------------------------- MapEd 2.0 Release Edition ------------------------- I) Intro to Maped 2.0 II) Running Maped 2.0 A) Moving within Maped B) Selection modes i) Layer Modes a) Tile Layers *) TileEd b) Special Layers III) Our friend the Program Menu A) Save/Load Functions B) Map Properties C) Layers D) Options E) Fun Crap(tm) i) MOD Player ii) CD Player iii) Columns IV) Miscellaneous i) Bug Fixes I) Intro to Maped 2.0 --------------------- MapEd 2.0 is essentially the same program as the one users had grown accustomed to with V1 but with significant enhancement and miscellaneous Fun Crap(tm). If you are unfamiliar with MapEd, it can be described as the "heart" of VERGE. Most of elements that will be seen by the player in terms of characters (entities) and backgrounds (tiles) will be setup within MapEd. Some of the most notable features of MapEd 2.0 are the windows-like enhancements; Dialog boxes can be dragged by their title bars and text boxes can be advanced with 'Tab'. Items added since the beta release are annoted with '***' I) Running Maped ---------------- MapEd can be run from the command line simply as 'maped' or with the specification of a map. (i.e. 'maped vospram1.map') MapEd 2.0 can be started without an additional map parameter, unlike its predecessor, to load a blank map and vsp. This has been stabalized from previous betas to load the default palette. Once inside the program, use the mouse to scroll around the map by moving it to the borders of the screen or use the cardinal direction keys. A) Moving within MapEd You can scroll the map a screen at a time by using one of the quick scroll keys: Page Up - Up Page Down - Down End - Right Home - Left You can summon the mini-map (just what the name implies) by pressing 'M'. Move the white screen outline to a portion of the map and click to move there quickly. Pressing 'Escape' while in the mini-map mode will return to MapEd without moving the screen. B) Selection Modes At the bottom of the main MapEd screen is are boxes indicating the current layers of the map. To the lower right is the information HUD for that layer. i) Layer Modes a) Tile Layers The numbers located in the lower left portion of the main MapEd screen are the tile layers available. (see the layers section of the menu chapter for instructions for adding new tile layers) Pressing the corresponding keyboard shortcut or clicking on a number shown in these boxes will toggle that tile layer's visibility and its background will become red to indicate that it is visible. (When switching to the special layers, all available tile layers will be shown.) While you can press a layer's number to make it immediately visable, you must click on it or press "shift+layer number" in order to hide it. When one or more of the tile layers is selected, two tile boxes will appear in the lower right portion of the screen to indicate the tile assigned to each mouse button. The left box is assigned to the left mouse button while the right is assigned to the right mouse button. (I hope your head isn't hurting, yet) Pressing 'Ctrl' while in the tile layer editing mode, will cause the 'Maped 2.0 Tile Selector' to pop-up. Basically the same as ME1, simply press up or down or mouse scroll through the VSP and click on a tile to select with the mouse button you wish to assign it to. While in tile layer editing mode, A/Z will change the tile assigned to the left button and S/X will change the tile assigned tot the right. The former letter scrolls forward through the VSP while the latter scrolls back. Also while in tile layer editing mode, clicking on a tile while holding '/' will assign that tile to the chosen mouse button. (Also, pressing 'H' will toggle tile highlighting.) Back to the Tile Selector, the buttons seen on the panel at the bottom of the screen are somewhat self explanatory. -Add Tiles adds the specified number of blank tiles to the end of the vsp. -Animation (can be called with 'V') brings up a dialog box showing an animation specified in the vsp. The Up/Down keys change the shown animation, while the text boxes across from it alter the shown animation's traits. Start and End are the animation's starting and ending tiles (Animations must be tiles in sequential order in the vsp.), Delay is the amount of time in milliseconds between each frame (100ms = 1 second), and mode is the animation's display mode. (0 = Linear(normal); 1 = Reverse; 2 = Random; 3 = Loop Back and Forth) -Import PCX/Import VSP are used to pilfer tiles from an existing image or tileset respectively. Import PCX is more complicated in that you are prompted to choose whether or not the imported image is a tileset or an image. If the pcx is set up as a tileset (with 1 pixel padding) then import it as a tileset. If appears as a normal image, import it as such. ***When selecting tiles to import, those which have already been imported will appear with a grey mask. You can still import multiple copies of each tile, but the masks will keep track. Pressing 'B' will build a list of imported tiles, automatically greying duplicates which already exist in the VSP. 