GameDev Options

This simple dialog (new with version 1.2) allows you to specify some global paremeters relating to the editing environment:

• Disable player edits in map editor. This option, when checked, has the following effects only while in the full screen map editor (the Play command from the file menu still functions normally).
  • When a collision test that involves inventory occurs, the player's inventory is not changed.
  • When any "Alter Map" type function is triggered, it will have no effect on map tiles.
  • For functions that have "Remove after use" checked, the function is not removed.
  • For functions that require inventory to activate, the inventory is not altered by the activation of the special function.
  • "Alter Inventory" special functions have no effect on the inventory.
  • All player map interactions are completely disabled.

  Any changes that *do* take place while the map editor is active are permanent and will be persisted to file when the project/map is saved.

• Display warning message before playing map. Using the "Play" command from within the editor environment can be risky. This is one reason for having the new "Make Shortcut" command in version 1.2. Running the game from a shortcut plays the game in a separate process. When playing the game in a separate process, the game is loaded from a file and never saved so there is no risk of corrupting the project or making unintended permanent changes. For this reason I decided to display a warning message whenever the play command is selected from withing the GameDev development environment. Realizing, however, that this message could quickly become very annoying to more experienced developers who know what they're doing, this option is provided to turn that message off. GameDev does its best to store and restore the project each time the Play command is executed from within the development environment, but who can predict everything that might happen.
• Store project backup in memory while playing. By default, GameDev attempts to export the current project (all data stored in the GDP and MAP files) into an XML string in memory before executing the Play command from within the development environment. When control returns to the development environment, GameDev will re-import all data from the XML string back into the active project, undoing any changes that may have occurred while playing the game. There are a few reasons you might want to disable this:
  • If you are working on a large project, exporting the data to an XML string might be time consuming and a real memory hog.
  • You might want the changes that take place during play to be permanent.
  • You might not have an XML parser installed (I believe that comes with IE5.0 and later).
  • There might be (*gasp*) an undiscovered bug in the process that results in imperfect restoration of the project.
• Show frame rate (FPS) at top right corner. Now that frame rate limiting is implemented (as of version 1.3) it will be handy to have an option to see what the frame rate is. Checking this option will enable the frame rate display for all GameDev games.
• Perform validation before playing. Version 1.4 introduced a new feature that validates certain aspects of the project and displays a warning message if there appear to be errors. If this validation is being more annoying than helpful, turn it off here. In version 1.4, the only validation that is performed is verifying that every sprite template has at least 1 frame defined in each of its states. To temporarily disable validation from script, set te bIgnoreValidate flag on the player object which has a similar effect, but only applies to the current execution.
• Default full screen display mode. Some video cards do not support 24-bit color, others do not support 32-bit color, but most seem to support 16-bit color so I originally settled on this as a hard coded default for playing games and editing maps and graphics. But if one neglected to select 24- or 32-bit color before editing a tileset, the tileset would lose valuable color information. Furthermore, there was no method, short of writing a vbs script, to play the game in 24- or 32-bit color. For these reasons I have added this option in order to supply an easy way to indicate to GameDev which video mode you want to use most often. This mode will be selected by default when editing tilesets and maps. The option to select a mode other than the default still exists on the editor dialogs. A command line switch has also been added so that playing a game can also select a particular video mode, or use the user's default specified in this dialog. That command line switch is utilized by the Make Shortcut command.