A desktop application designed to create the virtual environments that the component will render and make interactive at runtime. The main features of the Editor are:
- multiple projects management (create, open, save project)
- virtual world global configuration (tile size, tile aspect ratio, etc.)
- multiple skin libraries management, with auto skin generation from SWF files
- tiles and supertiles editing
- backgrounds and foregrounds editing
- maps editing
- skin and tile events triggers definition
- management of maps and assets librtaries
- inventory items creation
- maps, library and inventory text files exporting for usage.
Installation
In order to install the Editor you need to have the Adobe Air Runtime installed on your system (Windows XP SP2 or higher / Mac OSX 10.4.11 or higher / Linux Fedora 8, Ubuntu 7.10, OpenSuse 10.3 or higher). You can get it at this url: http://get.adobe.com/air/
To install the Editor simply double click on the file and follow the instructions. The application is not digitally signed, so a warning will be displayed. Simply ignore it and continue the installation process.
Using the Editor
The Editor is made of a project setup panel, a SWF files management panel, a number of sub-editors (Skin, Tile, Supertile, Background/Foreground, Map and Inventory editors) and an export panel. All the sub-editors (except the Inventory editor, which differs a little) have a similar layout, divided into three columns as shown in the following image:
The left column contains the library of items created with the selected sub-editor (in the above example the Tile editor) and specific controls to modify the preview settings. The items’ list features a text input at the bottom which allows the list filtering (the entered words are checked against the item’s id, title and keywords — see the Properties panel description in each editor); the Edit, Clone (where available) and Delete buttons can be used to edit, duplicate or remove an existing item respectively (please notice that in all cases the Save project button must be pressed to commit the changed before closing the Editor).
The center column shows the preview of the currently edited item, that the user can interact with. The column’s footer contains a button to enable preview area panning and additional informations where needed. The Tile editor and Map editor footers also contain a button (on the left) to show the Instance properties panel; this panel is used to set additional properties for the instances of skins, tiles and groups that have been dropped onto the currently edited item, for example a tile on a map (see the description of each sub-editor for further details).
The right column contains the Properties panel for the currently edited item and, below it, the library of items from the other editors that can be added to the current item, for example the library of tiles that can be dragged on a map.
Each item has its own set of specific properties displayed in the Properties panel. See the relative editor documentation for properties description.
Buttons to control the creation/editing of an item are located above and below the Properties panel: 1) a New (item) button, to create a new item of the current type (skin, tile, etc.); 2) a Create button to finish the item creation and add it to the library; 3) a Cancel button to stop the item creation/editing without committing the changes. In case an existing item is edited, the Create button’s label turns to Update. Also, a checkbox on the left of the Create/Update button allows, if checked, to keep editing the item when the button is pressed.
More to read: The structure of an isometric map
