Well-Actually War Trall Fort Posted June 12, 2004 Share Posted June 12, 2004 The editor that Jeff made for BoA seems to be somewhat difficult to work with and requires an awful lot of clicking and external programs to aid the programmer. I wonder what kind of program Jeff used to create the Avernum games (and possibly the Exile games). He must have had something a little more stream-lined, but it was probably lack-luster. I also heard that Jeff has made the editor open-source. Is there going to be an orchestrated project to make a new variant of the Editor by the community? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Well-Actually War Trall Spidweb Posted June 12, 2004 Share Posted June 12, 2004 "I wonder what kind of program Jeff used to create the Avernum games (and possibly the Exile games). He must have had something a little more stream-lined, but it was probably lack-luster." I made Geneforge and Geneforge 2 (and am making Geneforge 3) with basically this editor and this system. It's not perfect, but I can't be accused of not eating my own dog food. By the way, relying on external applications is not a minus. Exactly the opposite. Scripts and graphics are best made using tools made for exactly that purpose. It would be a waste of time to make my own text and graphics editors when BBEdit and Photoshop exist and are, well, perfect. (By the way, hot tip. If you don't want to pay the full, high proce for Photoshop, get Photoshop Elements. It's a fraction of the cost and, unless you're preparing stuff for printing, just as powerful.) - Jeff Vogel Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Well-Actually War Trall Fort Posted June 12, 2004 Author Share Posted June 12, 2004 OH . That is nice to hear. But I still think there should be a community project to improve the open source editor. We are allowed to do that under the software contract, aren't we? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Garrulous Glaahk UA Posted June 12, 2004 Share Posted June 12, 2004 Why else would it be open source? I, for one, would like the editor to move about maps at a reasonable speed. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kyshakk Koan PoD person Posted June 12, 2004 Share Posted June 12, 2004 On a somewhat related tack, I would like the editor to have a mini-map with a square representing the selection currently being edited. That way, I could click right where I want to go. Or else just make it so you could choose where you zoom back in from the zoomed-out mode, because I hate scrolling around looking for stuff. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Unflappable Drayk Icshi Posted June 12, 2004 Share Posted June 12, 2004 Quote: Originally written by Spidweb:It would be a waste of time to make my own text and graphics editors when BBEdit and Photoshop exist and are, well, perfect. I'd got to wondering what text editor you used, since the Roses of Reckoning and Babysitting scenarios' text files look like they went through a blender when I open them up — lots of squares instead of hard returns, etc. They worked fine, though, as the game understood them, but in order to look through them for my own benefit I had to paste the text into Appleworks and change all the squares into hard returns, etc. I think I'll try to hunt down BBEdit, since it seems to be more reliable in that respect — I had no trouble reading the scenario text files that came with the game. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Well-Actually War Trall Spidweb Posted June 12, 2004 Share Posted June 12, 2004 "I'd got to wondering what text editor you used, since the Roses of Reckoning and Babysitting scenarios' text files look like they went through a blender when I open them up — lots of squares instead of hard returns, etc." The reason for that is that text editors can use two different characters to represent a line break: carriage return and line feed. And not all editors handle both of these well. It is stupid and annoying and inexplicable that anyone would make a text editor that can't recognize both. BBEdit is my text editor of choice, and I am pretty sure they have a cheap version (the main app is pretty expensive). I should look into this and make a link on the resources page. - Jeff Vogel Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Unflappable Drayk Reality Corp. Posted June 12, 2004 Share Posted June 12, 2004 I think your best bet would be WordPad with Windows. Notepad, on the other hand, is one of those editors that does not recognize some of the line breaks. I've also heard that Crimson Editor is somewhat good with those text files. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Garrulous Glaahk spyderbytes Posted June 12, 2004 Share Posted June 12, 2004 BBEdit Lite (the formerly free version) is no longer being developed, but I recently discovered a link to an older version at the bottom of this page . (A friend of mine was looking for a cheap text editor.) TextWrangler is the cheapest currently available Bare Bones text editor, at $49. BBEdit is now $179. I got mine back when you could download the free BBEdit Lite and then upgrade from it to the full BBEdit for $29. IIRC, the last BBEdit update (from 6.x to 7.x) was about $50. Times have changed... At any rate, the bottom line is I'm still not sure what to recommend as a budget text editor that's OS X native and still actively developed. EDIT: Had a typo on current BBEdit version numbers... or I was caught in a time warp, one. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Garrulous Glaahk Frobozz Posted June 12, 2004 Share Posted June 12, 2004 I say go grab UltraEdit . Some of the features: * Syntax highlighting * Spell checking (for multiple languages) * Changing the indent for large sections of text * Highlighting the matching brace/parenthesis you are currently selecting * Retrieving files from FTP, sending via FTP and email * Handles DOS and Unicode (the "squares") * Can sort chunks of text * Ability to run external programs (ie a compiler to compile the current document) * Comparing the differences between two files For a more complete list, go to the features page on their website. All for $39. Oh and no, I don't work for UltraEdit. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Garrulous Glaahk UA Posted June 13, 2004 Share Posted June 13, 2004 Don't bother with all those commercial editors. The reason Jeff's Script files look weird in notepad is because Windows uses \r\n to symbolise line breaks, while UNIX-based systems (?and Mac?) use \n for line breaks. \r signifies carriage return, \n signalises line feed. (I might have mixed those around.) A small bug in Notepad (or clever coding from Microsoft, to try and stop people coding with other platforms ) is that it only recognises line breaks as line breaks if they follow the \r\n format, and not the \n format. So if you open a file using just \n for line-breaks, you'll see squares. Windows: Instead, I reccomend Metapad, which is an improved replacement for notepad, free, and not bloated. Or, if you want tabbing, try Shalom Text, another free editor. http://www.danish-shareware.dk/soft/stxt/ http://www.liquidninja.com/metapad/ I myself use both, depending on what I need. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Unflappable Drayk Icshi Posted June 13, 2004 Share Posted June 13, 2004 I tend to use SimpleText most of the time since it's a simple program that takes up little memory, launches quickly, and works pretty well for minor text documents. Naturally I use Appleworks for documents that need more intensive formatting. My two gripes about SimpleText are: the above-mentioned inablity to recognize many formatting characters properly (such as hard returns) when opening a document NOT made with SimpleText, and you can't work with files over a puny 32 k or so. I think I'll try downloading BBEdit Lite 6.1.2 (which I found on the company's website) and see how that works. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Well-Actually War Trall Khoth Posted June 13, 2004 Share Posted June 13, 2004 Babysitting was done using XCode from Apple's development tools. It's clever enough to match the parentheses for me, and know what's in quotes, and so on. And it keeps the same number of beginning of line tabs as there were on the previous line. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Garrulous Glaahk Qalnor Posted June 13, 2004 Share Posted June 13, 2004 hmm.. don't unix systems use the same system as microsoft and not apple? I may be mistaken on this but I tried opening the stuff in pico and it also came out rotten. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Unflappable Drayk Djur Revolutions Posted June 13, 2004 Share Posted June 13, 2004 Unix uses the linefeed character for a new line. Pre-X MacOS used the carriage return. Windows uses carriage return + linefeed. I use vim for all my text-editing needs. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Garrulous Glaahk Qalnor Posted June 13, 2004 Share Posted June 13, 2004 Ah there it is, I was pretty sure it wasn't the same between Mac and Unix. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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