I have been creating levels in XML by hand.
As I noted before, the data-centric concept need not
limit the type of expressions of that data. For example,
<floors>
<fill kind="fl-concrete"/>
...
The "fl-" prefix is required, which seems inconsistant with
the rest of the tags which know by context which object
prefix to assume.
In LUA, fill can specifiy a rectangular range,
fill_floor("fl-concrete", 6, 3, 2, 3)
but not in XML.
This sort of thing can only currently be done with multiple
row tags:
<row y="3">-6 concrete 1</row>
<row y="4">-6 concrete 1</row>
<row y="5">-6 concrete 1</row>
But as you see, it's much more verbose. Additionally, row
doesn't take an x parameter (does it?) Wouldn't it be nice
to create tagged sections which have an x offset?
And what about a tag for when one is trying to make
checkerboard patterns exclusively in XML format
with only row tags?
What would be nice is to create objects - data objects.
They are still data-centric, just more complex.
For example, the same rectangle could be an
object that's easily translatable:
<object name="start block" x="6" y="3">
<row>concrete 1</row>
<row>concrete 1</row>
<row>concrete 1</row>
</object>
Or even better:
<object name="start block" x="6" y="3" width="2" height="3">
<fill kind="concrete" />
</object>
Now that these are objects, they can be manpulated
by the editor more easily as a group. Also, they can
be translated by just changing the object's parameters.
An editor would be useful to me if it could manipulate
this data format to do simple translations to selected
objects and areas, such as slide, flip horizontal/vertical,
and turn counter-clockwise/clockwise/twice
(for 180 degree turn). Currently, I text-tag the XML
sections I wish to translate and run it through a script
to do such translations - or just edit the row entries by hand.
And what about tiling with an object?
<fill object="start block" x="0" y="0" width="77" height="13" />
The last four parameters could be optional.
If either width or height parameters are missing, then
the level width or height (respectively) is assumed
(from tag <level width="77" height="13">).
If x or y were missing, then of course 0 would be assumed
respectively.
Believe me, a graphical editor would be nice, but it must
be able to do useful things that would normally take me
longer to do by hand - otherwise I'll still be using the text
editor.
I hope those ideas are useful. I think others would appreciate
a data-centric, yet robust format also.
Karen
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