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Christian Diaz edited this page Jul 20, 2020 · 4 revisions

Welcome to the Toon-Express-Level-Editor wiki!

Current Wiki Docs

Suit Paths and Battle Cells

Why this project was made

I worked in level design in the Toontown community, primarily making streets from their initial concept design to their almost complete production design. I have heard of and seen a couple of level editors redesigned from the Disney source in some servers that are much more robust than this one, and thought the public should have access to a rehauled editor as well. However, I was motivated to make this project because the original level editor had many issues that slowed development, and caused unnecessary setbacks in making streets. The main issues that caused these hurdles were:

  • Ease of use: When working in level design, I found myself constantly losing progress when making streets, mostly due to bugs in the editor breaking the DNA file or crashing the editor. I realized this would be a 2 part issue to fix:

    1. Prevent the crashes/bugs from occurring
2. Implement a way of preventing data loss in the case of a bug or crash

    Issue 2 would be the easiest to tackle, as what it mostly required is some sort of autosaver program, that saves the working DNA file on a set interval. This wouldn't completely prevent data loss, as an unexpected crash could occur after the file was edited and not saved yet. This was the easiest and quickest solution for preventing data loss, which I made using a separate Python thread to automatically save the working DNA file either every 15 minutes or via a user-defined time interval. However, fixing some of the crashes with the editor has proven difficult, which brings us to the next issue.

  • Instability: The level editor tends to not work well, for multiple reasons. Sometimes it crashes if you mess with a suit point, sometimes spawning in one of the street models will crash the program, or naming the street node may cause the DNA file to not work if reloaded. Most of these issues are minor on their own, but together they can cause frustration, and prolong the development cycle. The general instability of the editor will take some time to fix, mainly after a Python 3.x overhaul.

  • Documentation: This issue isn't about the documentation, because there isn't any documentation. At all, nada. Since the editor was found in an old Panda3D download and wasn't meant for public use, there is no official documentation as of now. As such, some in the community have made videos or short guides on operating the level editor. In most of these cases, the level editor used was made for a specific private server, which meant it wasn't publically available. This caused confusion for me, as some functions, such as suit point placements, were shown to work via clicking Shift + S on a street, which isn't the complete way of doing so in the publicly available level editor.

  • Python: The newest level editor from Disney's Toontown Online is from 2005, running on Python 2.4. As such, there are significant gains in ease of use, OS optimizations, as well as readability if the original level editor was ported to Python 3.x. Also, many modules used in Python 2.4 are outdated, and many modules that should be used (i.e. multiprocessing) are not compatible with Python 2.4.

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