Flexlay - A Generic 2D Game Editor

**Notice!**
Current discussion of Flexlay's development and upcoming features (especially regarding FlexlayPaint) is occuring at the Flexlay Wiki. We'll have moved most of the content from here to the Wiki soon enough.

Flexlay is a generic 2d editor, with focus on games. It currently supports multi layered tile- and object maps, full undo/redo, support for tile-brushes, easy copy/paste, multiple buffers, minimap support, a metadata editor, drawing/sketch layers and some other stuff usefull for creating levels for 2d games. Flexlay uses ClanLib and Ruby.

Supported games are at the moment:

Flexlay can't be run on its own, but instead of you have to start it via wrapper scripts (supertux-editor, windstille-editor, netpanzer-editor).

Flexlay is covered under the GNU GPL, which means that you can copy and even modify it pretty much as you like, as long as you keep the copyright headers in place and distribute the source too if you distribute binaries, see the file COPYING for details.

Documentation

Flexlay itself is basically just a collection of GUI components that you can plug yourself together via Ruby scripts, it however comes with an example scripts that should get you started, called basic.rb. The script provides you with a full editor for a simple 2d game, all you have to add is code for loading you game data and for saving it again.

Screenshots

FlexlayPaint (working title)

FlexlayPaint aka. SketchLayer is a special layer in Flexlay that allows drawing. Its meant as both a development help for game levels, ie. you can sketch not-yet-developed object types or graphics directly ontop of a level for later reference, but it is also meant for use in a standalone graphic application. It is compared to normal paint programms relativly uniq in that it combines pixel and vector graphics unlike applications like The Gimp which are strictle pixel based or Inkscape which is strictly vector based.

In FlexlayPaint every stroke you make is saved and recorded, its not simply drawn to some pixelbuffer, but storted as a series of coordinates and parameters (brushsize, pressure). This leads to the following benefits. (Warning: The following is 'marketing speech', not all of these features might be implemented or fully working at this point in time, however the features listed here should all be implementable with the current codebase in not to much time)

Advantages of FlexlayPaint over other Applications

unlimited drawing area, you can paint where you want and you are not restricted to some fixed pixel-sized canvas
unlimited zoom, you won't reach a pixel-barrier when you zoom-in, you can simply add as much detail at whatever scale you like
unlimited undo/redo, since only strokes are saved which are memory wise pretty cheap as compared to a pixelbuffer the number of undo/redo is pretty much unlimited
the undo/redo stack will be saveable, meaning you can go back to all your older revisions of your work if necessary, named checkpoints inside your work will be available as well (might be useful for writing tutorials or such)
Flexlay will dump all your actions directly to disk directly after you performed them, this should allow to recover savely from crashes or otherwise fatal errors
brush size and properties are changable even after the image was drawn
some vector graphic primitves will be provided and be editable as they would be in a vector graphics application
you can 'render' the image into a pixelbased format at whatever resolution you want
real shaped brushes, not just polygons, circles and rectangles as in a classic vector application
the application itself is written in Ruby and thus fully customizable and scriptable, new tools, brushes and effects can be added with relativly little work
native OpenGL support, meaning very large brushes are no problem, HDR based images and GLSL based effects should be doable as well
network support, in theory it should be possible to link two Flexlays together and work together on an image, havn't thought to much about this, but shouldn't be all that difficult, just need to sync the undo/redo stack and replay the actions

Disadvantages of Flexlay

Beside from all the advantages Flexlay has, it has of course some disadvantages too.

lack of support for indexed images, Flexlay will be able to load them, however it will convert them to RGBA on the import, so palette information will be lost
images might not look 100% the same on all OpenGL drivers, how much of an issue that will be and how good that can be worked around isn't clear yet, having a reliable software renderer based on Mesa might help.

Ideas

gradient editor: allow it to 'grab' gradients from images/photos, etc

Download

Subversion

The latest development version is hosted in a Subversion repository:

svn checkout svn://svn.berlios.de/flexlay/trunk/