by Jeff | Oct 19, 2013 | Axon, Design/Development, Featured, Games, Our Games, Quench |
We’ve been working on the Quench pipeline tools for a couple of months now, and despite the apparently endless barrage of school assignments that keep slowing things down, we’ve managed to reach our first major milestone! As I mentioned in this post, our plan has been to closely integrate a hex-based pixel art editor called Hexels with Unity as a 2D map editor to let our map designers more easily do their work. We’ve got the initial stages of this process working and from this point forward we’ll be making more and more map features in Unity editable from Hexels. I figured that I would run through the stages that we’ve passed through on the way to a working (but still pretty unstable) product. First Steps When this integration process began, we planned to utilize Hexels’ XML output feature to pass data back and forth between it and Unity, but after a short email conversation with Ken Kopecky of Hex-Ray Studios (the developers behind Hexels) it was made clear to us that Hexels doesn’t actually read its own .XML output format. With that in mind, we realized that we’d have to bite the bullet and decode the Hexels binary .HXL file format. Thankfully Ken is amazing and happily provided us with a specification to follow in the process of building a C# .HXL reader/writer (Hexels itself is written in C++). Ultimately the power of Hexels has been well worth the effort, as it provides us with a ton of map editing features that would have been a mountain of work to implement from scratch in Unity as Editor extensions....
Recent Comments