Commander Keen's Time Machines
- Deltamatic
- Posts: 163
- Joined: Tue Oct 06, 2009 5:33 am
Commander Keen's Time Machines
Still haven't started my entry in Paramulart's improv contest, downloaded the file full of Keen 1 modding stuff and had no idea what to do. A link to a getting started with Vorticons or modding in general or something guide would be nice, if there aren't any then where do I start?
Best is to start out making tiles and sprites
for that you best use Keengraph to extract graphics of a clean Keen copy (you'll probably start with Keen1).
When you got some basic solid and top blocking tiles, you should want either tileinfo (for old style modding) or tilesettool (for fancy new modding, with more options but also a little more complicated), to make the tiles you did work ingame.
Then you need mindbelt to edit levels. I usually make the maplevel a placeholder and finish that last, but that's up to you.
Also I tend to make some specialized tiles as I go, I only know what I need when I have some half finished levels.
For easy patching and textpatches you'll want the Neural Stunner (and ck1patch of course). For story/helptext editing you only need a good text editor like notepad2 or notepad++ (standard windows notepad is no good)
For more complicated patching use the patch index and ask for help here
After that you should playtest your mod, and that's about it.
for that you best use Keengraph to extract graphics of a clean Keen copy (you'll probably start with Keen1).
When you got some basic solid and top blocking tiles, you should want either tileinfo (for old style modding) or tilesettool (for fancy new modding, with more options but also a little more complicated), to make the tiles you did work ingame.
Then you need mindbelt to edit levels. I usually make the maplevel a placeholder and finish that last, but that's up to you.
Also I tend to make some specialized tiles as I go, I only know what I need when I have some half finished levels.
For easy patching and textpatches you'll want the Neural Stunner (and ck1patch of course). For story/helptext editing you only need a good text editor like notepad2 or notepad++ (standard windows notepad is no good)
For more complicated patching use the patch index and ask for help here
After that you should playtest your mod, and that's about it.
- Deltamatic
- Posts: 163
- Joined: Tue Oct 06, 2009 5:33 am
- CommanderSpleen
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- Deltamatic
- Posts: 163
- Joined: Tue Oct 06, 2009 5:33 am
As I understand it, old Keengraph is a DOS program, like Keen so anyone who can mod Keen can run it the same way. The new version is either Windows or Linux 32-bit, this already creates two versions specific to two operating systems, and they evidently don't run in DOS. I wonder if there are other winodws/Linux platforms they won't run on.Are you talking about the FreeBASIC version you're developing? How will it be more "specific"? Also, Windows/Linux/DOS.
- CommanderSpleen
- Posts: 1017
- Joined: Sun Aug 31, 2003 12:11 pm
- Location: The Land of Sparkly Things
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This is my very point. (And besides that, isn't it still QB compatible anyway?). The new version is either Windows or Linux 32-bit, this already creates two versions specific to two operating systems, and they evidently don't run in DOS