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Topic: custom campaign immovables

martin

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Joined: 2011-01-13, 14:21
Posts: 65
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Posted at: 2011-06-20, 21:54

Hi dear widelands community!

What about an option to ship custom immovables with a campaign mission? So that I can create my own immovables which cannot be used in other maps via the editor's immovable menu, but just in my campaign. Sounds boring, but the reason for my question is that I guess, it will increase the level of surprise and flexibility within the campaigns a lot. You will then be able to

  • extend widelands' campaigns for special buildings (and their process of construction) - like a temple that has to be built and is only available in one mission,
  • place special non-AI-tribes (e.g. Indian tents, igloos, etc.) in a corner of your island,
  • put a small person with waving white hair as the leader of your tribe somewhere on a mountain and he will watch the landscape during the entire game (will especially fit for the current barbarian campaign)
  • and many many more

I think, realizing this feature won't be too difficult. The custom immovables will have to be placed within the .wmf map file or directory (exact subdir still has to be defined). By now, you already are able to ship pictures with your mission - but just for the story-telling people. Additionally, we just need the following things:

  • a subdir and a handling for the conf files and the corresponding images within the map dir
  • and of course a Lua interface for creating an immovable from a conf file within this subdir (and also for destroying immovables on the map)

All in all: if this feature existed, every campaign creator would have a lot more freedom while none of them would be forced to use it.

What do you think about this?


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Astuur
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Joined: 2009-02-28, 10:08
Posts: 733
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Location: Frankfurt / Germany
Posted at: 2011-06-21, 07:15

The idea sound good to me in general,
it would open up a lot of extras, that would make the game more fun to play.
But "cannot be used in other maps" seems a bit like waisting a lot of effort.
If really someone goes all the way and paints extra immovables, why not make them available in ordinary maps also?
And that is probably the point. Doing animations ("leader waving a flag") is quite some work.
Creating a new set of houses (indian tents), especially if they are not totally static, is even more work.

I am awaiting a qualified response for this question, from someone who knows, but I hope that it will not
be a problem to incorporate dozends of new immovables into the game.
If you can, there will be some of them, that are new for the players, since they have not been used in other maps.
Should be good enough for a suprise effect.
At the very least, this new stuff should become available in the editor, after having played that campaign.

So - what your suggestion really leads to, may be houses, immovables etc. regularily incorporated in the game, but hidden
in the editors interface, until some event triggers the disclosure.

I cannot speak up about the technical aspects how this could be done, (Lua?) but if you think you could do it, give it a try
I am sure, all sorts of additional stuff is welcome.


Being no programmer, I apologize for all my suggestions that imply undue workload and for other misjudgements due to lack of expertise or relevant skills.
I am on Win32, have no means to compile, and rely on prefabricated distributions (Thanks to Tino).

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SirVer

Joined: 2009-02-19, 15:18
Posts: 1445
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Location: Germany - Munich
Posted at: 2011-06-21, 10:30

We would love to have this (also to ship new custom productionsites for a tribe that can only be build in this mission), but alas this is hard to implement. Take a shot at it!


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