Every time I play I end up wishing I could make my own preset buildings (houses of hoarders, an old barn packed with rotted corpses, a stoner pad or drug den, different outdoor areas, variants of existing buildings, things like that)… Would an easy mouse-driven editor be possible at all? I’d assume it’d translate the drawn map symbols into the proper code so it could be pasted in, in an ideal world 
I’m no coder in any form or fashion (I can tamper with Dwarf Fortress, and edit vehicle info on Grand Theft Auto games, and use the TES Toolkit from Morrowind, the end 
), but I know you’d have to set flags and such, and also don’t know if you can place non-random items in random structures…
And then with said tool we could launch a building building competition… (unrelated, when you type two identical words one after the other spellcheck says the second duplicate word is spelled wrong, odd…)
Enlighten me! Or crush my dreams! Or do both simultaneously!
Since you’re not a coder I would suggest you post your ideas for a new map locations in a detailed manner in the suggestions section. Making suggestions and stirring up topics of interest are the quickest and easiest ways to see your ideas in the game. Besides of course coding it in yourself which you know… I love how the community is the driving force behind new ideas and features so I suggest anyone post their ideas if they feel they have something worthwhile.
This is what a building layout definition looks like (this is the one for a bar):
[code]
mapf::formatted_set_simple(this, 1, 1,
"
|---------+±--------|\n
| |\n
| ## ## ## ccc|\n
| ## ## ## c &|\n
| c B|\n
| c B|\n
| c B|\n
| ## ## ## c B|\n
| ## ## ## c |\n
| cc |\n
| |\n
| |\n
| xxxxx xxxxx |\n
| xxxxx xxxxx |\n
| |\n
|------------------D-|\n
D &|\n
|cccc|\n
|----|\n",
mapf::basic_bind("- | + D", t_wall_h, t_wall_v, t_door_c, t_door_locked),
mapf::basic_bind("# c x & B", f_table, f_counter, f_pool_table, f_fridge, f_rack));
[\code]
You can see at the bottom it associates symbols with terrain types, like ‘-’ is a t_wall_h, which is a wall section that’s horizontally oriented. Generally you use something similar to the in-game symbol for the terrain type.
If you have ideas for locations, making a nice layout like this is actually one of the biggest pains, since you have to carefully plot everything out.
You also need to specify what items spawn at various locations, and you can also spawn other goodies like monsters or traps.
If you have all this laid out, you can poke a coder and see about getting it integrated. At some point in the future we’d like to make this something you can do in a config file, but this is one that doesn’t break down as easily as some of the other pieces of data, like items or monsters.[/code]
