#40 - Nessie - Wed Jan 01, 2003 9:27 pm
I've seen several map editting tools on the GBADev.org site, but none of them are quite full-featured enough for my taste. Anyone know of any others that are worth trying? It'd be especially nice if one could have access to the source code so I could add improvements. Of course I'd be willing to share any enhancements made with the community if the source code agreement allows that.
#44 - J-Rod - Wed Jan 01, 2003 9:58 pm
I dunno, I know TUME is free and open source. Most people that I know make their own map editors to work with. Here's a link you can check out.
http://members.aol.com/opentume/html/download.html
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#45 - Nessie - Wed Jan 01, 2003 10:01 pm
Yeah, that's actually what I've started to do--build my own, but thanks, I'll check out that link.
#50 - lordmetroid - Wed Jan 01, 2003 11:18 pm
The Areta Network are working on a map editor, it's not quite finished yet but it's open source...
And one would be able to code their own saveing functions for saveing in the format one would need for their needs, just be sure to mention Areta in the credits if you use anything of their work!
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#62 - adavie - Thu Jan 02, 2003 1:49 am
I, too, use tUME.
My conversion tool, tumeric, does a great job of converting tUME maps into GBA-compatible data (source code for compilation). You can get that tool from www.2headed.com/tumeric.html - and sample code to draw maps from that data at www.2headed.com/bg.zip
Cheers
A
#65 - J-Rod - Thu Jan 02, 2003 2:35 am
Ah, Boofly wust have decided on another nick for these forums. :)
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#66 - adavie - Thu Jan 02, 2003 2:45 am
| J-Rod wrote: |
| Ah, Boofly wust have decided on another nick for these forums. :) |
Busted!
#109 - Sean - Fri Jan 03, 2003 1:38 am
I've been creating my own map editor this past week. Here are the features so far:
- Edit all four backgrounds for the same map
- Backgrounds can be edited and viewd seperatly, or viewed as a how it will appear on the gameboy advance.
- Fully compatible with Windows XP (sorry if you don't use windows).
- Tilesets are loadeded as bitmaps (24b,16b, 256 color, or 16 color)
- Tilesets are enlarged for selection
- Double Buffering is used for drawing to ensure quality of display.
I still have a lot of features to add. I will be uploading a demo soon. It will be closed-source, but I'm open to suggestions. For now, here is a preview.
[Images not permitted - Click here to view it]
#112 - J-Rod - Fri Jan 03, 2003 4:15 am
Neat Sean, I'll be looking for that when you've got it public. :)
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#139 - Mori Ryuu - Fri Jan 03, 2003 9:46 pm
yeah Sean that's pretty nice, will definitely check it out when it comes available!
#150 - sod - Fri Jan 03, 2003 11:47 pm
Looking good Sean.. any chances of exporting in asm?
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#191 - Nessie - Sun Jan 05, 2003 12:54 am
Well, if I ever get done with mine...I'd be happy to release the full source for everything.
No offense Sean, but it's too bad that people aren't willing to share their source code more.... as you can see by what I'm working on, a lot of effort is going to get wasted here..
[EDIT]: I've already got more framework done on the editor than what's shown in the shot, but I'm too lazy to upload a new pic at this point.
http://www.geocities.com/gba_dev/index.html
Last edited by Nessie on Tue Jan 07, 2003 3:19 am; edited 3 times in total
#196 - Sean - Sun Jan 05, 2003 2:24 am
MapStudio Advance will probably export into asm. It will support C++ first though.
#219 - Touchstone - Sun Jan 05, 2003 5:39 am
I think it would be much nicer if it exported plain binary files so you could convert it to a format of your own choice. I mean, maybe you want to rearrange the map data to suit your own game. Hint: write plugin support for your mapeditor. I'm currently working on a mapeditor that support plugins for importing/exporting and modifying map data as well as accessing my rendering system and when (if) the editor ships it will come with a simple API so people can write their own plugins. That way I think my mapeditor will cover everybodies needs. You need it to save in a special format? Write your own exporter! You want to add support for game objects and not only map data? Write a plugin that access your personal data chunk in the 'user data' area of the map data and also have the plugin render sprites via my rendering pipeline.
#307 - Nessie - Mon Jan 06, 2003 3:44 am
I dunno, this just amazes me. Seemingly everyone is working on a mapEditor or has done so in the past...but strangely, I've yet to find a reasonably decent one out there that also includes all of the source for it.
I'm sure that more than one of you has downloaded someone else's samples, tutorials, tools, etc..at some point. If so, have you ever considered giving something back to the community to make it a better place for everyone?
Sorry if it seems like I'm ranting, but in the end, being greedy isn't helping anyone at all. Frankly, I'd rather be working on my game, but that doesn't seem to be an option until I have a useful map editor. :(
#308 - sgeos - Mon Jan 06, 2003 4:04 am
| Nessie wrote: |
I dunno, this just amazes me. Seemingly everyone is working on a mapEditor or has done so in the past...but strangely, I've yet to find a reasonably decent one out there that also includes all of the source for it.
I'm sure that more than one of you has downloaded someone else's samples, tutorials, tools, etc..at some point. If so, have you ever considered giving something back to the community to make it a better place for everyone?
Sorry if it seems like I'm ranting, but in the end, being greedy isn't helping anyone at all. Frankly, I'd rather be working on my game, but that doesn't seem to be an option until I have a useful map editor. :( |
I'm designing a GBA map editor right now. Once the specification is done coding will begin. Anyone that wants to can help. I will post to the help wanted group when the spec is ready. It will be open source.
