Map Editor: Ganesha 0.60 Released

[mav]

Awesome stuff, Cheetah--I hope your map is completed some time soon...who knows, maybe we'll have a "Custom Maps" section of the board someday...And great work, gomtuu; I'm seriously grateful for all the work you're putting into this.

[Cheetah]

What were those previously unknown bytes for?

Who said anything about previously? I might be able to figure what they're for with more in-game testing, but like I said, it seems like they're always the same from what I've gathered so far, so I'm not sure there's any point in changing them.

Ah I get it, I thought you were saying you figured it out what the data meant, but what you said was that you figured out what the data should be. It is true they are different things. Something I am trying to figure out is if you can create polygons that sprites can't walk through. Or more importantly, are my units going to be able to jump through the roof of my map to get to the roof?


Mav, thanks dude. I have definitely been wanting to have custom maps a possibility for a long time. Just take a look at all my comments in Gomtuu's two topics haha.

[gomtuu]

Ganesha 0.57 is out:

http://gomtuu.org/fft/Ganesha/

This version fixes the new polygon problem and adds +28/-28 and +12/-12 buttons for moving polygons easily, among other things (see the changelog). The instructions have also been updated to cover the new features and explain the weirdness of black polygons.

Something I am trying to figure out is if you can create polygons that sprites can't walk through. Or more importantly, are my units going to be able to jump through the roof of my map to get to the roof?

That's a good question. I doubt you can make polygons that are obstacles, but I'm not 100% sure. I'm would also guess that units won't be able to jump through the roof, but I don't know what the game's mechanism is for determining the path a character takes between two tiles. When your character wants to go from a low tile to an adjacent higher tile, it might first check to make sure there's not another terrain tile directly above the lower tile within a certain height of the higher tile... We'll have to do some experiments, I guess.

[jimmyjw88]

Great job man, great job.

[Cheetah]

Oh man the new polygon edit/move options are incredible, they are so easy to use. I'm blowing through my custom map it feels like, plus it is totally addictive. I am maybe 35% done with basic polygon placement, though I'm sure vectors and textures are going to be an uber bitch. Plus if I never complete the two papers I have due next week I blame you Gomtuu. Amazing work.

[gomtuu]

though I'm sure vectors and textures are going to be an uber bitch.

It looks like your map is mostly flat surfaces, so Guess Normal Vectors should take care of most of your polygons. It'll be up to you whether you want to smooth out some of the corners manually.

As for the textures, I'm working on it, but it may take a while...

[Cheetah]

Currently you are working at a pace that is perfectly matching mine. I think the hardest part of the textures will likely be finding them and compiling them for use. Then there is the question of whether I will try to make some custom ones or not 8(.

[Cheetah]

So I'm still making really smooth progress. It all looks really strange because this is still missing some important polygons, but the basic shape is all there. Once I'm done with the rest of the polygons, maybe only 20% left, then I will start testing it in game and thing about what to do about textures. I'm worried that I am going to end up having lots of trouble with water animations once I get it running in game, but it should look crazy bizarre and be fixable.

[Vanya]

Sweet!
That's amazing. ^_^

[mav]

Holy crap! Great work, Cheetah. How long did it take you do all this?

[Xifanie]

Too long.
Even if you calculate instantly the coodinates of your new polygon it takes a while to create the poly and enter all its coordinates.

[Cheetah]

I think everything from scratch and working with earlier versions probably less than three hours. I just had the think through what I would do with each polygon I already had to work with, so far I have only added like 30 polygons and that was mostly for larger dimensions and the roof. I was also using a very bad map to use as a base, I had to spend lots of time just zeroing out the main level and remaking the black boarder on the bottom.

The real time consuming stuff will be the textures. Just searching where to rip them from, and getting them all in there, and the palettes, and figuring out coordinates gha.

I'm also concerned that I am going to need to rotate a whole bunch of polygons even thought they look correct because by default there seems to be no pattern to how the points are directed. So that will make textures even more complicated.

Speaking of which, a quick rotate function for polygons would be amazing. Especially for verticle polygons so that they can be easy made to work from different directions. Even just so that in the create polygon option you could choose it to be verticle and which direction to be facing by default would save lots of time.

[jimmyjw88]

This is just sweet!!!

[Vanya]

Perhaps an option to *zero out* a level would be a great addition Ganesha?

[Xifanie]

Damn, and I edited all the top textures of the gate in Ganesha; displays fine in Ganesha but I still get the "null" textures in-game.
Kokobo told me you working on a fix.

Don't forget to make the Starting Y +12 instead of +1 (to avoid manually lowering by 1).

[Cheetah]

Don't forget to make the Starting Y +12 instead of +1 (to avoid manually lowering by 1).

That is still awesome progress Zodiac.

That is a good reminder about the +1 to the vert of all new polygons (that should almost just be removed Gomtuu, I think it might cause more trouble than good. Maybe just have it automatically select the new polygon when you create it.

Are you having 12 is your base for height Zodiac? I have been using 0...

[Kokojo]

Changed map, thanks to Zodiac's methods of adding sectors.

[gomtuu]

Even if you calculate instantly the coodinates of your new polygon it takes a while to create the poly and enter all its coordinates.

Have you seen 0.57? I added buttons to the polygon edit window that move polygons around a tile at a time.

a quick rotate function for polygons would be amazing. Especially for verticle polygons so that they can be easy made to work from different directions. Even just so that in the create polygon option you could choose it to be verticle and which direction to be facing by default would save lots of time.

Added to to-do list.

Perhaps an option to *zero out* a level would be a great addition

You can already do this with terrain by setting the dimensions to 0 and then back to the dimensions you want. But polygons are a different story. I guess I could add a "delete all polygons" option or something. And a feature to create new polygons based on existing terrain tiles has already been mentioned. This is on my list.

Damn, and I edited all the top textures of the gate in Ganesha; displays fine in Ganesha but I still get the "null" textures in-game.
Kokobo told me you working on a fix.

In 0.57, I fixed the bug that causes new polygons to look like that. However, any polygons you had already created in 0.55 will continue to look wrong even if you load the map in 0.57 and save it. I wanted to make 0.57 detect these incorrectly-created polygons and fix them automatically, but that slipped my mind before I released it. The latest development version has this feature, though. So to fix this, you can either load the map in 0.57 and manually replace all the bad polygons, or you can wait for the next Ganesha release, then just load your map and save it, which should fix the bad polygons automatically.

Don't forget to make the Starting Y +12 instead of +1 (to avoid manually lowering by 1).

This is fixed in the latest dev version.

Changed map, thanks to Zodiac's methods of adding sectors.

Very nice! I've been working on a way of giving all the map files more sectors (taking advantage of the fact that about 43MB worth of files in the MAP folder are duplicates and could probably be deleted), but maybe that's not a high priority anymore?

[Cheetah]

Adding sectors? Are you guys running out of room for the individual maps, or is there different amounts of space alotted to each map?

I'm looking forward to these new features Gomtuu.

[jimmyjw88]

Wow, that looks great, Kokojo. Very nice.