@saxman Robocod thread got me thinking about this. Are there many non Sonic games for Sega systems with a map editor? Obviously with this being a rather niche hobby, it doesn't matter if they're not user friendly or even not finished, I'm just curious what's out there. I'm aware of a few. Romhacking.net - Utilities - K-E: The Kid Chameleon Editor also by Saxman lemdop · Prince of Persia: Original Trilogy (popot.org) and lemsop · Prince of Persia: Original Trilogy (popot.org) by Norbert for Prince of Persia @Korama got reasonably far on an Ecco editor (but never released I don't think) The Ecco The Dolphin Level Editor Project Thread (romhacking.net) The mighty KiddEd for Alex Kidd (which is so full featured people are using it for total conversions) KiddEd - Alex Kidd in Miracle World Editor - Emulicious EDIT - one more I remember dabbling with a few years ago View topic - Presenting ArcoEdit: a Rainbow Islands level editor - Forums - SMS Power! by Tom but surely there are many more!
https://segaretro.org/TUME ... it's quite old... here's a demo: https://segaretro.org/File:TUME_The_Universal_Map_Editor_Official_Demo.mp4
I think that one is more along the lines of designing maps using tiles when you're writing a new game, whereas I'm looking stuff that will work with existing roms/disassemblies. It's a fascinating piece of software though, thanks for sharing the link.
Thanks for mentioning my Rainbow Islands editor, though I'm ashamed I never managed to finish it (it can't edit enemy placements because it was too hard to implement). I also made an editor for Slider, though ironically this one also has limited support for enemy placements (you can move enemies around, but you can't change them to other types or add/remove them). I'm sure I made other things but I can't remember what at this time, life isn't being great and all, I might post again eventually.
I'm glad I'm not the only one! I never implemented enemy placement editing into K-E because I also found that too hard. It's much easier to rely on a grid where objects are expected to be a certain size and position intervals. When I worked the Java rewrite of K-E (which I never finished), I had enemy layout editing working. But by then, I had more experience under my belt as a programmer.
Worth noting that currently the best way to edit Kid Chameleon levels is to use the disassembly and this Tiled addon. I've always kind of wanted to make a level editor for World of Illusion, but figuring out how that all works by myself is a little daunting.
Oh, that wasn't the problem I had with Rainbow Islands, I just couldn't make sense of the enemy data despite Calindro trying to explain it to me. You see, Rainbow Islands uses vertical scrolling, and certain Y positions work as thresholds of sorts, though some enemies appear to have negative Y coordinates to effectively appear while off-screen, but that confused me, because the screen scrolls. I actually considered to allow my editor to alter only the X coordinate of the enemies at one point, but that would have been kinda pointless, so yeah, I ultimately gave up. As for Slider, the enemy data just isn't stored alongside the maps themselves, there are probably some arrays somewhere else in the rom, and I never felt like researching it. I'm not motivated if there is no feedback, and both of my editors kinda went unnoticed. In fact, I'm surprised Bobblen even mentioned it, he's probably the first one to do so. edit: small grammar mistake
Rod Land has a smorgasbord of in-engine map editor functionality left in the game, however there's no way to save your edits :C https://sudden-desu.net/entry/rod-land-location-test-code-and-stage-editor
That's always fun. Wanting my debug mode edits to be permanent is what led me to sonic hacking in the first place!
That's an amazing effort particularly for an rpg. What this thread is telling me is the future is tiled addons and that's what I should be keeping an eye on :-)
Even though Tiled may not be ideal for any specific game, it's extensible enough that you can get it to work with just about every game to some extent, if you're willing to write some JavaScript, and doing that is way faster than writing a dedicated editor from scratch. Even for me, I can make a Tiled addon way more quickly than I can fork SonLVL and change over all the internal data structures and UI elements to support a different game.
