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Graphics > MapEd v0.99

#20765 - Nessie - Mon May 17, 2004 4:31 am

Does anyone remember MapEd? It's been something like 6 months since the last update, heh. I'm looking to put out the newest build in the next couple of days.

Here's the list of fixes. If you happen to know of other bugs not listed, it would be great to know what the problems are so I could try to get the fixes in prior to making this release.
Quote:
*-------------*
New in 0.99
*-------------*

*Palette Offsetting - on export, the exported palettes can be moved to start at a palette bank other than the first one. The map data is correctly remapped in the exported data.

*Tile Offsetting - on export, the exported tile data can be remapped to start at a non-zero base. The map data is correctly remapped in the exported data.

*Export Layer to .bmp fixed

*Tilesets can be any size that is a multiple of 8

*Import Tileset to Layer workes better with tileset fix listed above.

*Layer initialization fixes (first loaded tileset no longer needs to have upper-left tile empty)

*Layer Bar is now moveable/dockable.

*Layer name directly editable on layer bar.

*Tool Tips on Layer Bar items

*Secondary layers can created using explicit sizes in addition to the old method of specifying parallax (relative) values.

*Parallax values are now split into an x and y component (x & y were previously forced to be the same).

*Layer resizing now supports map stretching/compression. Not perfect, but presents an alternative to the old crop/padding method.

*Secondary layers are no longer forced to be resized when a primary/collision layer is resized.

*Experimental Layer Tools - Layer Merge & Eat Hidden Tiles.

*Fixed a problem where shifted layers created garbled map data.

*Added status bar. Not really exploiting it too much yet, but am planning on using it to display various things.

*Flood Fill now replaces each filled tile with the current h/v-flip state. Previously, it kept the h/v-flip state that was already present on the tile.

*An extra palette would sometimes be exported, usually the palette associated with the first empty tile. Being a transparent tile, the actual palette it used was irrelevant, so it should have just used whatever palette was available.

*------------------------------------------*
TODO (hopefully to be added to v.99)
*------------------------------------------*


*Correct Tiles (palette tool) - some art programs will remap pixels to the first instance of that color it finds in the palette, which can cause mapEd to not handle those tiles correctly. This would be a simple tool that would correct this flaw...it will not currently attempt to address other problems that can come up.

*Need to refactor TileSet Bar. Once that's done, it will be moveable/dockable...and I can finally (easily) add scrolling in TileSet View!!

*Better flood fill - allow filling with a complete brush shape instead of just a single tile.

*New layer bar flickers harshly (low priority)

#20766 - NoMis - Mon May 17, 2004 9:52 am

Nice to hear about MapEd again. You said a time ago you are planning an entity layer. Is it still planned and when will you release this feature?

NoMis

#20775 - Nessie - Mon May 17, 2004 4:56 pm

Entity layers are in, but it was hardcoded to the game I was working on.

I have to come up with a better way to allow people to specify an entity list and entity representation to use with the editor.

#20787 - dagamer34 - Mon May 17, 2004 10:14 pm

Sorry if I ask, but what is an entity layer?
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#20831 - Lupin - Tue May 18, 2004 3:33 pm

Entities are map objects (coins, power ups...).
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#20838 - Nessie - Tue May 18, 2004 5:12 pm

Yep, that's what they are. It is possible to come up with your own way to place entities, say, by using the collision layer/flags...or secondary layers, etc.

However, placement is a bit coarse this way...with an entity layer, you can place objects at the pixel level.

That, and you'd have to either write your own tool to build some kind of entity list from the map data that your game understands (pre-processing)...or you could scan the data run-time and build the list that way. Either way it entails some extra effort on your part (though admittedly probably not much)....mapEd will do the pre-processing for you, generating a list of entities, each with an x,y position and information about direction it should face.

The other main advantage though is that the entity layer will allow you place enemies in off-screen locations (areas that are outside of of the tile array boundaries).

This is actually the main reason I opted to implement an entirely different layer type.

#20987 - Nessie - Fri May 21, 2004 12:53 am

An unsupported pre-v0.99 build has been uploaded to the MapEd site: http://nessie.gbadev.org/

There are probably a whole lot of issues yet to work out, so use at your own risk!

You might wonder....If there are so many issues to work out, why am I making a release? Well, the main reason is that there are a huge number of feature interactions to test out, and frankly I don't have the time to methodically test every possible interaction. :(

However, I think the main things are:

Flags and Entity layers are currently disabled.
Unoptimized mode is partially broken.

Naturally, if you find something else....SPEAK UP....it's possible I don't know about the problem.

Lastly, it may be obvious, but...protect your data. I wouldn't overwrite your old map files if you use 0.99 and need to save. Save it to a new file instead.

#21733 - Nessie - Fri Jun 04, 2004 3:41 am

Uploaded a new build with a few more fixes.


One thing I forgot to mention is a new Tile Grouping feature. It works like this:

Previously mapEd only supported 1024 tiles total. Now, each layer has a "grouping button"...so you can assign the tiles on a layer to 1 of 2 groups.

MapEd then exports two different tile arrays and appropriately maps each map tile index to the correct position in the associated tile array.

The Tile Count button obeys the layer grouping, returning a count of tiles that would be in each group, so you can try a couple of variations to determine the final grouping you desire.

Since the hardware supports 4 character/tile base blocks, you could technically have up to 2048 tiles 16 colour tiles, though it'll be less in practice.

There are a few details left up to the programmer:

You'll need to DMA/copy both tile arrays to the correct character base block. Typically you'd probably want to upload the first group of tiles to character base block 0...and the second batch of tiles to character base block 2. Additionally, you'll have to set the BG control register for each BG layer to use the correct character base block.

That's really about it.

#21759 - ChronoDK - Fri Jun 04, 2004 4:11 pm

First of all - I really like you program :-)

Then a suggestion. Could you make it posible to import the tiles created by gfx2gba as a tileset in MapEd? That would be really helpful to me.

It is xxx.raw.c and xxx.pal.c created by gfx2gba you should look at.

#36590 - AShorty - Fri Feb 25, 2005 1:29 pm

Useing MapEd V0.99 and finally sorted how to use my own collision tiles, "collisionTiles.bmp" found this in the forum(s), this works fine? only if you are creating a new project.
If you update an existing project's collisionTiles (i.e add few more triggers/collision definitions not changing dimensions or colour depth) then it won't allow you to drop any tiles onto the collision map itself? it just locks you out in the map editor.

AShorty