-Brendan
#316 - Touchstone - Mon Jan 06, 2003 5:36 am
I don't think greed necessarily have to do with why people don't release their mapeditors. Me for instance was scurrying around the internet looking for a decent mapeditor one and a half year ago and I found basically nothing so I decided to write my own. 18 months later and my mapeditor is still nothing spectacular and I'm sure there are plenty of editors out there that are a lot better than mine so I don't see a reason for releasing my editor to the public. I don't want to release the source to the editor neither and it's not becuase I'm greedy, it's because I would be so embarraced if someone I saw the code I've written. For gods sake, even my artist laughs at me when he sees the code and he doesn't know much about object oriented programming. :P I'm planning on writing a new mapeditor for Mac OS X, that way I think I have something special to offer and I will indeed release it if it gets good enough. Untill then you can either start writing on your own mapeditor or keep your fingers crossed that someone will release a really good one soon.
#333 - Nessie - Mon Jan 06, 2003 4:17 pm
I really do apologise...people can and should do whatever they want with their own work.
I also understand that one could be embarrassed about people looking at your code. I guess my opinion is that, even though my editor code might be terrible, I could perhaps learn a lot if someone else would take a look at the code and maybe fix a few things. In the end, people do the best they can at the time and they usually discover better ways to do things as they continue to program. I'm always looking back at old code and wondering why I did something a certain way!
Anyway, if it's of any interest to anyone, I'd be happy to release my code for anyone to use. If all goes well, I hope to be at the point where things are working well in a week or two.
#353 - tutifruti - Mon Jan 06, 2003 8:09 pm
I'm using EMapper Advanced (http://gbadev.endostech.net) to do the maps. Isn't free, but is great and worth the price.
#359 - snug - Mon Jan 06, 2003 8:47 pm
I'm actually working on a map editor as we speak. It's something I whipped up with VB, some picture boxes, and bitblt :) If anyone wants the source you're more than welcome to it. Just drop me a line via e-mail or PM.
#364 - Nessie - Mon Jan 06, 2003 9:32 pm
Thanks tutifruti, it's dang tempting to shell out the cash for that.... :)
#453 - arog - Tue Jan 07, 2003 8:21 pm
Visual HAM comes with a nice map editor now:
http://visualham.console-dev.de/index.php?mylink=main.htm
- Aaron Rogers
HAM Tutorial
#631 - darkcloud - Thu Jan 09, 2003 5:57 am
Hey touchstone, if you get around to making a map editor for Mac OS X, I would definitely be interested. I am currently doing all my development on the mac and would love a map editor native to OSX. Currently, I use Virtual PC to do the PC stuff I need to do.
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Last edited by darkcloud on Thu Jan 30, 2003 4:08 am; edited 1 time in total
#1229 - Nessie - Wed Jan 15, 2003 8:55 pm
Quick update. My map editor is coming along quite well these days. I'm almost at the point where I could post a demo by this weekend. The features currently include:
1) Image plug-in for loading tilesets. Of course, the source for the plug-ins will be freely available so someone could improve the existing plug-ins or write custom ones.
2) BMP and PCX importer plug-ins but will probably also make a TGA one shortly.
3) Create complex brushes from a tile set and then use those for map drawing.
4) Currently have a brush-slot system so the user can create a couple of custom brushes at a time, quickly recalling them for use as needed.
5) Multiple levels of zoom for both tile and map view windows ( 1x,2x,3x,5x,7x,10x,15x ) ...more can easily be added.
Things I'm still working on:
1) Map export and import plug-in support. I'll include a couple of pre-built plug-ins that anyone can modify if they desire.
2) Support for multiple BG layers rendered very similarly to what you'd see on a real GBA.
3) ? ( anything else I think would be cool/useful ).
I also plan to release the full source for the editor ( in addition to the plug-ins already mentioned )....I'd just ask that people making mods of it return their work back to the community so we all can have decent tools to work with. :)
#1280 - Quirky - Thu Jan 16, 2003 9:19 am
The tume/tumeric combo works really well - it's dead easy to use and really flexible. The only problem I had with it was that there was a fair amount of reduntant info in the resulting .c, but that could just have been due to my lack of fiddling in the tume menus.
#1528 - Nessie - Sun Jan 19, 2003 9:09 pm
I'm sure everyone is just dying to check out my map editor, heh...but seriously, I ran into a "brick wall" Friday night and realised that even with doing some clever optimisations, the windows GDI route still wasn't fast enough. Of course, I knew GDI rendering would never be the fastest by far, but had hoped that it would have the highest compatibility and that it would be sufficiently fast. Well, not so.
So, I spent the part of this weekend hooking up OpenGL to my MFC app and getting that to work. Still some bugs and features I'm working on, but the speed boost is just insane ( naturally ) since the video card gets to do most of the work now. It also makes it much easier to do some slick layer transparency effects which might be useful for level designers out there.
I'm still planning on doing an Alpha release soon. When it gets to a Beta state, I'll release the source as well.
#2148 - adavie - Thu Jan 30, 2003 4:06 am
| Quirky wrote: |
| The tume/tumeric combo works really well - it's dead easy to use and really flexible. The only problem I had with it was that there was a fair amount of reduntant info in the resulting .c, but that could just have been due to my lack of fiddling in the tume menus. |
The Tumeric utilitiy optimises character sets and tile sets, so the redundant information you talk about would not translate to wasted ROM space. If there's something you don't understand, either RTFM or email the author and I'm sure he'd be willing to help out.
Cheers
A
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