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BZEditWin32

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Revision as of 20:44, 18 February 2007 by JeffM2501 (Talk | contribs) (Development)

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BZEditWin32 is the name of the Microsoft Windows version of BZEdit, a graphical BZW map editor. It was first written by Jeff Myers and later extended by Daniel Remenak.

Overview

BZEditWin32 provides a graphical representation of the BZFlag world, and tools to place various objects in it. It has tools to create and edit the basic objects that were supported in BZFlag version 1.7. These include:

BZEditWin32 is still in use today by some map makers who prefer the a more simple editing interface then the one provided by the BZTools blender plug-in.

Development

BZEditWin32 is written in C++ using the Microsoft Foundation Classes or MFC. Development began in 2003 as a simple BZW map viewer but evolved into a full blown map editor shortly after. It was written by Jeff Myers as a way to get back into the BZFlag community after he found that it had gone open source. The current application shares it's world loading and editing system with the Linux based BZEdit. Active development on the project stoped in 2005 with a set of bug fixes made by Daniel Remenak.

The BZEditWin32 codebase is included in the BZFlag CVS repository as the bzeditW32 module.

A number of requests have been made to port BZEditWin32 to other platforms, namely MacOSX. The use of the MFC framework prevents easy porting of the code. The iBZEdit projects have attempted to create an OSX native editor. A cross platform rewrite of BZEdit was started, and is included in the tools module of BZFlag CVS, but was never finished.

Distributions

The last binary version is also available on the BZFlag SourceFORGE downloads page.

Compiling and building

BZEditWin32 can be built with the Microsoft Visual C++ compiler, version 6 or later.

Controversy and confusion

When first written, BZEditWin32 did not see wide use or acceptance by the BZFlag Community. It was not until nearly a year later did it begin to see real use. At that time the author had stoped active development of the project due to lack of interest. This lead to a large group of users who wanted a windows based BZW editing tool, but had to deal with the bugs and inconsistencies of the initial versions of the editor. The largest complaint was dealing with a bug that would cause the editor to "eat" a map when an object was deleted, causing it to save out an empty file, loosing the work of the user. After hearing about the resurgence of use, the BZFlag developers worked to fix these major bugs, and make the application usable.

Additional confusion lies with the fact that BZEditWin32 only supports editing of the basic "1.10" type objects. It was not updated to support the extended map objects that were added with version 2.0 of BZFlag. This includes Mesh objects, Textured Materials, and Physics Drivers. A number of new users are unaware that BZEditWin32 was written before these features were added.

Replacement by blender

The current accepted method of graphically editing BZW maps on Windows is using the BZWTools plug-ins for blender, as they provide a full 2.0 compliant editing system on a large number of platforms.