Keen: Galaxy editor - it's coming

Utilities for editing Keen:Galaxy and Keen:Dreams levels.
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ckguy
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Keen: Galaxy editor - it's coming

Post by ckguy »

I finally got a carmack decompresser working, and now have the beginnings of a level viewer. So this means that I very well may create a Keen: Galaxy editor. So yeah, good news, I hope.
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Post by CommanderSpleen »

Good to hear! The easier Keen 4-6 modding becomes, the better. Even a quick level viewer would be helpful, I imagine.
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Post by levellord »

Nice. *Nominates you for official Keen Community Programmer*

Will it share a lot of features with Mindbelt? It certainly seems like you do very solid and reliable programs.
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Post by ckguy »

levellord wrote:Will it share a lot of features with Mindbelt?
Hopefully it will eventually, not promising it will do all of that stuff the first release. A good deal of code will, I think, be able to be copied with slight to moderate to heavy revision from Mindbelt.
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Post by Mink »

This is excellent news! Another Keen 4-6 level editor would be great. Hope it goes well, CK Guy.
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Post by ckguy »

Mink wrote:This is excellent news! Another Keen 4-6 level editor would be great. Hope it goes well, CK Guy.
Thanks! I've made a bit more progress ... making a Keen 4-6 level editor is both easier and harder than a Keen 1-3 one. There's some stuff I need to worry about in one, but not the other, and vice versa. Anyway, at some point soon, I'm going to have to roll up my sleeves, and write code to actually save the level. (Yeah, kinda important.) I'm debating whether or not to implement the LZ-esque part of Carmack compression, or just the RLE part. I think I'll just stick with RLE for now, so this means that my editor's gamemaps.ck? won't be as compact as TED5's. (Oh well.)
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Post by XkyRauh »

Not really an issue, as we're no longer concerned with fitting our games/mods on a 1.44mb floppy! ;)
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Post by ckguy »

Okay here is a preliminary version of the level editor. When you start it, you will be presented with four sequential 'open' dialog boxes. In these you have to select: the maphead file, the gamemaps file, the ?til0000.bmp file, the ?til0001.bmp file. Once you're in the level editor, you can switch levels with the levels menu, or with pgup/pgdn. Put tiles with leftclick, get them with rightclick. Pressing [1],[2],[3] toggle whether the background, foreground, and infoplanes are active. Pressing Ctrl+[1],[2],[3] toggles the planes' visibility. Pressing [7],[8],[9] bring up and close tile selection screens. Arrows and the mouse wheel scroll around. Zoom with [+] and [-]. And File->Save saves. I think that's about it. Try it, it's definitely missing tons of stuff. Make sure you back up your level files before doing anything!!! And lastly, let me know what you think the hotkeys should be--I'm not so happy with the current setup.
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Post by levellord »

Ok.

Firstly, that's a cool icon.


This needs to autolocate the maphead file I think, it's one step too many. )And I doubt anyone will have more than one to choose from or even one outside the gamemaps directory.)

This is a reasonably functional if somewhat rough level editor, like you said, it's missing many things, but seems very well built for something made so fast. I am sure you will not take long to complete it.

There needs to be some way of telling what planes are active though; one of the most annoying things I have found with Ted is when I'm clicking about and I find I've accidentally picked up an icon or background tile, or I've copied an area when I didn't have the right plane active.

I think Ted's original hotkeys suffice for most purposes (Enter to place a value in infoplane, space to select tiles.) Aside from that everything seems to be in pretty good order. (Though the levels are easy to mess up, but hey, I mess them up in ted, so who am I to complain?)
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Post by XkyRauh »

It's easy to tell which planes are active/inactive with TED--whether the BFI is showing. I know what you mean about making mistakes, though. :) Haha

I'll definitely be checking this out this weekend--how exciting!
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Post by ckguy »

levellord wrote:Firstly, that's a cool icon.
Haha, that's just the icon for the programming language I'm using. If you don't change it, that's what comes up.

Anyway: what would you guys suggest for a way to show which planes are active? It sounds like you guys want the BFI thing.

And yes, the [enter] to type in a custom infoplane value is coming ... so is creating new levels, renaming levels, deleting levels ... the hopefully I can start implementing the 'tools' like I did in MB.

Are you guys happy with how infoplane values are shown on the map? I pretty much used exactly the same method as TED5, because it seemed to work well. (I even copied the font used pixel-for-pixel after trying and failing to make a nice-ish font. It's hard to work in an 8x8 square!)

This project is kind of putting MB on hold for a little while--I hope no one minds. It's just more interesting, and MB currently has a strange obnoxious bug that I don't really feel like dealing with now. ;-P

I was trying to not make this a clone of TED5, but it seems it will be moving in that direction. TED5's just a great example of a level editor--if it ran properly in later versions of Windows, I don't think there'd be much call for any other editor.

[edit:] Oh, and maybe we'll be seeing XkyKeen4 sometime in 2008, lol.
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Post by ckguy »

Unofficial Version #2 is up.

Check out the readme.
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Post by ckguy »

( ... triple post ... )

So, do you think I should start up a thread at the PCKF? Just to get more people reading it, more feedback, etc? 'Cause K:M is not currently a "vibrant community." I know that this is sorta more closely related to modding, but there was a release forum over there, and people released their modding-related tools on the old one. I just feel like stuff over here gets pretty much missed by the larger community.
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Post by XkyRauh »

CK Guy wrote: [edit:] Oh, and maybe we'll be seeing XkyKeen4 sometime in 2008, lol.
Hehe... I wish I could say it's the lack of an editor that's been slowing me down, but it really isn't--I can't draw tiles to save my life, and every time I try, I get bogged down in trying to figure out a way to make everything look uniform-yet-not-tiled. It drives me crazy. :)

Going to download v.2 and give it a whirl tomorrow after helping a friend move.

The "old" PCKF had a Modding sub-forum--the current one just links here. I'm not sure how welcome 'advertising' a new development would be, but I think this is certainly deserving of a bulletin of some sort. Maybe a post in "Other Keen Stuff" to say "Hey, please gimme some feedback!" or something. :)
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Post by levellord »

Xky, what on earth is a BFI and how do I use it? I assume it's some sort of indicator?

Ted5 is tried and tested, it's versatile and has had to be to accommodate the various games it's made over the years. If this editor is a clone of it, I doubt anyone will mind. It sounds in fact like it could be TED6, an improved, Keen-only version. (Though there is Biomenace... )

I see you've made GFXINFOE files for TPT to use; it appears that they support Biomenace already in a fashion, how interesting.

This is almost enough to inspire me to Mod Keen 4-6; but I think at heart I'll always be a 1-3 fan, they're so much simpler.

This latest verion crashes however as soon as I open the script file, it's almost impossible to get running. (The previous version often froze after loading the tiles and other files, sittting in memory and absorbing more and more memory.)
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