Tile-based terrain editor

[erlend-sh]

trafficstars

Having something akin to the terrain editors of Warcraft 3 / StarCraft 2 would make custom map creation a whole lot easier.

Prior art in Godot land: https://github.com/shmolyneaux/godot-rts-terrain by @shmolyneaux

Some madlads even made an open source alternative to the Wc3 editor: https://github.com/stijnherfst/HiveWE

[Scony]

I agree.

I'm planning to do a terrain rework at some point. I've been considering using Terrain3D but using a 3D tile map sounds like a nice option to have as well. The map editor will come along with that.

Anyway, thanks for reporting this proposal!

[shmolyneaux]

I've found creating editor plugins to be pretty painful. At this point I tend to prefer to create a separate tool to use as an editor rather than trying to extend the Godot editor. That's the approach Proton Graph (formerly Concept Graph?) and Material Maker went with too.

If you want to have end-users create and distribute maps, you probably want to have a custom file format for maps, rather than relying on Godot scenes. I think that would push you to want to have a special-purpose editor as well.

Creating alternative world editors for WC3 goes back fairly far. There's a lot of functionality that WC3 supports that wasn't available in the built-in editor. Custom editors allowed you to add map protection and go beyond the default heightmap limits, for example. It also integrated better with extensions to the JASS programming language that was used in WC3.

[erlend-sh]

More prior art courtesy of @shawwn here: https://github.com/shawwn/noh

[Heroes of Newerth:] An open source implementation of Icefrog's DotA