TechCor,
The editor is looking great. I downloaded it and give it a try. A couple of thoughts below. I'm overall very impressed, so don't take these as negative. It is a pretty massive project.
A big feature request is to store the cell index associated with a terrain tile and automatically update the cell index when the tile is placed. I spent many hours in the old mapper updating cell indexes to match my terrain types, when I usually just wanted to change the cell index to the default value of the terrain image. It would be nice to maybe disable this feature temporarily if desired, but default to updating the cell index. I know mapping all the cell indexes to tiles could be a pretty big time suck.
1. The initial dialog to change screen resolution and grid color doesn't seem to have an accept or ok button. I just used the top right X, but might be nice to add an OK button as I was a bit confused if it would cancel my settings or not.
2. I tested it on a laptop. The terrain tiles on the right side of the screen are pretty small. I had a difficult time distinguishing the tiles. It would be nice if they could be maybe doubled in size or more.
3. I tried creating a new mission. It just flashed a small dialog box too small for me to see and didn't seem to do anything else. When I tried opening an existing map everything seemed to work.
I appreciate that you allow saving maps in the original format. This would allow people who want to use C++ for mission development to still use your editor for map editing.
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Concerning the lighting. Do you mean the shadows on buildings and vehicles or the day night cycle or building/vehicle lights in the dark?
The unit shadows are simply 1 bit bitmaps that are added to each image. They are contained in the .prt/.bmp file like other sprites.
The day night cycle and edge of light is produced by applying a mask over the tiles. The same principle is used for the blight but a different color is used. Hooman wrote a sample program to show how it works and you can find some details here:
https://wiki.outpost2.net/doku.php?id=outpost_2:helper_programs:virus_mask. The program is written in Visual Basic and the source is available, so you could inspect it. I have a hard time reading Visual Basic code not being fluent in the language.
Quote from Hooman in how light/dark tiles are completed internally:
When determining which tile to display, it examines 4 tiles in a 2×2 setup, using 1 bit from each tile to get a 4 bit index. (There are 16 tiles in VirMask.raw). It's probably easiest to think of the actual virus display as being off by half a tile.
I believe VirMask.raw is contained in Art.vol.
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EDIT: It appears the SVN repository is down again, so you might not be able to pull the source code. Someone might have a copy of it though if you want to inspect.
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