'N' will import all non-existing tiles within the image to the VSP, while 'A' imports them all, regardless. -H/P toggles tile selector highlighting and tile padding respectively. Tile padding adds or removes a 1 pixel border in between tiles to make them more distinguished. -Select/Edit modes determine what happens when you click on a tile. In 'Select Mode' the selected tile is assigned to that button as previously mentioned, unlike 'Edit Mode' which causes TileEd to be launched and the selected tile to be loaded. You can also enter edit mode by pressing 'E' with the cursor over the tile to edit. While in the Tile Selector with the cursor positioned over a tile you wish to copy, press 'Ctrl+C' to copy that tile onto the clipboard. If you wish to carbon copy the tile onto another, position the cursor over the tile you wish to overlay and press 'Ctrl+S'. If you only want to paste the non-0 color portions of the tile, press 'Ctrl+T'. To delete a tile entirely from the VSP, postion the cursor over it and press 'Ctrl+D'. If you accidently delete an important tile from your VSP by mistake, you can reload the map it to recover the lost tile. Also, be warned that the tiles are recognized by number and as such, deleting a single tile will cause the following tiles to move one number higher. This will seriously screw up your maps, so be careful. A work around is to delete the tile then insert a blank one in its place to be used later. ***The Super Delete function, 'ctrl+alt+d' will alter the map information so that all of the deleted tile's instances on the map will be replaced with the default, rather than creating a big mess. To insert a blank tile into the vsp, position the cursor over the tile you want to add the blank one before and press 'Ctrl+I'. ***Similar to Super Delete, Super Insert, 'ctrl+alt+i' will insert a blank tile while reassigning the current tiles to their original artwork. ***Note*** Do not super delete or insert too quickly, do it slow and rhythmically... i know it sounds stupid but for some reason, doing it too fast messes things up. X/Y/Z- X and Y will mirror chosen tile upon the pressed key's related axis. 'X' for instance, will flip the tile left to right, 'Y' will flip it up and down. 'Z' however, will turn the tile 90 degrees clockwise. *) TileEd TileEd primary method of drawing tiles, and has improved exponetially from ME1. Most of the manipulation functions are self-explanatory or ported similarly from ACE, but there are a few new features. Key shortcuts are courtesy of Ric: CTRL/S + mouse click - (over edit window) Pick up colour under mouse SPACEBAR - toggle between draw mode and select mode CTRL+Z or U - one level undo CTRL+A - select all CTRL+U - unselect all CTRL+C - copy selected area CTRL+X - cut selected area CTRL+V - paste DEL - clears selected area CTRL+R - reverts the tile to the original (like undo in maped 1) G - toggles grid on/off H - toggles hilight on/off M - toggles mask on/off I - inverts mask X - mirrors image Y - flips image L/R - Rotates tile 90 degrees anti-clockwise/clockwise Q/W - Steps through animation (in tile edit mode) if any A/Z and S/X - changes the left or right drawing colours PGUP/PGDN - Colour shift up/down [ and ] - toggle screen resolutions ALT+X - quits to DOS (Note: This doesn't prompt you to save nor does it save automatically at the moment. It just dumps you straight to DOS) b) Special Layers The letters adjacent to the tile layers in the lower left portion indicate the map's special layers as follows: O - Obstructions ---------------- Areas the main character and designated entities cannot enter. When editing in layer mode, you simply left click the area upon which you wish to add an obstruction or right click to remove it. N - Zones --------- Zones are triggers that link to events in the map's vc code of which there may be a maximum of 256 per map. Pressing A/Z scrolls through the available zones (or shift-clicking a zone to adopt it), and pressing 'ctrl' will bring up the zone info box for the active zone. Name: A description of the zone for the creator's use alone. The player will never see it. Script: This is the number of the event in the map's vc code that will be called when the player successfully activated the zone. Chance: This value determines whether the zone will be activated by determining the randomness of success. A value of 0 will cause the event never to occur (unless over-ridden by Adjacent Activation) while 256 (the maximum) will cause it never to fail. Delay: A value of 0 is assigned to the chance of the zone before this number of steps have been taken within the zone. From then, the Chance it returned to the default you've set and calculated normally. For instance, on a map if the chance of incurring a random battle is 50%, and the delay s 10, a minimum of 10 steps must be taken after each battle before another may occur. Entity: This specifies a script number to be executed when an entity enters the zone. 0 means no script. Allow Adjacent Activation: If this is checked, then the player may stand in an adjacent tile and while facing the zone, activate it with the 'Talk/Confirm' button. This over-rides the chance factor. E - Entities ------------ Entities are generally the characters that roam your maps but can become more dynamic if you so choose. In entity editing mode, clicking on a blank space on the map creates an entity doppelganger there and assigns it the lowest untaken entity number. Pressing 'Del' while the cursor is over an entity will prompt you to erase that entity. When done so, that entity and it's properties will be gone and the next numbered entity with become one number lower and so on. (i.e. Deleting Entity0 on a map will cause Entity1 to become Entity0 and Entity2 to become Entity1, etc) Clicking on an existing entity will call that character's information dialog box. (Pressing Up/Down while in this box will scroll through the available entities.) The entity properties include a description (for your benefit alone), the XY