to defaults? Or maybe integrating with Atlas' undo/redo functionality would be better, if possible?

[Ykkrosh]

OK, since Atlas is now written purely in C++, I had to scrap my previous JS attempt at the player editor.

Yeah, sorry about that

Would a reset button be useful: so you could reset the player data to defaults? Or maybe integrating with Atlas' undo/redo functionality would be better, if possible?

I think undo/redo for map settings and player settings is important, because it's too easy to accidentally mess something up (e.g. delete your map description) and have no way to recover. Assuming we add that at some point (it shouldn't be too hard, I think, though it might need some tweaks to the command processor system), maybe a reset-to-global-defaults button would still be useful but I don't really know. (A reset button without an undo feature would be pretty dangerous, though )