NEW LOCATION EDITOR: PROGRESS REPORT
by Hazed
Alan is continuing to work on his new version of the location editor – the workbench tool that lets you lay out the maps for your star system. He’s rewriting it from scratch because the old version is, well, old. The compiler used - Borland C++ Builder - dates back to the last century and so is massively out of date. The new stuff uses the Qt libraries to produce a more sophisticated and clean looking program.
The new version is going to have some changes to the way it works, in order to make it more user-friendly. It’s an attempt to address the problems that many people seem to have when designing a planet, by making it impossible to make some of the common mistakes.
One example is that when you start a new map, you will be asked whether it’s going to be a planet map or a space map:
If you say it’s a space map, the editor will automatically set all locations with the space property. This will remove one of the things it’s easy to forget – when you add a new location at a later date, that space property won’t get left off.
Similarly, because the editor will always know whether you are working on a space or ground map, you won’t be able to set the space property on a ground location – nor will you be able to have a trading exchange, hospital or bar in space.
So no more drive-through exchanges, as pioneered by the late Occy - exchanges which no one could visit anyway, because of the way Fed works!
