Sizing things up

I don't believe in plans. Never have and can't imagine I ever will. I think they are the most pointless things I've ever been constantly told to do by teachers, lecturers, employee's, parents, etc. Why confine yourself to a single course of action? But hey, there's always Plan B right? Forget it...You can't possibly know what will go wrong with Plan A and therefore you can't possibly know if Plan B is a viable option. Forget plans, just think dynamically or "on the fly". The point of a plan is to be prepared for the future, which changes with every act you take. That's a pretty hard thing to be prepared for! Screw it, if you can come up with a plan for something that hasn't happened yet, then you can most definitely come up with a plan for something staring you in the face.

That being said, I do believe in blueprints. You can't build a house without blueprints. You need to know what size the plot of land is, just like you need to know the size of the house and every room in it. Try making a house without a blueprint and the whole thing comes tumbling down. Same goes for a program.

In the map maker I am building there are a lot of things going on inside the form and they're all different sizes. Worse still, my plot of land (the size of the screen) varies from monitor to monitor. I have two monitors, one uses a "1768x992" resolution while the other uses a "1280x1024" resolution. I know some people still use "1024x768" resolutions and not knowing which one to cater for is a real problem. But like plans, we shouldn't restrict ourselves to one line of thought. I have just made the blueprint of the map maker, and things will shift around depending on the size of the screen...or on the size of the window if you don't want it full screen.

As you can see there will be a typical menu bar at the top. Currently holding "File, Edit, View" others will be added as features are implemented. Below that is a toolbox holding the bog standard "New, Open, Save" icons and a few others. Again this toolbox will grow with features as they are added.

The panel taking up the majority of the screen will be where the map is viewed and made. The blue colour indicates that this panel is an XNA panel (this means that what is seen in this window will be identical to what is seen in the game). Also notice the scroll bars to the left and bottom of this panel. These scroll bars ensure that the map is not restricted to the size of the panel. Maps will be saved using the XML format and you can just about see the tab labelled "XML" to the top left of the panel. Choosing between the "Map" tab and the "XML" tab will switch between the graphical representation of the map and the XML code which can be altered directly.

The blue panel to the right of the screen is essentially the "pallet" of the map maker. From here we will be able to import tilesets and create objects. This panel will have a great number of modes, some of which are: importing tilesets, creating new objects and selecting existing objects.

The long white panel at the bottom of the screen will show the projects working directory. By this I mean all maps created by the user under a single saved file. Maps can be organised into folders and this panel will show the hierarchy in a tree format.

Finally, the small box located to the bottom right of the screen will show the properties of the currently selected item. Whether this be the map itself or an object from the list of available objects, you will be able to change it's properties and see the results in the map window. This will allow features such as adding weather, resizing objects, rotating objects, naming the map or objects and a lot more. All at the touch of a button.