Sonntag, 24. Januar 2016

Edit Map Tiles

I finished the map compression routine so now it's possible to read back map arrangement and tileset data back to the ROM!
With this post I will show the editing of the tileset data:

You can choose a specific tile in the editor and change it's properties. You can change the X/Y mirror, the palette and tileset offset as well if the tile is displayed above the player or not.
You can also change the property of the tile which means what interaction takes place if the player is on a specific tile.
Here is a list of the possible properties:

0 - Tile Pass
1 - Steps
2 - Climb (Up/Down)
3 - Ramp (Down)
4 - ?
5 - Ramp (Left)
6 - Tile Block (Diagonal Left)
7- Climb (Left/Right)
8 - Jump Down
9 - Tile Block (Diagonal Right)
10 - Ramp (Right)
11 - ?
12 - Ramp (Up)
13 - ?
14 - ?
15 - Tile Block

As an example I changed the property of the wall tile from "Jump Down" to "Climb (Up/Down)".

The result in the game, the player doesn't jump down the wall but climbs it up and down:

I also changed the gras tile property so the player climbs from the left to the right:

In the next post I will show how you can edit a map and write it back to the ROM.

Montag, 11. Januar 2016

Map Display Improvement

I improved the display of the maps by considering the tileset offset bit which is part of the tileset data. This bit signals which part of a large tileset (Size = 0x4000 Bytes instead of 0x2000 Bytes) is to be used for a specific tile.
As a result, some maps look much better now, some of them can be seen in the following screenshots with a comparison of the old and new look.

Edward's Castle Old:


Edward's Castle New:
Inca Ship Old:
Inca Ship New:





Freitag, 8. Januar 2016

Sprite Palettes

I found the palette offset information for the sprites so now the color palettes seem to be correct.
A few impressions:




 I also rewrited the loading algorithm for the sprites and it is much faster now. I needed this improvement for the display of the sprites on the maps which will be my next goal.
And as a little outlook:
I need to finish the map data compression routine to write the edited map data back to the ROM. Once this is done I will release the next version of the editor that will enable map editing and mabye even sprite editing.