Announcing Alpha Release Of Our New Level Editor

We are pleased to announce the first release of an exciting new Planets Nu feature, the Level Editor. This tool will allow you to create single-player games and story lines, and share them with the Planets Nu community. You can access the Level Editor from your 'Hosting' tab, next to the Design Game button.

Once inside the Level Editor, you will find a modified version of the regular Planets Nu game interface.

At the Starmap, where you will do much of the design work, you will find a 'New Obj' button next to the Map Tools. This will allow you to add new planets, ships, etc., with the various settings you choose (some are generated by default, but you can change them). You can add an item at the displayed X-Y location by clicking the Add button, or just click on the map where you want it go and the X-Y fields will be updated accordingly. Once you are done adding items, just select New Obj again to close the menu. From there you can select individual items on the map by clicking on them as usual, but the interface screen will also have additional options to move, edit, or delete the selected item.

Back at the Dashboard, you will see several new menu items on the left hand side:

• Players - allows you to setup the players for the level, with the human player always in slot 1. Note that 'Unknown' (choose your own race) is not currently supported, but will be in the future.
• Events - in these new levels, you can setup various things to occur as the game progresses. More on that below.
• Game Settings - lists a sub set of the game settings which you can use to configure your level. Not all of these settings will necessarily apply to the level, and some may be overwritten based on the objects you add. However you can also configure them to Generate a New Map, which you can use as a base for building your level from. The map generation feature can also be useful for standard game hosts to quickly try out various map settings without having to create a full game to see what they do.
• Save Level - lets you set the overall parameters for your level, like name and description. The status field currently has 2 options, 'Edit' (which is default) will keep the level private to you while you work on it. 'Trial' will make the level publicly playable, so other players can try it out and offer feedback, while the level is still editable. In the future, once the feature has stabilized more, there will be another option to 'Publish' your level, which will make it publicly playable and lock it from additional modification. Also available are options to set the Sector the level will take place in (in the future, published levels will be viewable from the "Map" screen). And also to assign the level to a named story line, which is a collection of levels to be played in order to create a greater story arc.
• Manage Levels - lists all of your story lines, with basic options for opening them for editing, deleting them, as well as creating an actual game from your level so you can play through it to try it out.

A little more info then on the Events, since this is what will make a lot of these levels more interesting to play and help integrate them into a more immersive experience. There are several types of events currently available with more on the way. When an event is triggered (which will depend on the event type and the parameters set for it), all of the Actions attached to it will be performed. The currently available actions are:

• Victory - When the event this is attached to is triggered, the game ends and the player wins, allowing them to proceed to the next level in the story line. Note this won't make much difference until we allow levels to be published and played in order, but will be very important then!
• Defeat - Obviously the opposite of Victory, when this occurs the player immediately loses.
• AddShip - When triggered, the defined ships will be put into the level. For example, the arrival of friendly (or enemy) reinforcements.
• CutScene - When a cut scene is triggered, it will play the image and text when the new turn is first opened. It can also be replayed from an in-game menu option. Several cut scene actions can be added to an event and will play sequentially to create back-and-forth dialogue or other effect. Note that the image selection is not yet fully functional, but you can use some of our stock images with imgid 0-15. Once the image gallery functionality is complete, you will be able to add your own imagery as well, and our hope is that these cut scenes will really help you to tell the tale you want the player to be a part of.

Again, there will be many more Event and Action options available in the future (and we are open to your suggestions), but already you can create some interesting scenarios such as "capture the enemy base to win", "hold your homeworld for 20 turns", "take 5 planets and a reinforcement fleet arrives", and many others.

Well, that's a lot of info now, but hopefully it will make sense once you get a chance to play around with it some. Just keep in mind, that this is being released VERY early in its development so we can get your feedback, and there are still plenty of bugs and incomplete functionality, some known and likely many we have not yet discovered. Our hope is that once this has been stabilized it can provide new players some awesome tutorials to learn with, veteran players some interesting new challenges without the time and schedule commitment of a full multi-player game, and also give our creative community a tool to create some great planets work.

We've created a simple demo of a new single player level if you'd like to try it. You can find it under you Levels tab, selecting the link for 'User Created Story Lines'. It is BB's Demo Levels - Simple Demo 1. Other user created levels will start to appear here also, as they move them to the trial state for community testing. Note that these games run as single player levels, and there is no record kept of them, so you can create/play/delete them freely.

Enjoy!