No, you don't want a better base editor.

What you want is a map editor.

It's taken a while for these thoughts to coalesce in my head, but bases are small time, and we're not thinking big enough for this to happen and get everything we want. Think about how many years the base editor has languished. It's done so because none of the devs want to tackle a job as big as fixing the base editor for the small number of players it would affect.

The AE can be our guide for how we can make this happen. The AE was the result of a set of devs that sat down and reevaluated their tools available for crafting missions, intent on making it easier. They rewrote their interface and came up with a much more streamlined and much faster process and at some point, a dev said, "Hey, wouldn't it be cool if our players could use these tools too?"

Eventually we got the AE. And it's in these terms that we should be thinking, when we ask for anything else going forward. Bases are in fact, nothing more then small maps, constructed using a crude set of tools the devs made available to us from their own map editing tools, using a small subset of objects in the game. So instead of asking for changes to this small set of inferior tools, for a small subset of the playerbase, we should instead go for something that will exponentially expand our ability to work with bases that will also affect a far wider audience then just base builders.

It took two devs working for a year to recreate Atlas park, using the tools they had available. It was beautiful, brilliant work. But a whole year? For one medium sized zone? Surely there is some overhead in that process that can be improved upon. So why don't we ask the devs to go ahead and rewrite their map editing tools? Give them search features for objects they want to place, give them a go back button, and all the other tools we'd like to see in the base editor. Let them know that doing this would help them crank out missions and maps and game content faster, and then ask for a subset of the tools just like they gave us with the AE. This becomes a win for the devs, a win for Architects who want their own mission maps, and a win for base builders too.

Now instead of a small base editor with limited tiles and items, you have a big, beefy, map editor. And you can build a one story apartment, or a towering mansion on top of a skyscraper. Think about the things we could create if we had access to a tool that would let us recreate the Architect Buildings. You could do anything with that. In fact one thing I'd like to see is a contest to rebuild City Hall that was "anatomically correct," if you get my meaning. How cool would that be?

So we stop asking for a better base editor and we stop asking right now. It's too expensive for something too small. Ask for a map editor instead. Use it for the devs, the AE, and base builders. You get more of everything in one fell swoop and the resource costs for doing such a thing become much more manageable given the audience such changes would affect.

....



I sat staring blankly at the screen, drooling just a little bit after reading this. You've just described a little piece of heaven.

Should nothing come of this ever, thanks for the dream.

I've never been much of a base editor, mostly because of the limitations it has and that (for me) it isn't worth the time to figure out the little tricks to make it do what I want. But this, this could definitely get me into building bases.

A wonderful idea, sir. I hope it gains some traction.

Sneaky thinking. I like it.

Hope it works.

I can handle the base editor as it is, but I just want more items!

give this man a job!

I'm not smart enough to properly evaluate such an idea (and it's not my nature to put down ideas anyway because something good could can come out of them). Somebody like War Witch is smart enough and I'd suggest you give a pm to her a shot and see if you get a response.

Off the top of my head, I shudder to think what the impact to the servers would be if every basebuilder could essentially create their own City of Heroes environment (or even one part of one zone of an environment). Also, I'm picturing in my mind how an announcement like this would go over: "We at Paragon Studios have decided to think big! We are going to suspend all ongoing programing efforts while we build a new map editor. But don't worry, when we are done it'll be used by us internally and the AE and basebuilding communities." I suspect NCSoft corporate... and much of the player community would not respond with a standing ovation.

But that is just me.

Reasons we've had for not updating the base editor:

• The original programmer is no longer with PS and left no coding notes. Now when changes are attempted, bases tend to break.
• Base building does not appeal to a large enough audience to warrant the development time required.
• Making purchaseable base items would only benefit a small audience and does not warrant the development time required to implement.
• The way many bases are currently built, using clipping/imbedding of objects into each other, is using a bug in the code. Changing the code would break those bases and cause a significant loss to the Baser community who spend hundreds of hours building magnificent masterpieces of design and ingenuity (paraphrased)

Kheprera, I'd be willing to bet that if the devs put forth the effort to recode the bases and add more content, then there'd be an influx of players as I'm sure there are many that gave up over time due to things like storage changes and other stuff that my half asleep brain can't come up with atm. What many of us wouldn't give to have an issue dedicated to SGs/VGs/Bases. There was alot of excitement when CoV was released because of things like RAIDS and base customization. Sadly that's taken a backseat to things like AE and incarnate stuff (to name a few).

