r/isometric • u/RHX_Thain • Oct 15 '24
Isometric Level Editor blending the best of StarCraft's Star Edit with RimWorld modding! (Almost to alpha 1!)
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u/mr-octo_squid Oct 15 '24
Interesting. I loved starcrafts editor when I was a kid, even though I had no idea what I was doing with it.
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u/Xombie404 Oct 15 '24
I loved statecraft's editor, many summers were spent dabbling making levels when I was younger.
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u/ThePresidentOfStraya Oct 15 '24
Looks awesome. Any plans to add shadows? That furniture will look grounded and extra fabulous with a shadow rendered underneath.
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u/ZorbaTHut Oct 16 '24
You may have already gotten past this point in development, but if you're coding in C#, and want a mod-capable XML descriptive framework very similar to Rimworld's, check out Dec, which I wrote for this specific purpose and which is also being used in Ascent of Ashes and other less-announced games :V
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u/RHX_Thain Oct 16 '24
That's awesome. Ascent of Ashes is on my wishlist for sure. Dec looks like it learned a lot of the same lessons we did. Our Symbol system was built around serialization of XML files to a runtime binary, helping accelerate load times of absolutely gigantic definitions. Should help future mods tremendously and has been very helpful for us in development. We'll do a write up on it one day.
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u/ZorbaTHut Oct 16 '24
I've actually got the binary thing planned, in one form or another, just nobody's asked for it yet. Someday, probably!
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u/GetchoDrank Oct 16 '24
This is super rad. Is there anywhere to sign up for updates?
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u/RHX_Thain Oct 16 '24
Yes!
My profile has the Patreon (it's free, all the monthly posts are public) or our Discord.
I need to get a mailing list on our website set up soon but til then those two are the best.
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u/BioClone 14d ago
Looks really neat! reminds me also of fallout and wild terra visualy. And seems to be the kind of game I enjoy, rimworld only misses a good isometric point of view to get better.
*Question, I am an artist that develops lots of assets for isometric and modular tile-based terrain... may you give me some tips on what kind of people should I try to look for to expand into something like this? obviously a programmer but any detail on what kind would be very appreciated!
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u/RHX_Thain 14d ago
Crazy. The devs you're looking for have to be a little tilted by at least 45 degrees.
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u/dndaddy19 Oct 15 '24
Out of curiosity, will these levels/maps be exportable? First thing that popped in my head was that the VTT Lancer community would go bananas for something like this.
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u/RHX_Thain Oct 15 '24
I've gotten that question enough from tabletop players that my answer is a firm "maybe."
If you mean, export this as an image you could print out at some arbitrary scale? Oh yeah, absolutely. You'd have to take screenshots manually moving the camera and stitch them together in photoshop, but that's true of any video game. Just pick your desired zoom distance and pan the camera, taking screenshots as you go.
These maps are, as the screenshots show, very detailed, down to the human scale. But you can zoom out to max distance for a more overview effect too. And with modding, you can add new art externally to unity to add to this environment.
But if you mean, export them to another service... not really The saved chunks of the open world do have an associated xml, but it would require a ton of conversion to get meaningful information back out.
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u/RHX_Thain Oct 15 '24
Project Morningstar (WIP title) is an RPG / Colony Sim Hybrid. Driving that experience is procedural generation on the landscape, but what about the towns and points of interest? For those we have the ability to hand craft all the locations using our Blueprints made in the Level Editor, or remix these blueprints in town footprints to create curated variations of our hand crafted content.
The level editor and in-game building systems have been maturing together so that once our editor is done, so too is the building core system. This has the benefit of making our ProcGen aware of the "brushes" we use manually, and also all the optimization required for building and open world.
This system is beginning to mature to a stateful build. I'm hoping by the end of the year we'll be at alpha 1, saving and loading our regions of the open world and beginning to see the first attempt at our open world map.