Elysian Shadows

Hello .

I was wondering, how does a mapeditor work? can someone give me a short explanation of how they work?
This game im playing has private servers which they call "open tibia" servers.

And a guy made a mapeditor in C++ which is open source so I downloaded it but it kinda confused me :p.
But he had all kind of cool functions, i'm just simply interested in how the "mapping" itself works.

It's a 2d tile game, and the source for his mapeditor can be found here: http://remeresmapeditor.com/marklar.php
I know making a mapeditor is way too much for me, so im just interested :p.

Oh btw, the game uses an OTBM file format to open.

Just to start, lusikkamage (aka moosader) has a good map editor, it's open-source aswell, so you can see what she did there, plus she's quite active on this forum, her website is here http://moosader.com/app-moose-tiles.html

As for making your own editor, just think about what you would do in the editor, a few actions that come to mind for me are

- clicking to place tiles
- selecting tiles
- outputting the map to a file
- reading in maps

have a bit of a brainstorming session, and think about what you would find in a good editor, write down what you think of, and then break that down into logical steps, then it should hopefully become clear

PS: I've made my own editor in the past, so i'm not completely clueless, if you'd like to see what I did with my editor/ game, heres the link to the video, I tried best to explain what the editor can do, and it might give you some pointers as to what is usually included in a (very basic I must stress) map editor.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1xE9gM54mkI
(theres also a slightly more advanced editor I wrote a few months later, the video is on my channel)

I need to put the webpage tutorial I had back up on my site. It seems like this gets asked every other day.
I guess since I'm not doing anything on my vacation right now, I'll re-start it again.

Here ye go:
http://moosader.com/tutfiles/Writing_2D_MapEditor.pdf

Thanks both :D.
Really helpful .