Summary: If you dev a war game with maps and scenarios, include a custom scenario editor that is EASY to CODE but VERY SATISFYING. Here is a revolutionary idea.

Background: I'm retired and I enjoy a now-seasoned game called Blitzkrieg 2; I play in Win 7 and game works great. But the Editor freezes in Win7. The editor is complex and likely never got tuned forward from WinXP. That editor was obviously a HUGE DEV PROJECT and custom games can be found (e.g.) that are vast and remarkable, so it was a great editor. But the editor not getting updated to Win7 is understandable. Blitzkrieg 2 is available for $9 Amazon Prime here.

Idea: Instead of coding, documenting, maintaining, and supporting a complex map/scenario editor, just provide say ~200 randomly generated maps, independent of the leveling up, for custom games. Tell the users, "Here is a very simple no-learning-curve editor where you choose one of these maps and set any units, locations, and objectives that you desire. IN OTHER WORDS THE REVOLUTIONARY MAP EDITOR CONCEPT IS VERY SIMPLE AND LIMITED; it just allows point and click to set unit and objective locations and some simple screens to specify reinforcements, number of turns, etc."

Users Will Love It: They can skip the usual complex editor learning curve and just learn a couple really simple dialogs. But they still have endless flexibility to generate custom contests.

Business People and Devs will Love It: They do much less work on the editor phase, both in dev and support (also in documentation), but they still get positive feedback and strong sales.

Users Will Love It: They can skip the usual complex editor learning curve and just learn a couple really simple dialogs. But they still have endless flexibility to generate custom contests.

Business People and Devs will Love It: They do much less work on the editor phase, both in dev and support (also in documentation), but they still get positive feedback and strong sales.

Many users will in fact hate it. One of the major criticisms of game editors is lack of complexity.

The editors generally don't add to development time (therefore cost), as they're often intended to be used by the developers themselves.

Moving to the Lounge (off-topic in GDNet Comments, Suggestions and Ideas, which is
for comments and suggestions about, and ideas for, GDNet itself).

Maybe provide both, (1) a complex editor as usual and (b) many maps and a simple tool for those users who don't want to climb a complex learning curve. I know as a user I would really like the latter. If Blitzkrieg 2 had provided that (b) option too, it could have been updated to Win7 easily, whereas they never updated their complex editor to Win7, because of complexity.

I'm with LennyLen's opinion in the 19 years I play/build content for video games there have been many does and donts in the editor technic.

• I loved the Spellforce Editor because of loving the game but it wasnt well documented and scripting wasnt possible also but have had fun building some maps.
• Totally loved Warcraft World Edit and Starcraft II's Map Editor. This is how a real content editor (at this time) has had to be with all the complexity to build any content only limmited to the graphics and some gameplay
• Disliked the Neverwinter MMO Content editor because it seemed to be very limitted and scripting was only possible inside the build-in dialog system

What a good game content editor need to offer in my opinion is

• A well documented or self explaining interface. It is nothing more frustrating than seeking a century for finding the function you looked for
• An Asset database; I love to browse the assets contained in a game and try whatever it does
• Flexible terrain editor; Importing hightmaps is ok but having tools for editing and not have to switch to photoshop every time you want to change something is better
• Entity editor or at least personalization of existing entities to make scenario based characters or create completely new fractions/races
• Last but not least a good scripting interface. It is not a shame to go for LUA but having a drag & drop scripting interface makes life also easy. Loved Blizzards approach for the scripting interface even if it took three times longer to click something together than it might have been to simply write a few lines of code but it was beginner friendly where I think today it should look more like this

Anyway, what a game offers at the end is part of the studio/publisher because they have to pay for. Most people are going to Unity or Unreal these days so there are only a few holding in-house software and even less ones willing to offer it to the community. What I would like to have (and also on the way to build at the moment) is a standard free to use game content editor including any of the tools one needs and as flexible as possible to fit well into a game studios workflow