Greetings, fellow gamers, this is Bonifarz.

Like Honno, I’m not a core developer, but a Red Eclipse community member who likes to contribute on the wiki and forums. If you played race mode, maybe you have seen some of my maps, such as the movement tutorial or the Super MaREo 64 remake.

Today, I would like to say a word about open and community-driven development of Red Eclipse. When Quin announced the move to github, I had no clue about the site or using git for versionning. Learning by doing, I thought, and tried submitting some small patches, like search filters for the server list. Maybe I did not quite follow the guidelines for contributions at that time, but hey, the features got merged quickly and were somewhat useful (well, at least some of them).

That’s a while ago, so why am I talking about this in a news article? Because there’s a project I started about a week ago: The grand editing menu overhaul. As you probably know, the cube2 engine comes with some amazing map editing features. This allows you to create maps in-game and play-test them on the fly - and you can even do so cooperatively online. As there are plenty of mapping features, which are mostly executed via console commands, the learning curve is rather steep. We have some useful guides on the wiki, but for our in-game editing menus, I thought there are many things that could be improved. After starting some work-in-progress, I opened a ticket on github, which was approved by Quin. Meanwhile, I have rewritten most of the menus and added a bunch of features I consider nice to have, such as pretty colour pickers for altering textures, materials, lights and more. Also, I have put emphasis on the ability to look up console commands via the menus and to find the feature you need as quickly as possible.

Now, one thing that is cool: To test these menus, you don’t even need to fetch the development version from github. My work-in-progress got merged with the stable branch, so if you launch the game, you will fetch the latest updates for my new menus automatically. In return, this means that you may come across some glitches or partly finished menus, so you know who to blame! Feel free to leave your bug reports and suggestions on the corresponding github ticket or the forum topic and I will see what I can do about it.

I hope this will make mapping more accessible and convenient for everyone.

Cheers,
Bonifarz