Play Mapper (WIP)

[kevin]

Play Mapper (Work In Progress)

PlayBasic Map Editing Tool

     Many, many  moons ago we decided to replace the original Play Mapper tool.  So after suffering through a few failed 3rd party attempts,  we decided we'd throw a tool together ourselves.  The job of course falls into my hands.   Which is ok, but it's not like have loads of free time to be producing 'free' add on tools. 

     Having written a few editors in my time,  my objective in creating this one, was to keep it simple as possible and try and give the user some subtle flexibilities when mapping.   If you've ever had to map out levels before, you'll be familiar just how tedious a lot of these tools can be.   By that i mean, we load in our block image and then are then forced to manually move the tiles from the block palette individually.  To make this worse, often the block palette doesn't retain it's original shape.    Which is a form of water torture i'm sure.

     To counter this I wanted the user to be able select individual or rects of blocks directly from the block palette.  For example, if the artist draws a tree that used say a 6*4 block area, then we should be able to grab this region directly and plonk it directly upon the level as the current tile brush.  Rather than having to grab each fragment of the tree shape individually.   Moreover,  for more complex shapes you can grab regions from the level as brushes.  You've and unlimited supply of these can cycle through them at will while editing.  What this means is that you can make sets of prefabs basically,  then run though and and paste these brushes through out the level.    Brushes are saved with the map project, so you can come back to it later.   

    Anyway, that's about it for the moment.  Will post a few ALPHA's later.  Really need some Artistic people to make some maps.   


  Download

   Play Mapper V0.46 (alpha)  (29th June 2008)

   Play Mapper V0.45 (alpha)  (27th June 2008)

   Play Mapper V0.43b (alpha)  (26th June 2008)

   Play Mapper V0.37 (alpha)




  Related Source Code Examples

    Load Play Mapper Maps

    Loading Exported Play Mapper Level Pack Files




Old WIP Thread

  PlayMapper Mini

[kevin]

Play Mapper V0.27 (Alpha)

 Here's the curentt warts'n' all public alpha of Play Mapper Mini. Like all of the revisions thus far,  I've been focusing more on the feel of the application than features.  While many of the core features are implemented, it's still missing custom dialogs and keyboard short cuts.

 Control wise the editor functions completely from the mouse.


Included Stuff
 * Basic tools (Tile,Line,Box,Circle,Brush)
 * Block import
 * Multi tile Selection
 * Multi Layer Support
 * Brushes
 * Context driven pop up menus (right click)
 * Load/Save Format (hunk based.)  
 * Undo support (100 or so levels)
 

To Do List (only if there's demand)

 * Animation Support
 * Shift/optimize layers
 * Import Layer/brush
 * Export Blocks/layers
 etc etc


Download

   Old alpha removed

[nrasool]

Hey Kev, Had a quick run on this, and looks good, I like it. Very simple to use, One thing I would add to the wishlist would be to do a full preview of the map. I think that is the only thing missing from this release :)

[ATLUS]

+1
Yea its cool program!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[kevin]

nrasool,

    So preview, as in showing/saving scaled down version of the map ?    I guess the only question really is how the scaling is done.  Probably easier to scale  the blocks to size, than scaling the map to particular size.

[nrasool]

Hey Kevin, Yeah, similar to Mappy really they show a full screen preview, or maybe a scaled down bitmap, similar to Gale. That is really the grip, but apart from that, got to say it is really good for producing maps quickly :)

[kevin]

  So it scaled the world to a screen sized image then ?

[nrasool]

Yes exactly, so it gives you 'the user' the full picture of the world

[kevin]

Play Mapper V0.29 (Alpha)

  Here's the current warts 'n' all public alpha of Play Mapper Mini.   This version is a little cleaner than the previous alpha and has the project load/saving fleshed out some more and a new block properties dialog,   This dialog lets you change the block width / block height and block maskcolour (which it can also guess for you) outside of the 'new project' dialog.



  The next dialog addition will allow the user to edit project info in a re-loaded project. Currently once you set that stuff, there's no way to change it.   That will give the tool a functional base.  Far from perfect, but functional.


  Control wise the editor functions completely from the mouse.   Left button select, right button de-select/abort


Included Stuff
 * Basic tools (Tile,Line,Box,Circle,Brush)
 * Block import
 * Multi tile Selection
 * Multi Layer Support
 * Brushes
 * Context driven pop up menus (right click)
 * Load/Save Format (hunk based.)  
 * Undo support (100 or so levels)
 

To Do List (only if there's demand)

 * Map Preview / Overview
 * Animation Support
 * Shift/optimize layers
 * Import Layer/brush
 * Export Blocks/layers
 etc etc


Download

  old alpha removed.



Note

   Maps saved in this version should be ok to import into future editions.  So feel free to have go at laying out some test maps.  You never know when this will be updated again.

[reno]

I didn't play with maps, but I thank you for your efforts to give to the PB community a great and "simply" tool to make maps.

I'll test it in a few days.

;)

[basil99]

Strange thing, but on office and home PC font size seems to be extremly small -  i can't read nothing  :o

[kevin]

   What size is the desktop ?  as it uses the default PB font (couier) / default sizing & style. 

[kevin]

Testing Map Scaling

   Tinkering with making a overview image of the map.   In this one i was toying with filtering the tiles (at fixed sizes) in the hope it'd smooth out the end result a little.  Sorta works but the mask colour is leeking through in this example.  But ya get that :)

   I'm using the xenon map/blocks purely because it's the biggest one I have.   Feel free to send me something to test !

[basil99]

   What size is the desktop ?  as it uses the default PB font (couier) / default sizing & style. 

1024x768x24

8 is too small for me :-((

[kevin]

  24 ? how old is the video card ?

  I'm running 1440x*900y here and don't have a problem.