[Tenshi]

Hey everyone. ^^ Yes, I still exist. Anyway, I have a question, with the recent [lawl, whatever] change of my game over to being more "tactics" based [see shot here ] that made me realize that really, the best thing to do is to build the map engine first, because it would remove the majority of the battle engine's code because the map engine will handle most of it (collisions and all of that, with the battle engine merely handling combat actions). I already have a fully working , fully integrated script engine which controls everything... so what I need to do is get this done and everything will fall into place (except graphics, which always take a ton of time), but I've been pointed to some free tilesets I can use as place holders while I'm working on that.

- ANYWAY... designing a reader is always easiest when a writer has been written. I've already mapped out my formats on paper for the most part (32 bits per tile -- 9 bits per 3 layers [512 tile values per layer], with potentially less being used for particular layers and more for others based on necessity, with 5 bits left for flags). So I've been working on the editor, which I'm writing in Java because Java is the easiest language for me to use to write up GUIs with (use Sun One studio to drag and drop elements like a Visual Java, and then fill in the blanks for events in Eclipse, I can get a fully functional GUI done in a day or less). But the problem is that I want to use a JTable to build the map panel. Now... JTables can hold images by default... I had to use them to build a Battleship server/client model for class way back... but I need to be able to use 2 - 3 individual images that can be laid overtop of one another, and I'm not sure what the best class is. Any help would be appreciated.


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Edit: Actually, I think I've found what I need. I won't be able to test it until later, but WriteableRenderedImage and Raster appear to be the classes I need. We'll see. And no, I'm not worried about speed, I'm really the only one that -needs- this editor, and my pc is kinda sexy. Still open to suggestions though.

- Oh, and I'm trying to put most of the map responsibility on the map engine now ["d'uh" I know, but in the past I haven't always done that], so if anyone has any suggestions for how to handle NPCs and other map objects I'm open for discussion. My QB version worked rather well with NPCs, but this time around I'm also putting enemies on the map, too. So what I'm trying to do is generate those randomly in set areas using either zones or spawn points of some sort, allow them to wander a set distance, but at the same time, when the player comes within aggro range, battle needs to kick in. The problem is, I don't know how far effective combat should be allowed to go before combat's broken, and such.
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- Jaeda