That too is a really important feature. Personally I can't see myself making a cave using cavegen without it.

I'd also really appreciate some sort of Ctrl+C/V/X feature implemented. I tend to move things around a lot when making caves in HATPC/Aeon, so that sort of thing would be super beneficial.

One day, CaveGen will have every productivity shortcut that you're used to. Every one of them comes as a surprise to me because I only ever used the mouse like a noob when I made caves haha. Since becoming a software engineer, I've learned the value of hotkeys and shortcuts though, so I totally get why you'd want this stuff.

I do have a task on my Trello board for "region selecting" - I could easily extend that to cover region copy-pasting. Could also be combined with Ctrl selection to select a non-rectangular set of tiles to paste and move around.

An idea I've toyed with is allowing you to save common groups of tiles (e.g. a trio of arrows with a dynamite) as templates that you can reuse across your levels, and perhaps even share with others.

Thanks for pointing this out - it'll come, don't worry.

wow jebby ... that sure is a tall order to drink but i am sure you can handle it u can do it Jebby

Are there plans to bring back the cave generating aspect of cavegen?

You can now resize your levels by adding/removing columns or rows. This can be done using these new tools:
- Add Column (hotkey: 6)
- Remove Column (hotkey: 7)
- Add Row (hotkey: 8)
- Remove Row (hotkey: 9)

New columns/rows contain space by default.

Additionally, new levels contain space by default, rather than terrain like before.

Hopefully, these tools should make it easier to tweak the dimensions of your cave without starting from scratch.

Very cool implementation, I like it. Great work!

You can now select and manipulate regions. The following actions are possible:
- Drag to select a region
- Fill the region with a tile type
- Resize the region
- Copy the contents of the region and paste it somewhere else
- Move the region around

Demonstration here: http://giphy.com/gifs/xUPGcyF8xpUuqpoxyM

This is made possible by a new "Select Region" tool, which can be operated with the following hotkeys:
- Use (hotkey: a)
- Resize Region (hotkey: Shift + Arrow keys)
- Move Region (hotkey: Alt + Shift + Arrow keys)
- Fill Region (hotkey: Alt + tile key)
- Fill Region from palette (hotkey: Alt + click on a palette tile)
- Copy (hotkey: Ctrl + C)
- Paste (hotkey: Ctrl + V)

This is the last piece of work I'll do on hotkeys for a long time. My next point of focus is supporting some of the new hotness in HATPC Reborn, namely events and checkpoints. This is going to be a tricky one, but my aim is to make it as visual as possible, with minimal understanding of Droid's event language required. Watch this space!

This is amazing, time to make some serious caves

Quick update to keep you guys in the loop. I've been busy the last few months with work and moving house, but have a bit of time coming up where I can make some fresh progress on CaveGen.

I'm in the process of redesigning the UI to make the layout a bit more streamlined, and primarily to make it easier to add the two new features that are coming next (in no determined order yet):
- Basic checkpoints and tutorial messages
- Cave Directory 2.0

I'm applying the 80/20 rule and intentionally not going to implement all of Droid's event system. The more complex event parameters create a lot of dependencies between events. I had cool ideas for visualising them in a tree or a graph, but I figured that most of the time, people will just be making a linear sequence of region-based checkpoints. The region selector from CaveGen's main editor will be reused to make checkpoint creation a simple (and purely visual) process with no understanding of the event language required.

For the advanced event syntax, I'll add an optional text input for those who want to add such events to their CaveGen level manually.

For the public cave list, I'm throwing out the little dropdown and replacing it with a separate page. I haven't finished designing this yet, but I'm imagining a kind of grid listing all the caves, possibly with the aid of some clever filters for a better search experience. Each cave will probably have:
- An auto-generated cover image, something like the map preview HATPC currently renders.
- A Play button.
- If you are the owner, a Build button.
- Other details, like name, description, "likes", etc. If I get round to it, I may collaborate with Droid to add interesting stats like playthroughs and deaths.

Aside from a few tweaks and marketing it to a wider audience, I consider this to be the endgame for CaveGen, the point at which I can call it "done". I've been building CaveGen in various forms for 4 years now and would like to start on a new project. That said, I may come back to it on occasions.

In the meantime, I'll keep you guys updated about the two features above whenever I can.

I have a question about having stats on caves. Would it show the total number of times people (that is, everyone who's played the level) have died, or will it only show one's own deaths?

Death stats would be dependent on how Droid implemented it. In theory, I could pass information to HATPC Reborn about which player is playing the level. Then we could generate both total deaths for everyone AND personal deaths for each individual player.

Again, this depends on there being a new level of integration between CaveGen and HATPC Reborn - I wouldn't count on it just yet. What I can do straight away is do a count of play sessions, which is simply the number of times people press Play in CaveGen to open up HATPC Reborn. This is only moderately interesting though as (a) people could spam the Play button to boost this number and (b) individual attempts at the level are probably of more interest to the creator in terms of judging the difficulty and popularity of their cave.

Combining success stats and death stats would be the best implementation as it would allow creators to see the number of deaths per cave completion, giving them a fairly good metric of difficulty.

Copying level codes isn't working for me. The codes don't come out formatted properly.

Thanks for notifying me. I'm updating CaveGen soon - I'll make sure it's fixed in that update.

I've given CaveGen a lick of new paint and redesigned it in preparation for checkpoints and Level Directory 2.0. Browsing through levels is now done on a separate page rather than in those ugly dropdowns. They'll get prettified in Level Directory 2.0.

I've not been able to reproduce broken level code copying. If you're running it on Firefox, allow the outdated version of Flash it complains about as this enables level code copying. I'll look into updating it. If it's still an issue, describe the state the app was in at the time and the things you did just before it broke.

Okay, the issue only seems to occur when I paste the code into notepad. It doesn't paste the code with separate lines. It works perfectly fine if I paste it into the comment box, and then copy it from that and paste it into notepad. Sorry for any confusion

Besides that, this new site layout is pretty cool

Is there a way to paste code into cavegen?

@krotomo - sounds like an encoding issue. What happens if you paste it directly into the Neopets uploader?

@soccerboy - not yet.

Pasting into the Neopets uploader works fine, the issue only seems to occur with Notepad for some reason.

The bug where you couldn't play a cave from the editor should now be fixed.