Game Markers Join The Editor

I added marker layers to the editor. This is not a huge flashy feature, but it solves one of those annoying little problems that keeps showing up once exports get more serious.

Some things on a map are not terrain, roads, fields, or buildings. They are just points the game needs to know about: where the player starts, where a shop trigger is, where a world spawn should be. Until now those points did not really have a proper home in MapToPlay.

What Markers Do

Markers are a new layer type for small game-specific objects. You can place them in the editor as little spheres, drag them around, and rotate them with a ring in the scene.

They also snap to the ground, because I do not want placing a spawn point to become a tiny coordinate spreadsheet adventure. It should be something you move, look at, adjust, and export.

The First Ones

For Farming Simulator 25, marker layers start with the career starting point and the vehicle shop pieces. The shop needs a trigger and spawn positions, so it is exactly the kind of thing that should be editable instead of buried in a template file.

For Minecraft, the first marker is the spawn point. Very simple, very useful. When the world opens, the player should appear where the map creator actually wanted them to appear.

• FS25 career starting point
• FS25 vehicle shop trigger and spawn points
• Minecraft world spawn point

Why I Like This

The part I like is that export now listens to the editor here. If you move the FS25 shop marker, the exported map updates the right positions in the i3d. If you move the Minecraft spawn marker, the world spawn follows it.

That sounds obvious, but this is the kind of obvious I want more of in MapToPlay. Less opening generated files by hand. Less guessing where something came from. More direct control in the place where you are already building the map.

So yes, markers are small. But they make the editor feel a little more honest about what a game map actually contains. Not only shapes and textures, but also the quiet little points that make the world start in the right place.

Stan, Developer of MapToPlay