[CF-Devel] CFJavaEditor update

[Andreas Vogl]

I happily announce that there is a new feature for the CFJavaEditor
available, which is going to make mapmaking significantly easier.

The biggest problem with Crossfire maps is the terrible
mess of the arch syntax. Arch attributes like "sp", "wc", "last_heal"
etc. are confusing on their own - and they get used in so many
different ways. Even the most passionate Crossfire-developer
needs a long time to understand half of it.

I tried to improve the situation by writing my map-guide.
Docu is a fine thing - but not good enough. It's way too annoying
to read all that, and look things up repeatedly.

So now I have integrated a Graphical User Interface in the editor,
providing a convenient input-mask for all kinds of crossfire-objects.
The GUI is very flexible, the data is parsed from a definitions-
file called "types.txt". As you can imagine, this file has a
non-trivial syntax, but it's quite easy to understand.
It already contains a lot more information than my map-guide.

The whole thing is available for now at
<
     
     http://mids.student.utwente.nl/~avogl/CFJavaEditor/
     
     >
(I can easily put it on cvs later, the new code is
pretty much stand-alone)
Look for the red "Attributes"-button...


Of course the whole thing isn't complete yet.
And the "types.txt" still lacks a bunch of information,
but it's already extremely helpful. I started to work
on this feature long time ago and decided it's time
for a first release.


Andreas V.