We’re seeing a lot of really cool maps being submitted into the gallery. We’re going to loosen up a bit on moderation so that we can get your maps up to the public a lot quicker.
I’ve also put in a request in to support mod maps in custom games so that a group of friends can create their own maps and then play on them. It won’t be in v1.08 but we’re hoping to get it before too long.
One of the challenges in moderating the mods is the handling of the more complex mods – tiles, quests, and campaigns.
After v1.08 goes out the door, the team is going to be looking at ways to make it easier for modders to submit these pieces and for users to get and install them.
The challenge on tiles, quests, and campaigns is that they involve a lot of different pieces. Our job is to make it easy for people to create their own.
To get people started let me break these out:
Tiles
Tiles are created with the tile editor (Builder’s Forge).
When you save a tile, it is saved into your My games\Elemental\Tiles directory. Two files are created – the XML file and the shadow file in 256 and 512 pixel size (for the two shadow quality levels).
On their own, tiles are meaningless. They have to be attached to something else. They are the building blocks for everything else.
To make these shareable, we are going to update Impulse::Reactor to simply look in your tile directory and list those. Beware though, your load time is impacted by the # of tiles you have.
Quests
Quests are made up of 3 basic parts:
1. The Quest Location (i.e. an Inn )
2. A Quest Destination (i.e. a Dungeon)
3. A Quest Definition (the thing that describes the quest)
If you want to see these parts together open up your: \stardock games\elemental\data\english\core quests folder.
In there, you will see files like this:
I can say, right now, making quests is a chore. It’s one of the things I’ve put in requests for – a quest editor. The reason quests are hard to make is that the system is fairly powerful. Quests are capable of not just taking you across the world and running into monsters and getting items but they are capable of loading up maps as well which is something we baked in the future when people might want to actually ENTER a dungeon.
Quest locations make use of tiles as do Quest Destinations. Quest Destinations are actually Notable Locations (goodie huts) that get spawned by the game when the quest is triggered.
Sharing these is a bit more complex as you can imagine. We are going to just add a “Quests” user directory and ask modders to zip their files themselves and put them in the quests directory and then just have the game make use of that.
Campaigns
Campaigns are the whole thing put together.
(Spoiler alert)
The first campaign is called MainCampaign.xml and is in the Elemental\data\english directory. If you know XML reasonably well, you can probably see how it works for the most part. If you don’t, there’s not nearly enough space to go through it.
More to come!
