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Graphics > mapEd features (for Nessie in first)

#18023 - RaBBi - Thu Mar 18, 2004 8:58 pm

Hi ^^

I have some questions about the future and the features ^^ of this great map editor for GBA ^^

As me and my teamates make an old school RPG, we essentially use 16 colors BG, so this editor is almost perfect for this task.

almost, because I encoutered some points that made this task a little bit more complex than thought.

The fact is that we use 2 (sometimes 3 layers (BGs)) so we create our maps in an unique mapEd map file.

But sometimes we need to add another layer not linked to the map, for instance the dialogbox.
Dialogbox that we created with mapEd too.

But this layer is isolated from the other maps we can create, so when exporting it to header, it use palettes from palette 0.

And if we want to display it on a screen that have other maps yet, and thus other palettes loaded, we need to programmatically adjust map info for this dialog box BG (updating palette number in bits 12-15).

So I wanted to know if there's a way to tell the editor an offset to palettes so the exported map header would be ok, and the palette too.

If no, is it possible to have it in a next version of mapEd?

Finally I notice another thing.
Always with this dialogbox which only uses 16 colors.

I have to say that the original tileset use a 256 colors palette, but each tile is 16 color (the validateTileset tool say Yeah! ^^).

I create the map with mapEd, and when I export it, the palette contains 2 rows :

- the first row of the initial palette of the tileset
- the row of the palette used by dialogbox map

So, is this a bug?
Is there a way not to have it ?

Hope I haven't been too "heavy" in my explanation.

Thanks ^^
_________________
Sorry for my poor english, but it would be worst for you to understand me if I speak in my native language, French ^^

#18025 - Nessie - Thu Mar 18, 2004 9:22 pm

I apologize for the lack of mapEd updates as of late.

I had been busy for a while and didn't have much chance to get around to making fixes...or more accurately, I had made fixes, but because we needed some very specific features for a demo I was doing and it was fastest to hardcode the features in, all of a sudden I was in a position where I couldn't release new versions of mapEd unless I had everyone sign an NDA. :)

Specifically regarding your questions, yeah, I discovered that we needed to do a similar thing to your dialog box. We wanted a cloud backdrop that was basically constant across many levels. We could have put the same clouds in each of the maps, but we would have been exporting kind of a lot of redundant data.

Because I had the source code, I just hacked the palette offsets, etc. In a future update, it would be easy to provide an offset for both palettes and tiles.

Regarding just the tile end of it, one easy way to handle that is to set the character base block (bits 2-3 in BGxCNT) and upload the array of tiles to the required block (naturally, make sure they don't overlap!)

Not sure what you mean about the last question though.

Anyway, if anyone is interested in helping support the mapEd code or test newer versions prior to a release, that would be hugely helpful.

Edit Doh, I know what you mean about the palette thing now. Yes, I think I fixed this issue a while back. Getting a new version of mapEd out will be dependant on getting it bug-tested etc.