The map editors issue - A big flaw in the OpenTibia development and hosting.

[Delirium]

Hello.

It is widely known that only two map editors exist at the time being. SimOne's and Remere's. Both however have their own pros and cons (not sure what SomOne's has that Remere's lacks of). These two map editors though have a great flaw. They are not updated anymore. This is a problem according to my judgement since people want to host servers with the latest client version and they have no way to do it since these map editors have no support or whatsoever for the latest Tibia version.

My question to the community is: How does the OpenTibia community deal with it? What stops/keeps developers from writing new map editors that will be kept updated? Is anybody working on a new map editor that is planned to be released in the near future?

/discuss.

 

[Zithium]

http://otland.net/f251/new-map-editor-129244/

 

[Summ]

OTClient is the way to go.
Easy to understand / update / open-source.

 

[J.Dre]

My question to the community is: What stops/keeps developers from writing new map editors that will be kept updated?

/discuss.

Desires dictate our priorities, priorities shape our choices, and choices determine our actions.

 

[Evan]

Unfortunately, the OTB, OTBM, Tibia.dat, Tibia.spr files are not documented anywhere (afaik).

I have the capabilities of developing some sort of program tool, like a map-editor.
However, since I don't know how the files (listed above) are structured, I can't really get anywhere.

Yes, I can use hex-editing through the files to see, but that's more demanding and a little more complicating.
I think the issue is that nobody really knows how to edit or develop using the above files.

 

[zbizu]

@up
you can check FME sources to see how opening a file works

 

[Evan]

Well, yeah, I have been looking through RME's open-source code and can see how it's done, I've been able to load a small sized map (that's pretty much it).
However, that's just for RME, so I don't know the full extent of the files. I could just go through TFS sources. Again, I haven't had much time.

But that's not the point, it's just I believe there should be some documentation for the community to get information from in order to understand how to develop
a program that uses OTB, OTBM, DAT, SPR files. This will definitely encourage others to start contributing something big to the community when needed.

Eh, since I love making tutorials, I could research a little more sometime in the future and write up some documents for each file.

 

[zakius]

Dat and spr are pretty well explained on tpforum, otb probably was somewhere on otfans. Otbm is the real problem here.

 

[GhostX]

Hello.

It is widely known that only two map editors exist at the time being. SimOne's and Remere's. Both however have their own pros and cons (not sure what SomOne's has that Remere's lacks of). These two map editors though have a great flaw. They are not updated anymore. This is a problem according to my judgement since people want to host servers with the latest client version and they have no way to do it since these map editors have no support or whatsoever for the latest Tibia version.

My question to the community is: How does the OpenTibia community deal with it? What stops/keeps developers from writing new map editors that will be kept updated? Is anybody working on a new map editor that is planned to be released in the near future?

/discuss.

This is why developers need to support fallen with his project. Or atleast remere. He did all this work and got little back. I kinda felt guilty not donating to him. I honestly would have if it was more convenient. I rarely use the rme website to download it. Therefore hardly seen the donate button. I donated several premium subscriptions here because i used tfs and the support that is given here. So i should have donated to remere. (I will soon).

Problem is a huge amount of developers are leaving and not many are joining the forum. A huge amount of our member base are also unskilled with scripting/programming and this is where the problem arises. There needs to be a bigger incentive to learn scripting and/or programming.

If i knew how - i would. I'm a mapper so i know what kinda features we would need + some more that are not on remeres. But i simply do not have the know how. I can learn - but it wont be a next day, week or even month thing. And it isn't practical judging on the amount of real life duties i have on top of what i do for several projects here.

So all i can do is just support fallen + remere hoping the community can keep growing and developing the map editors.