Dienstag, 9. Mai 2017

Event Editor: Sprite Palettes

The sprite palettes are now displayed correctly in the event editor. I was working on this back in february but was not able to show you this progress.




Current status

Hello everyone, 
sorry for the long absence of information but I was very busy the last few months.
I will be able to provide more frequent updates from now on ;)
But before that I will I will show you the current status of the editor as some of you have already asked for it:

  • Characters [20%]
    • You can already edit the appearances of the characters with the sprite / tileset editor
    • You can edit the names of the characters and their special abilities
    • I haven't found the character status values yet
  • Events [30%]
    • The biggest work package for me at the moment. I need to rearrange the event editor to be able to display and edit the event sequences correctly (e.g. loops are not correctly handled at the moment)
  • HUD [0%]
    • I still haven't found where the HUD display and mechanics are stored. Thus they cannot be edited yet
  • Items -Display [95%]
    • Item graphics, descriptions and acquisition messages are displayed correctly in the editor
  • Items - Edit [60%]
    • Item graphics can already be edited with the sprite /tileset editor
    • Item descriptions and acquisition messages can also be edited but the size is currently limited to the size of the original item names and messages
  • Maps - Display [80%]
    • All maps are displayed correctly except for the house interiors in the City of Euro
    • What is also not working is the correct concurrent display of the map layers for at least half of the maps
    • The display of graphic effects (e.g. transparency or animation of map tiles) is not implemented yet
  • Maps - Edit [50%]
    • Most of the maps can already be edited but there is a general problem with map tiles that have the tile index 0 (transparent background). There seems to be an error when they are compressed and written back to the ROM because these tiles are not transparent anymore
    • Graphic effects can not be edited yet
  • Music [5%]
    • I know the location of the music in the ROM but there is no sound editing implemented yet
  • Sounds [5%]
    • I know the location of the sounds in the ROM but there is no sound editing implemented yet
  • Sprites - Display [85%]
    • Nearly all of the sprites can be viewed in the editor. I currently implement the mapping of the tileset and palette Ids for the spritesets that are read from the XML configuration file.
  • Sprites - Edit [70%]
    • Sprite editing is generally possible. But I haven't tested it for many spritesets yet so there may still be some hidden problems.
  • Tilemaps - Display [100%]
    • All tilemaps are displayed correctly. The tileset and palette Ids are automatically loaded from the XML configuration file.
  • Tilemaps - Edit [90%]
    • It's possible to edit the Tilemaps. However, there are still 4 unknown tile types.
  • Tileset - Display [100%]
    • All tilesets are displayed correctly
  • Tileset - Edit [100%]
    • All tilesets can also be edited.
  • Title Screen [15%]
    • I already found where the text strings for the title screen are saved in the ROM but there is no modification from the editor implemented yet.
    • The game title can already be edited with the map editor. But it's not possible yet to change the background or the title screen animation
  • World Map [30%]
    • The world map can already be edited with the map editor
    • I already found the world map events (e.g move from one place to another) but they cannot be edited yet

My plan is to provide a first release with basic functionality (events, items, maps, sprite, tilemap and tileset editing) by the end of this year. I cannot tell yet how mature or even usable this release will be but i definately want to make a release that enables the user to already play around and make some basic editing.