coordinated of the entity (which are useful when you want to move a single entity without disrupting the whole order of your entities by deleting one), the number of the chr (as referenced to the chr list (see below) which may be accessed by a button adjacent to the chr text box), the speed of the entity (see Appendix A), and the activation script called when the entity is activated. Pressing the 'CHR list' from the entity properties box will bring up a listing of chrs that may be used in the map. Clicking on an empty text box to enter the chrs name with the attached extention, or choose browse to search for the file locally. Once the chr for the entity has been chosen, the appropriate chr will be displayed in the upper right corner of the property box. The addtional boxes control: -Autoface- Causes entity to face the player when "activated." -Active/Adjacent Method- If active, the entity will be activated when faced and "talked to" by the player. In Adjacent mode, it is activated as soon as the player comes in contact with it by occupying the space adjacent to it. -Obstructable/Obstruction- If the entity is obstructable, it will be stopped as the player would by map obstruction. If obstruction is unchecked, the player will be able to walk through the entity. (useful for flying chrs or invisible trigger chrs) Below these are the Movement Code/Scripts for the entity which control its movement behaviour in the game. The MoveCodes are: 0 - Stopped 1 - Causes the entity to roam aimlessly the specified number of steps before pausing for the specified delay. 2 - Causes the entity only to wander within a specified area. 3 - Causes the entity to wander within a specified zone. 4 - Causes the entity to enact a movement script specified in the 'scripts box'. (see below) If you select 4, fill in the last text box with the *number* of the movement script you wish the entity to use, not the actual movement code. Scripts: This button brings up a list of the predefined scripts for the entities to follow. Using Up/Down you can find the numbered slot to fill in the movement script using a letter followed by the value of the direction. The letters are: U - Up D - Down L - Left R - Right X - Move to X axis value Y - Move to Y axis value Z - Special Frame F - Face (See Appendix B) W - Wait If you wanted the entity to move up two spaces, left 1, then move to 21 on the X axis, face down, pause for one second, and display its 22nd frame then repeat, you would use: U2L1X21F0B III) The Program Menu --------------------- The program menu is the most crucial and integral part of MapEd 2.0. How else would you get to Columns? It can be called by pressing 'Esc' or (if you have a three-button mouse) with the middle (or third bound) mouse button within the main editing window. A) New/Save/Load Functions Using 'New MAP' from the menu will abort the current map (after a prompt) and begin an blank map and VSP. In order to use an existing VSP with the new map, you must enter one in the MAP properties (see below) or use the 'Import VSP' function from the tile selector. The Save/Load features are fairly obvious; Pressing 'F10' or accessing 'Save MAP' from the menu will save the map contents including the VSP, map contents and it will compile the map's VC code into the map itself. ***Saving a new VSP does so in a compressed format, although Maped2 and the engine can load older, uncompressed VSP formats. Maps must be resaved in order to be used, however. -If you save a New MAP generated from the menu or one generated if maped is run without a map parameter, it will automatically be saved as "untitled.map" with "untitled.vsp" Load will bring up a Load Map Dialog box. Either enter the map's name (with .map extention) or press the 'Browse' button to search for the map locally. You will be prompted to save the current map before it is aborted. Save VSP will save just the VSP independant of the map and entailing information. Useful if you were to create a few nice tiles, yet accidently delete a layer. B) MAP properties This dialog box is used to enter the important map information and the map resize function. -Music: This is the initial music file that will be played upon map startup. -VSP: The VSP this map will use. Note that if you use the same VSP for multiple maps, all alterations made to it will affect ALL of its maps. -Rstring: This indicates the order and display values of the layers. (see below) The order of the the layer numbers determines in which order they will be displayed. Also, the letter 'E' should be added in order to determine upon which layer they will be shown. Additionally, you may add an 'R' to determine where to display a hookretrace script or you may define a specific script begun with an 'S' followed by the script number appended with an 'X'. Therefore, if you had four map layers, the obligatory entities drawn on the first layer and script 3 to drawn over all the other layers, your Rstring would look like: 1E234S3X -MAP Resize: This calls a box used to edit the X/Y sizes of the map. Just enter the new values and press 'Resize'. C) Layers: Layers are a somewhat complicated aspect of your map. Accessing 'Layers' on the program menu calls a submenu which is used to add or edit existing map layers. 'Add Layer' will generate a new layer for the map. After adding it to the Rstring (IIIb), you can then add tiles to it as you would the other layers. 