/signed

request: lets hear feedback from the rednames on this for a change.

Giving PS better map tools, and letting us build better bases and actual maps?

Sounds like a good idea all around.

Just a note: people asked for this even when the AE itself was being designed and created. But map creation from scratch is not as easy as it sounds. And in fact there are lots of ways to make subtle errors that you don't spot until someone else uses your maps in different or unexpected ways.

One of the bugs that cropped up in the AE in the early days that caused a lot of maps to be revoked was the fact that when the devs create a mission, they hand-place the spawn points for things. When those spawn points were combined with an automated placement system that wasn't aware of how the points were oriented, you would get situations where objects would spawn at a point on a wall but inside the wall because their orientation was 180 degrees the wrong way around.

Making a map editor for players would actually not be that hard, but the hard part would be the map validator that ensured what you made actually worked correctly. And it would be extremely difficult to program the tools to prevent invalid design in the first place.

Its a good idea, and all it would take is work, but it might be an awful lot of work. It can be surprising without knowing the details how difficult it is to do certain things. My favorite AE related story is that when the AE was being designed, I was asked if I could help with a problem. pohsyb wanted to know, since I spent a lot of time on the animation system with BaB, if I could tell him how long a critter would spend eating a doughnut if it was told to do execute that animation (actually this was so early I didn't even *know* they were making the AE yet: I could only guess at what that was for at first).

I spent a couple weeks on it studying the problem, and eventually I wrote up a three page description of how to figure out how long it takes for a critter to eat a doughnut, starting from scratch. You'd think that would be a number somewhere. Its not. As it turns out, I later found out that pohsyb was trying to figure out if there was a way to make a critter perform one emote, and then follow it with another when it was finished in the AE as part of a critter scripting feature, but the way the animation system worked made that extremely difficult.

I still wished they could spend more time on the AE design tools, though. I still think there's enormous untapped potential there.

Bravo LockOn, you've managed to express beautifully what I've long thought to be our best bet for improving the base editor.

One thng that I've suggested a few times in the past as a way of totally shaking up the base system is to scrap plot sizes and restrictions, and add mission maps as preset plots - and then just let players place the current bases items in them, with the same amount of clipping allowed - so players could make bases on a sewer map, or a lab map, or Dr. Kane's mansion map, or the Cimeroran temple map.

This would be a fantastic tool, and I heartily agree with the idea that developing such a thing would help both sides of the board win out. Unfortunately, I can't see it happening any time soon. Due to the niche nature of these systems (and the outright abuse of AE) updates to them are seldom and sporadic. It's hard to justify putting so much attention into something that generates very little of the core game appeal. The best road to achieving something like this would be finding a way to develop little components to the toolset that would be released bit by bit and then fully repackaged once they were all in place.

For example:
Issue 24 - Base Exterior Graphic Options (set sky graphics as clouds, underwater, space, etc. that can be seen through windows)
Issue 27 - Base Building GUI (simple gui that streamlines object manipulation)
Issue 29 - Personal Player Housing (The structure of the system is retooled to include a sense of location in its design, unlike the ambiguity of existing bases)
Issue 32 - Architect 'Custom Map' Option (add objects into predefined environments)
Issue 33 - 'City Planner' Feature (Allows for creation of custom maps for implementation in Bases, Personal Housing, and Architect; size restrictions apply for each to keep file size manageable)

The hilarious thing with a 'small audience' argument is that, like PVP, the audience is only so small because the implemented feature is so bad. Minecraft certainly is not a small audience.