CipSoft's "Creator" software (Map Editor and more)

[TibiCAM]

Today on 07 Feb 2023 the fansite Rookie.com.pl published an interview with Satudo, one of the testers at CipSoft GmbH.
In that interview, CipSoft GmbH provided screenshots of their internal tool, called Creator.
It's not just a map editor by the looks of it. It appears they also create other things inside of it:

• Quests
• Events
• Raids
• Add sound to areas
• AI (?) [look at the menu bar button]
• and more...

Perhaps, they do everything inside of that one tool. Scripting NPCs, modifying monsters, etc.
It's a nice idea and could be useful for the Open Tibia community as well.
I think this is the first time we see full-size images of it. Previously it has only been shown on some images and videos from a distance.
What do you guys think of it?

Here are the images of it:

 

[Nottinghster]

This is awesome !

 

[Rexxar]

Perhaps, they do everything inside of that one tool. Scripting NPCs, modifying monsters, etc.

They most likely could do just that.
Both NPC and MON files in the 7.7 leak are just simple tables of data, so you could easily build in a GUI tool inside of the map editor to create and edit both of them with buttons and dropdown menus.

What fascinates me tho is how they overlay walls and tiles with collision and void indicators so you can easily see room structure and where walkable tiles are and are not, and even objects with event triggers. It even has that blueprint like "door swings this way" indicator on the center top door.

There's some really clever stuff there that I think this community would benefit from. Especially the red exclamation points on event trigger objects, since it's always been hard to see at a glance what objects on the maps are "special" and which are just generic objects.

 

[TibiCAM]

They most likely could do just that.
Both NPC and MON files in the 7.7 leak are just simple tables of data, so you could easily build in a GUI tool inside of the map editor to create and edit both of them with buttons and dropdown menus.

What fascinates me tho is how they overlay walls and tiles with collision and void indicators so you can easily see room structure and where walkable tiles are and are not, and even objects with event triggers. It even has that blueprint like "door swings this way" indicator on the center top door.

There's some really clever stuff there that I think this community would benefit from. Especially the red exclamation points on event trigger objects, since it's always been hard to see at a glance what objects on the maps are "special" and which are just generic objects.

Also, look at the monster in the top-left. It has the text "RM" on top of it. Any clue what that could be? I'm not familiar with this new spawn and monsters, so I don't know what that monster is called. "Rare Monster", "Random (Amount of) Monsters")? No clue.

I agree, everything looks interesting and quite useful.

There are also some videos of them using it in their 25th anniversary video on YouTube, but there they only show the map editing part of it. And old pictures also only show the map editing section. Today I think it's the first time we see what other features they've got.

 

[Rexxar]

Also, look at the monster in the top-left. It has the text "RM" on top of it. Any clue what that could be? I'm not familiar with this new spawn and monsters, so I don't know what that monster is called. "Rare Monster", "Random (Amount of) Monsters")? No clue.

I agree, everything looks interesting and quite useful.

There are also some videos of them using it in their 25th anniversary video on YouTube, but there they only show the map editing part of it. And old pictures also only show the map editing section. Today I think it's the first time we see what other features they've got.

I don't know what monster that is either, but looking at the old 7.7 files there are "event files" in the monsters folder that define monster raids on cities (invasions).
So it's possible that the RM stands for "Raid Monster" and tells the editor that this monster isn't wrongly placed or a mistake, but will only exist at certain times/dates when the invasion event they're attached to triggers.

 

[TibiCAM]

I don't know what monster that is either, but looking at the old 7.7 files there are "event files" in the monsters folder that define monster raids on cities (invasions).
So it's possible that the RM stands for "Raid Monster" and tells the editor that this monster isn't wrongly placed or a mistake, but will only exist at certain times/dates when the invasion event they're attached to triggers.

They seem to still use those sector files from 7.7 files too. At the bottom you see the coordinates, which sector file it is and the offset inside that file. They also name certain zones, e.g. "Deeper Ingol" and I assume that also has the zone id 694 in their screenshot. Also an indicator if that zone has some certain sound. They maybe still use that same format then on all their files (NPCs, Monsters, Map, etc.). Just a nice GUI for it.

 

[Rexxar]

They seem to still use those sector files from 7.7 files too. At the bottom you see the coordinates, which sector file it is and the offset inside that file. They also name certain zones, e.g. "Deeper Ingol" and I assume that also has the zone id 694 in their screenshot. Also an indicator if that zone has some certain sound.