'Edit Layer' allows you to edit the layer properties including parallax and h-line/transparency. The parallax values alter the movement of the layers in accordance with the party's movement. The X/Y multipliers alter the direction of the layer opposite to the party while the divider does vice versa. Keep in mind that these are multipliers and dividers, hence, are fractions so an x multiplier and divider of 20 reduces to 1/1 and cancels movement. 'Import Image' directly crops all tiles from an image and places them in proper order directly onto a selected layer. If the selected layer has tiles currently on it, that information will discarded. ***The checkbox 'Eliminate Duplicates' will not crop and tiles that are identical to ones already a part of the vsp, instead substituting the original when they are actually imported. -Destroyer: Destroys specific elements entirely from the map. Destroying Zones will get rid of the physical placement of the zones while destroying zone data will eliminate the information about the zones from the zone's property box. You can also eliminate all entities and obstructions with destroyer. D) Options Most of these values are self explanatory; You can toggle smooth scrolling as opposed to tile based scrolling, mouse scrolling, whether you cursor will have a white tile outline and alternate between graphics modes. You can also set the color of the window title bar, box background, highlight color, and white offset color. The window color options are based on the numbers of the currently active palette. E) Fun Crap (tm) These are some assorted throw ins that are determined to throw all sorts of road blocks in front of you as you attempt to concentrate. i) MOD Player This is a simple interface for loading MOD, XM, or S3M music file. In the future it may be used for playing ITs as well. Simply enter the name of the music file or browse for it locally and press play. ii) CD Player This feature is capable of loading and playing CD music tracks. Unfortunately, it has some issues conflicting with Windows' Auto-Load and CD-Player. iii) Columns If you want to know the real reason V2 was delayed, look no further. The great spanning abyss of wasted time, this is Columns! In case you've never played the original SEGA classic, the object of Columns is to align three of the same colored crystals (orbs) and they will disappear. Pressing 'Up' will alternate the colors of the orbs, and Left/Right move the stack accordingly. Press 'Down' to accelerate the stack. To change the difficulty setting, alter the 'difficulty' variable in MAPED.CFG (found at the end of maped.cfg) (Courtesy of vecna:) The difficulty levels are as follows: 4 - Normal 5 - Harder 6 - Your death is assured. ^_^ The difficulty controls not how fast the blocks fall, but how many different colors of blocks are on the playing field. A value of greater than 6 will error the program, and a difficulty less than 4 is outright cheating. If you ever LOSE with a difficulty less than 4 you have serious problems. You can now skin the background and sprite graphics for Columns. The default is still hardcoded into the EXE, however, if the external files COLBACK.PCX and/or COLSPR.PCX are found, they will be used. You can download the default skin from www.verge-rpg.com, and other graphic sets can be found at Extended Play. (http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~rwkl97/ep/download.html#me2skins) iv) Quitting! Accessing 'Exit to DOS' from the main menu or 'Alt+X' will quit to DOS. IV) Miscellaneous ----------------- ***'F11' will take a proper screen shot, making the 'prntscrn' method obsolete. Map movement has been retooled so that it will scroll independant of CPU speed. There are a few other features such as the trippy built-in screen saver that are left for you to uncover. ^_^ *) Various Fixes ---------------- (From whatsnew.txt in Maped Beta 3) - Out-of-Bounds rendering protections reintroduced to the map renderer. These were originally in ME2 a while ago, but somehow along the line they got lost while juggling around different copies of the source. This should prevent ME2 from crashing even if a mapfile or VSP is partially corrupt. - Fixed a problem with an internal tileset helper array not being updated if you loaded a map from the commandline, resulting in the map being drawn erratically. - Problems with the sound system crashing the DOS box if sound couldn't be initialized fixed. Now you just won't hear sound if there are problems; The only reason ME2 should crash on startup now is 1) you're running Windows NT or 2) you need to use the nocdaudio option in MAPED.CFG - Increased the tilebay size from 2048 tiles to 10240 tiles. - Some improvements have been made with the CD audio situation; Exiting ME2 will no longer stop the CD playback unless you used the ME2 CD player. This was causing problems with people who were using Windows CD Player to listen to CDs while going in and out of MapEd, which could get very annoying. ^_^ It's still not perfect tho. ***The map movement clipping has been fixed so you can now access every tile in the map. ***Maped2 won't crash and burn hardcode if your map is less than the screen size. Not that you shouldn't have maps less than the screen size, but if you're stupid and try it, it'll handle it. This will become an issue with the multi-res versions of Maped. ======================================================================================== Appendix A: Entity/Character Speeds ----------------------------------- Speed Pixels/second 1 25 2 33 3 50 4 100 5 200 6 300 7 400 The default speed of the main character is 4. Appendix B: Face direction values --------------------------------- 1-Up | 2-Left - - 3-Right | 0-Down