tools for dungeon creation

don't even tell me that you all still creating it all manually. there should be some sort of tool to make it easier. at least to visualise the things. please, point me to it, so i will fork and mutilate it.

please, don't say that i have to create such tool from the scratch. i know, "road to death" and all that, but have at least some mercy!

and if you have no mercy, then at least help me with your ideas. how do you see teh UI of such editor? go wild! i'm not promising anything, but who knows... throw your ideas against the wall, and we'll see.

Yes we're all still creating dungeons manually.
Yes there should be a tool to make it easier, which would enable a great many more people to contribute.

The only saving grace we have is the dev team took the time to separate dungeon.dat out into separate .dat files to make things at least a little easier for players to mod.

If we were hypothetically going to have a dungeon modder, for the UI I think something simple like the Binding of Isaac room editor would work just fine. Similar to Isaac we'd be using the editor to create rooms that the game stitches together procedurally, but there's a few points of difference between Isaac and IVAN's level generator that we'd need to account for. For example, Isaac doesn't feature hallways and every room is pre-defined, whereas IVAN has both random and set room types.
You'd also need to define whether an object you placed in the room is positioned exactly where you've placed it, or whether it can appear on any free tile, plus the spawn chance (if any).

yeah. i see the tool as something that allows you to draw predefined room shapes, place items, and edit random appearance properties, with "generate sample level" button to get a rough "feeling" of how it would look in the game. it prolly should use game graphics for this.

but if somebody has a better idea, or want to sketch an UI, you're welcome.

i'll prolly start with something simple that allows a user to draw a room, place items inside, and set some room/item properties, and we'll see what will come next.

no defined terms, tho — it may happen, or may not, i don't know yet. i have to port some code from C++ to D (my language of preference) first. i'm not planning to invest any additional efforts into windows support, but due to the cross-platform nature of the libraries i plan to use, the same code should work both in windows and GNU/Linux, so i'll prolly provide prebuilt windows binaries.

in the meantime, i am slowly writing some low-level support code, and still open to high-level suggestions.

This is a great initiative, something we've been longing to have.
So far we only have the unfinished dungeon building guide on the wiki. It gives the basic stucture of the script files and how they relate to the dungeon.

There was this. I never tried it out though, and cannot make any comment.