Random Hacks of Kindness is a project which aims to use technology to make the world a better place and since I need the karma, I figured I would lend a hand.
Chestnut is a tiled map editor, written by a friend of mine, @Tom_Cashman. The problem? It’s written in C# and uses .Net 4.0 and the Windows Presentation Foundation and was closed sourced and that’s just cruel. I firmly believe that the world would be a much better place if it was cross-platform compatible, open-sourced and backwards compatible with Tiled.
Well, I’m in luck because after a very brief talk with Tom, he open sourced the C# code he wrote under the BSD license and will help me out turn this cross-platform compatible and was already planning on making it backwards compatible with Tiled.
And I know what you’re wondering. If Tiled exists, why do we need yet another map editor? While Tiled is a great tool, while working on the ceased-and-desisted Pokenet we found it quite troublesome in these areas:
- Dynamic map loading of maps at runtime often resulted in minor lag due to required decompression.
- Loading over 250 maps at once (e.g. on the game server) would result with insane amounts of RAM being used up. We’re talking GBs here.
- Mapping teams often messed up when linking maps together since they could not visually see the maps beside each other. They kept track on an XLS spreadsheet. It was chaotic.
I know I’ll hit a couple dozen blocks when porting the code over to Java, I doubt I’ll finish the project in a weekend, but I’m willing to try it anyway.
So this is my Random Hack Of Kindness: Porting Chestnut to all important platforms that run Java and maybe later, getting it packaged on Fedora.
Nice that you will do it, but still don’t overwork yourself with it and work on abugadro too.
With Crystalis gone, I have more time. Chestnut can fill said time.