Map Editor

[Halifax]

Year or so ago I lost everything to a hard drive wipe, was able to scrounge some stuff though. Thanks to the FreeBasic Forums

My goal is a tad more realistic this time. The overall goal is to have a pixel scrolling map editor. I'm settling on 640x480 mode with 16bp color. This is going to limit some of the transparency effects, but it's not hard to get around that.

As of today here is my progress

Graphics: I have more than I'll ever use. I've stolen from RPGMaker and I just combine the tiles in various ways to give it a little more flair.

Sound: No sound. Although I did get FMOD to work one time. I plan to use OCR Remix songs of various games.

Controls: Mouse is up and running, decided against a custom cursor, buttons work fine, just need some content. Still working on Save button, Map Cleanup button, etc. The scrolling is ad hoc atm, just goes to wherever you click, no speed or distance considerations.

Functionality: Nothing yet. I just set up a random map of tiles and display them. Scrolling is smooth and fast, framerate is good on my machine, and I have a tile selector up, it darkens the currently selected tile. No animation for anything yet.


Next couple weeks I'll be putting in tile changing, saving, loading, scrolling, and map cleanup functions.

http://b.imagehost.org/0307/game.png

[Lachie Dazdarian]

Well, I'm glad you recovered from you hard drive wipe. Not sure how I would. Hmm...when was the last time I made a backup?

Anyway, I'm not sure why you picked 16 bit. Quite odd. You can make your engine cross 32 and 16 bit quite easily. You are using FBGFX?

Also, don't expect the community to jump on your map editor like crazy. Unless you compile something super flexible and user-friendly, you might end up being one of few people actually using it. Think about it as a tool what will help you complete your own project...one day. Well, that's how I'm thinking about my screen by screen scrolling engine: http://lachie.phatcode.net/screenbyscreen.php

And if you are making only a map editor, I don’t know why graphics and sound are relevant at all.

[Halifax]

I actually went out and bought a 1g usb memory stick which i throw stuff onto every few weeks. I've learned my lesson.

I picked 16 bit because my old computer was 900 mhz and had lots of trouble with FBGFX framerate-wise. My new computer is 3ghz but I remember those days. Who knows, maybe I'll switch. All my bmp files are in 24 bit anyway.

Yeah, about the map editor, I'm not really making it to be a map editor available to others, I'm making it so I'll have a map editor to use to build my maps. Last time my goal was making a game, I just did not realize that before making a game you have to have things like map editors, etc. I'm focusing on the small steps first, if I ever achieve those I'll move on.

I like screen by screen engines, I've considered it for my game. I intend to remove the mouse scrolling function and link screen movement/map scrolling to the character movement anyway. I'm going for SUPER simple here, just to get a game up. Like, Final Fantasy 1 level of simple.

Eventually I do intend to make some kind of game, so I'll have to work on sound n'stuff.