N Sane Trilogy level editor prototype

[ARD]

Things have been a bit crazy for me over the last few months so I haven't had as much time as I would have liked for working on Crash stuff. But I'm getting back into it now and want to try to do a better job of keeping this thread up to date because people continue to ask me about the level editor pretty much every day. Which is a relief because I was worried no one would care anymore now that Crash 4 is on PC.

(I would have kept going with this project even if no one did care, don't worry)



In its current state the level editor looks like ^this^. On the surface it doesn't look a whole lot different to when I was demonstrating it in my Arctic Antics behind the scenes video, but there have been a few changes since then and a lot of improvements. If you haven't seen it before then this video shows a series of levels I made using pretty much the latest version of the editor, so this should give you an idea of the kind of thing it's now possible to do (or at least most of the stuff in those levels was done with the editor, I did have to cheat with a few things). If you're interested in that reimagined project, I will be uploading a new video talking about it in the next couple of days.

At this point the editor is now about 95% ready to go for version 1.00, but there are still a few things that are a bit broken or that will prevent it from working if your setup isn't basically identical to mine. So that's why it hasn't been released yet. But to give you an idea of where I'm currently at and what's left to do, these are the main things I'm aiming to get done as part of 1.00, most of these are already in progress:

• Better way to save projects so they can be shared and don't take up hundreds of MBs - will also allow much faster loading of new levels into the editor
  
• Option to add collision without needing to manually import the files for it
  
• Option to export levels as single PAKs (bigger file sizes and much harder to quickly swap between different custom levels but won't cause as many crashes after finishing levels as current system)
  
• Proper keyboard and mouse camera controls (currently only really works with a controller)
  
• Option to export and reimport files for advanced editing with Alchemist etc / file manager option
  
• Fix rotation for splines etc that are still broken (eg. from the cannon and death route platform in the above image)
  
• Fix model swaps that don't update in the editor until reloading the project and load models that are currently being missed
  
• General stability, optimisation and QOL fixes (assume this also covers anything I forgot to list)
  

If that sounds like a lot, it's nothing compared to what I've already done. The complicated stuff is finished.

There are some features I have started working on but won't be developing further until after 1.00 is out. Some of these will still exist in 1.00 in some form but will be improved later, some I will remove altogether until they work better. These include:

• Support for CTRNF tracks and Skylanders Imaginators (still needs a lot of work, won't be possible in 1.00)
  
• Improved model editing (currently can disable individual parts of every instance of a model in the level, will be extended to modifying individual models later and include options for changing model materials)
  
• Improved texture editing (similar to models, currently changes every instance of a texture in the level, will include option to change only for certain models later)
  
• Improved importing of models from other games (currently only some static models from CTR are supported, this will be improved on later, and include animated models and stuff from Skylanders if possible)
  
• Better options for animation swapping of enemies etc (current system can break other enemies in the same file)
  
• More options for modifying lighting effects (currently only has some settings for draw distance that I don't really understand)
  
• Some way to add camera changing zones automatically without having to deal with the mouse pit stuff (possibly a similar system to the automatic collision stuff)
  
• More options for modifying the properties of crates, enemies, gameplay objects etc (I will have to manually add these in as I find more things you can do - but the option to export and modify files with Alchemist will let you do anything that isn't supported yet pretty easily yourself)
  
• Improved accuracy of textures when shown in the editor
  

There is other stuff I would like to add beyond those features that I haven't started working on yet and will probably leave until after most or all of the other updates are done. I'll probably release a new version every time I finish one of those things and of course there will be smaller bug fix updates etc in between once people start telling me how much I broke their computer. But I can worry about that after the first version is done.

Thanks as always for the continued interest and support in this project! I will keep updating this thread as I work my way through that to do list so you can see how I'm doing. I can't really give an ETA at the moment because I still have a lot of other stuff going on but I have to be out of the place I'm currently living in a couple of months and have no idea what I'll be doing after that so I'm treating that as a hard final final deadline. Should hopefully be comfortably done before that though.