Future - More ideas

Another very nice feature of this entire VWorld stuff is the containment-relationship of the cells. Although the Dark Engine doesn't support this, I can well imagine a game which uses this info like this:

Player: Go to the kitchen!
NPC: Which kitchen? There are two of them.
Player: The one in the south wing.
NPC: On my way. [shuffles away]

And since the game knows that the south wing consists of some stories and that story 0 contains two rooms, one of them is named "kitchen", the NPC instantly knows to which room you refer to, and how he/she can get there. That's like the automatic patrol routes I mentioned in section 7.

Drawbacks

If this sounds like easy, automated level generation is around the corner, I should add some realistic points, too.

There was an GUI in the works, but the only guy working on it no longer has time, unfortunately. The GUI would make many things much more easier, because even for me it is somewhat tiresome to describe the level without actually seeing the cellsplits. If you implement it from a paper version, this is, however, a straight-forward conversion and can be done without a GUI.

The file format used in Thief/System Shock is undocumented, as well as all other internals and DromEd. Nearly all we know was found out by fans and I cannot say how I glad I am how many people devote so much time to this "hobby". But even now CoW does not understand the files fully, which means it can not do certain things, like generating creatures (AI, NPC etc) nor particle effects (so the famous torches are out of reach). The DromEd is buggy (at least) and often causes corrupted missions, crashes or other obscure things. While this should be in theory no concern with CoW, CoW still depends heavily on the editor. We just do not know enough, and there seems to be so little time.

But the future does look interesting, indeed.

Some wonderfull cityhouses, generated by a script done by Xarax. It took him about 3 minutes to generate the 16 houses with a script, and 40 minutes to place and Grid snap them in DromEd.

Castle, an example castle done by me in about 10 hours (including developing time to implement some stuff into CoW)

A temple, included as tutorial 8. Done in 2 hours.

Afterword