Map Viewing Tool

I had a couple of hours after waking up too early so I hacked a couple more things into the prototype map viewer - almost making it a useful-if-a-bit-crude tool.

First it displays any 'interesting' tiles - ones with any associated game behaviour - using red squares. Then as it was so simple even though it isn't terribly useful more than once, it does the same for the original dusk game - using blue squares. Then down the left-hand side it shows all the details of the scripts.

For starters it shows that I didn't get the tutorial complete after-all, although one of those squares just has an empty script.

Not a lot more work is required to turn it into a useful if basic game behaviour editor. Just the ability to save and create scripts and a few little lookup and navigation functions.

A couple of days ago after some work on jjjay I had a fleeting thought about how the game might be transformed to use a database backend. With Berkeley DB JE it would be a cinch, I could reliably persist all the live game objects into a single table with very little work indeed - the subclassing stuff is better than I can recall from last time i looked at it but I suspect I just didn't look too closely. I shouldn't need any DTO's. Actually it would probably turn out to be easier than all the text-mode import/export stuff I had to come up with and it could also be used to replace some of the internal indices. Using a db means that a text editor can no longer be the primary development tool so it would also require additional tooling. Something to ferment in the wort a bit longer ...

I had some other fleeing thought about something about the game, but it just flitted away ...

On an unrelated note, ScrollBar doesn't support middle-click. Annoying.

Oh thats right on the flittery thought. The way JavaScript is being used in the scripts is so simple, I wonder if it isn't easier just using Java instead. The scripts would stay in their format but could inserted into a template before being compiled. Might be an option for rarely-changing/performance critical tasks, but might not be so easy for any dynamic content. Definitely not something i'm going to rush into without a lot of experimentation.