Home of Empyrion Playfield Designer – EPD
Here you will find information about the tools I created for the Space Survival Game Emyprion – Galactic Survival.
Most importantly about EPD – Empyrion Playfield Designer. A tool for creating and editing the playfield.yaml files the game uses as playfields – a level editor – you can say.
What can I do with EPD?
EPD consists of many different editors and tools in one.
First and foremost it’s a playfield editor for Empyrion’s both random and static playfield.yamls. It wraps the yaml files in a graphical user interface with multiple input fields and database driven selection boxes.
You can edit all the basic parameters like atmosphere, biomes, resources as well as the more spohisticated setups like POIs, player start equipment, creatures and more.
Secondly there’s the Terrain Editor:
The terrain editor allows you to edit a planet’s or moon’s textures. EPD uses a stacked texture setup, where up to three textures define a texture setup, you then can use in the biomes section of the playfield editor. This terrain setup is both used for surface textures and resource textures as well.
Although the game has its own texture editor in game, this will help you choose and edit the textures, while you’re stil working on your playfield biomes.
Third: The Config Editor (ecf files):
EPD has three different editor types for configs, the terrain editor is one of them.
Then there’s the Trader Editor:
Here you can edit and also create Traders with all their items and prices. It allows you to choose from all the items the game offers with the same icon preview you’ll have in the game.
The Game Config Editor:
In the game config editor you can edit all (most of for now) the other ecf files. It allows you to edit everything the game offers.
But be aware. Even EPD can offer you a graohical user interface to minimize typing errors and format/indentation errors, it’s still very demanding to change the game’s configs. Man properties settings can brake your game and even make it cxrash during startup. So whatever you do, do it in very small doses, and keep track of what you’ve changed. Otherwise you’ll most probably have to start over.
Other Amenities:
Pre-Flight:
Beyond that, EPD has an integrated pre-flight check. It will check for some common mistakes in your playfield, when you save. Although it won’t find every mistake you could possibly make, but will help you in the beginning to get your playfield loaded and playable.
Blueprint Preview:
Whenever you get to select a blueprint (e.g. for a POI setup) EPD offers a live 3D preview of the blueprint you’ve selected. So no more guess-work, when you have to pick a POI from a list of thousand blueprints.
I hope that you enjoy EPD and that it will bring new worlds to Empyrion’s already fantastic galaxy.
/jmc