Utility ClownMapEd - The Open Source SonMapEd Clone

Oh my gooood please dont say sike dont let this be a dream
This is truly a godsend tool

 

This is so surreal and quite the bloody match of accuracy, I'm impressed!

I have a few suggestions, I hope you're taking some...

• Support for "Organise All Tiles by Sprite Order" like SonMapEd (the menu didn't mention it, but there is a short-cut key too; "O").
• Zoom support via +/- and CTRL +/-, for top and bottom sections.
  
• The ability to open uncompressed art files with ClownMapEd via "open with"/association, and have it automatically load in from the beginning for quick tile viewing. (I'm aware there is no way to tell if the file being opened is an uncompressed art file, it'd be entirely at user discretion, this is something SonMapEd annoyingly didn't have and I wish it did, would be bloody useful, even if you leave the mappings/plc/palette alone which were previously there).
• Rulers (or at least a crosshair which stands out) to help identify the centre of the object, this is one of SonMapEd's biggest flaws, you have to fiddle to locate the relative position.

 

Not really asking for actual sprite ordering, more if you'd support showing the tiles vertically in the tile viewer, row count dictated by window height. I used SonMapEd's misnomer "Organise All Tiles by Sprite Order" simply to communicate the function it happens to perform, apologies for the confusion.

Let me rephrase; "Support for showing tiles vertically in the tile viewer, short-cut key "O" to switch". It sounds silly, but it's very useful for... certain things...

 

Oh geez, hahahaha, forgive me. For some reason all these years I had that option name associated with that function in my head, no wonder it didn't label "O" as the short-cut in the menu, I guess it's not a misnomer after all. Forgive my ignorance d=

But yeah, if you could support that, that would be absolutely swell!

 

If there's one thing I'd love to see added, it's the ability to change hotkeys. The original SonMapEd was clearly not designed with foreign keyboard layouts in mind, as apparent by the rampant usage of [ and ] to navigate through the tool:



The problem is that it's physically impossible to press Ctrl+] on a German keyboard, as we poor souls already need to hold down a special key called Alt Gr to even access [ and ] keys.

I still remember manually clicking through this menu over and over to swap sprites all the way to the end of the list. It was a nightmare.

 

Good stuff, Maynard G! I appreciate the focus on portability, it makes me feel less left-out as a FreeBSD and OpenBSD user.

Man, I remember when I discovered SonED2 10-12 years ago (running on Windows 7) and used it to make a simple layout hack of Labyrinth Zone. My hack sucked eggs and suffered from slowdown in Kega Fusion, but at least I could play something. ACM should have given an award to the guy who reverse engineered the tile compression algorithm.

 

Quickly ran into a a bit of a compatibility issue: the program seems to only allows loading tile data from files with a .bin extension. While this is accurate to SonMapEd, it prevents the program from being used with Hivebrain's and my own disassemblies of Sonic and Sonic 2, as we use .nem, .kos, and .unc for our tile files.

On a side note, are there any plans to add support for loading or exporting macro-based mappings, specifically spritepiece and the custom format in HB2022?

 

There are certain specific cases where labels are important, such as Sonic's running frames in S2.

 

Exactly what I was going to mention: the DPLCs for Sonic's running frames in Sonic 2 (which are referenced directly by the Sega screen). HB2022 takes it to a whole different level: it explicitly depends on the labels in the mappings files, as the ID constants generated by its index table system are used to build the animation scripts and handle any instances where objects need to set or check for a specific frame (as will mine once it's finished):

Code (ASM):

1.  
2. Walk:       dc.b $FF
3.        dc.b id_frame_walk13
4.        dc.b id_frame_walk14
5.        dc.b id_frame_walk15
6.        dc.b id_frame_walk16
7.        dc.b id_frame_walk11
8.        dc.b id_frame_walk12
9.        dc.b afEnd
10.        even
11.  

 

This is a problem on the portuguese and a good majority of other EU keyboard layouts where [ and ] are stuffed in the numeric keys and therefore don't work as shortcuts, my workaround is to switch between keyboard layouts on the spot which tends to make me write ' as - in chats which is rather annoying.

Oh and please, for the sake of not having to use the dumb save state feature, add an undo feature.

 

I've recently messaged you on Discord about this without a response, so I'll repeat it here again since I think it's a rather inconvenient shortcoming compared to the old version of SonMapEd.

So basically, this tool is subpar for the old 2005 disassembly. Its reliance on macros to do the job leads to various problems. Naturally, I don't have the MapMacros installed, so I unchecked that, but that didn't help much either:



ClownMapEd uses .offsets and .frameN for its purposes. While clean in code, it causes label collisions elsewhere. SonMapEd circumvented this problem with a rather ugly but effective method, which is generating a random string when saving maps:



"A2xNg" in this case. Really ugly, but it gets the job done.

I'd love to see this as a legacy feature added, disabled by default of course since I'm well aware it's not the recommended approach anymore, but it gives us poor people who started working on their projects back when the 2005 disassembly was all we got some relief. Right now I have to manually adjust the mapping files each time I save them and it's rather time consuming.

EDIT: Oh yeah one more thing, while importing sprites it uses the background color of whatever palette is currently active, while the interface still uses the background color of line 1. Took me a while to figure out and would be nice to see adressed.

 

Sounds like the issue is rather that the program is assuming you're using the AS assembler, not ASM68K. Swapping all the

Code (Text):

1. .

with

Code (Text):

1. @

would fix it for you.

 

Alternatively, you can set an assembler option for ASM68K to change the local label symbol to a "." by adding "/o l." in the command line, or adding "opt l." in the code.

 

Regardless of which approach should be taken, this would've been great to know beforehand.