Yeah I think the big red divider you see in the middle of the screen is the sector indicator.
I'm surprised tho they got internal names for zones. I don't think that ever shows up in game for the player (like it does in wow does for example).
I wonder what they're used for... Maybe GM teleports and quests triggers?

 

[TibiCAM]

Yeah I think the big red divider you see in the middle of the screen is the sector indicator.
I'm surprised tho they got internal names for zones. I don't think that ever shows up in game for the player (like it does in wow does for example).
I wonder what they're used for... Maybe GM teleports and quests triggers?

Looking at the Tibia website's map section, they list a lot of areas there and I guess they pull that data from the "Zones" data. Each zone probably has a category (City, Forest, Dungeon, Mountain, etc.), some description, and subzones. They can also be seen inside the "Cyclopedia Map". Zooming in on Carlin there shows e.g. "Carlin Surroundings", "Fields of Glory" and "Ghostlands"... They have different raids sometimes and gets highlighted in the Cyclopedia Map. There's also a quest where you have to find "points of interests" in those areas.

List of zones:

Cyclopedia/Map Areas

This table lists all the Areas and Subareas of Tibia according their official names used in the Cyclopedia. Areas and subareas in bold are those which can also be highlighted in the Cyclopedia Map, and most of them can also be discovered, with few exceptions.

tibia.fandom.com

Edit: Also the monster in the screenshot appears to be a Carnivostrich.
They made some typos on that monster data/description haha.
They switch between the words "Carnivostrich" and "Carnovostrich", and even "carnivostriches/carnoviostriches". lul
Couldn't figure out any "RM" from that creature page though.

 

[Ezzz]

More interestengly enough is that they still rely on moveuse.dat for their entire action system structure and apparently even for complex events, well, not that we can't expect less from a syntax tree such as that one.

 

[zbizu]

Looks old but also very advanced at the same time.

 

[TibiCAM]

Looks old but also very advanced at the same time.

Yeah well, it is an old software. There are some really old pics of them by Knightmare and another CM, from around 2010. And it looks very similar to that, without all overlays and some less buttons.

 

[Rexxar]

I bet it's several decades old and they've just been adding stuff to it over time.
Such is the wonders of legacy support on windows, lol. You can have a 20 year old program using WinForms and it'll work perfectly fine today as long as you keep recompiling it with updated libraries and whatnot.

 

[zbizu]

I bet it's several decades old and they've just been adding stuff to it over time.

I wouldn't be surprised if they made this tool in '97 together with game client. That would make it nearly three decades old by now.

 

[Crazytoeee]

Looks nice

 

[TibiCAM]

I must say I fucking love the way CipSoft makes everything in-house and it doesn't particularily look nice, but whatever they do, it always works. And it will work for years and years on end (after bugs have been fixed). And they never change their way of working either. Can't put my words on it, but it's like some programming/developer ASMR of some sorts. Some dude in that office opened the same software for probably 20+ years at this point and it looks the same today. It looks like a 6/10 but it fucking works and they made it from scratch.

 

[Ezzz]

They are testing + creating content live, I am pretty sure that, given that they still use sector files, they can reload sectors in-game to reload the current map area they are developing a custom quest / A.I boss monster. Also, can see that they have everything in a .cre (for Creator) project, and I am sure they later export everything to the respective folders to be used by the game server.

 

[Rexxar]

I must say I fucking love the way CipSoft makes everything in-house and it doesn't particularily look nice, but whatever they do, it always works.

It definitely has the feeling of old Blizzard before they got swallowed up by corporatism.
If I remember correctly Blizzard also had a janky as hell in-house world editor for their games that you could see in the background of various old documentaries and videos from the 90s and early 2000s, that looked like it was cobbled together by a bunch of geeks in a weekend.

Love it.

 

[Ezzz]

It definitely has the feeling of old Blizzard before they got swallowed up by corporatism.
If I remember correctly Blizzard also had a janky as hell in-house world editor for their games that you could see in the background of various old documentaries and videos from the 90s and early 2000s, that looked like it was cobbled together by a bunch of geeks in a weekend.

Love it.

I think it reminds of the Warcraft editor, it's very intuitive.

 

[TibiCAM]

I wonder why they repeat a lot of the button icons in the toolbar, but they're also not identical.

 

[Rexxar]

I wonder why they repeat a lot of the button icons in the toolbar, but they're also not identical.

The left row is probably "add new", while the right side has what looks like a wrench on it so it's most likely "edit existing".
They probably have that many button categories because clicking one highlights those objects on the map to make them easy to see.