CaveEditor again (beta, maybe alpha)

You are currently my favorite person. Thanks so much for taking the time to type all that.

 

S.P. - I'm not a fan of AIM myself but I've forgotten my ICQ#... It's been so long since I used it. Not since playing Total Annihilation (an RTS).

How'd I miss this!

 

Way to make a totally useless and unrelated post.

On-topic: this is awesome and Wistil needs to come back. His fan club misses him. Also, I did some very small things to help out. So dang small, not even programming. But they're things he doesn't have to do later.

 

I emailed him (largely to bug him about TA ).
He's been busy lately; he moved and has been swamped by other non-CE projects.
However, he said he'll try to get back onto the CE boat ASAP.

 

Hey everyone!
Sorry for dropping off the planet there. As DragonBoots said, things have been pretty crazy for me lately. New job, new town, and then the holidays on top of it all.
When I was last here I was working on a major overhaul of the script editor. Well, sorry to say but I've gotten next to nothing done with that yet. It's frustrating me a lot too. So to get me back into the swing of things I'll be looking at fixing many of the bugs that have been discovered instead of adding features right now.

Q&A inside.

Spoiler

Wistil, how did you create space for the map data without messing up calls/jumps?

IT all comes down to shifting the resource offsets all by a fixed amount based on the size of the new map section being added. This was a HUGE pain to get to work correctly BTW. As a bonus, you can use all the space from the old map data location to place any assembly code you want since its not being referenced anymore. If you're curious as to how exactly it does it, look at the code in the General.cpp for the ResourceShifter function.

!?
What's my name doing there

I can't fin the thread, but long long ago you wrote about you theories about the history of the Cave Story world. It inspired my to make a mod but I couldn't get SW to so what I wanted so I designed an editor instead.

shoot I made it crash/time out lol I set the map size to 9999 x 9999 ... What's the real limit?

I don't know this one. Being that there comes an issue when you make too big with Cave Story itself I didn't think to check the number. 2048x2048 is probably the largest the editor will allow you to edit. Ok, I just tried creating a 999x999 map and about 4GB of memory and 1/5 hour later... it created it. I'll look at optimizing this shortly. Currently the maps are all pre-rendered into bitmaps, one for each of (background, foreground,

I'm also wondering about the tileset. Can I change the size and still set numbers to the tileset? So I can have a huge amount of stuff to pick from on a single map? Hmm... I guess I need to scour the modding section sometime...
... Looks like I can change the tilesize to almost anything?! Is there a limit?? I mean I could do a whole map using unique tiles if I wanted to at this rate...
Also, interesting the limited amount of colors allowed... 4x4 color map? Has any mod increased this? Actually it'll probably keep things simple...
Same with background? I can adjust the size as large as I want? so I could have a completely unique image cover the whole map????

The only limit that I know of on either the tileset or protraits is that it must be 256 pixels wide.

Hmm... having major trouble making HUGE maps. If it gets too big like 300x300 or 32x1702; I can't see the map I'm editing anymore!
Also sorta unrelated, when dealing with large maps, is there a way to adjust the in-game default water height? I am sure it has come up before... Hmm...
Had a 21x700 map which shows up correctly in editor; but in the game I end up hitting water at a certain height. Guess I need to search some...

hmmm... I just tried to create a 430x360 map and it displayed ok. If the map area isn't drawing but it still lets you zoom in/out then its probably a windows resource issue which probably means there's a memory leak somewhere...

 

He's back!

Well, it's good to know you're still with us ;

When I was last here I was working on a major overhaul of the script editor.

Major overhaul? What was planned for that?
{Script editor seems fine enough, for me}

 

Re: Mrm....new....

I have a request, one thing I did like about using SW was that you could edit multiple maps and scripts at once, could that be implemented please?

It would be cool if you could implement this.

 

I have a request. Could you add a function to export a list of changes made to the executable to a plaintext file? Just the changes affecting the executable; not those that affect the maps, images, and scripts. If you do this, then if and when a Mac editor ever gets made (and I am considering making one someday), it could have an import function which reads that text file and applies all the same changes.

Of course, you'd want to have an import function too, so that the hypothetical map editor can export the changes to a similar file which can be imported by Cave Editor.

This will make it easy to port a mod if said hypothetical Mac editor is ever created. (Well, apart from the mods that have assembly changes; those might be a bit more difficult, unless there's an easy way to translate between x86 and PPC assembly.)

Don't consider this at all urgent, but please put it on the list of features to add.

 

Hurray! The Wistl whistle worked!

As Lowell said, glad to know you're still with us.
Heh.
I wonder if we'll ever run out of features to suggest.
(inb4 cupholder)

I'd like to see the TSC commands intigrated into the CE EXE itself, so you could do nifty things like flag tracking.

And I *think* I know what the script editor overhaul is all about - It *might* be to do with organization of the TSC commands (header groups or sumfin).

 

Not sure if this is what you're looking for, but Translhextion could compare a modified Cave Story EXE to a clean one and then give you a list of the differences in offsets...
Would that be anything like you're looking for in the Cave Editor thread?

Not good enough. The offsets are almost certainly different on the Mac, so just knowing the offsets that have changed is not sufficient. For my suggestion, it would need to specify what has changed in an offset-independent way.

For example, if the only change made is to remove (C)Pixel and change the file extension to .bmp, then the patch file would contain something like the following:

ext = ".bmp"
cpright = ""

Not necessarily in that format, though.

 

Hope the new job, new location and all the other new stuff is working out smoothly
Glad to know you're still out there

Maybe this was the thread you were thinking about?
http://www.cavestory.org/forums/threads/152/
Anyways... did you make that mod you originally were planning to make?
If not...
What was it? What was it going to be about? Still planning on doing it?

 

If I edit the file in the sourcefile (from the download link) "CE_TSC_INFO.txt" and add in all of the new definitions from the newly posted Compete TSC, would all of those definitions and flags be in the flag list in the script editor when I recompiled? (or got someone else to recompile since my 'doze hasn't got any compiling options)

 

If I edit the file in the sourcefile (from the download link) "CE_TSC_INFO.txt" and add in all of the new definitions from the newly posted Compete TSC, would all of those definitions and flags be in the flag list in the script editor when I recompiled? (or got someone else to recompile since my 'doze hasn't got any compiling options)

You can skip the compiling and just drop the finished CE_TSC_Info.txt into the same folder as the pre-compiled Cave Editor.
SFIWFM.

 

Oh! Random thought! If it's not too much work, I'd suggest interpreting the TSC files as Shift-JIS text rather than extended ASCII; that way the Japanese characters in a couple of the files will be visible (as long as the user's computer can display such characters, of course).

 

The major over haul was adding integrated dropdown lists for commands as you typed similar to what a lot of advanced compilers do. It also is supposed to add some useful info (probably through mouse over but I'm not sure yet) like showing the portrait selected by the <FAC command or the map selected by the <TRA command, etc. A lot of that stuff proved too difficult for my abilities at the moment. At least considering the time to results I was getting which was lots of time for ~0 results.

@X-Calibar
That might be the one. It was so long ago I can't remember. lol I do remember talk of a prequel and the robot army though wich was what my mod is focusing on. It's still in the VERY early stages and I'm trying to get 4 playable character sprite instead of 2 but I might just have to rewrite my plans a bit. I didn't even start on it until after I got the sprite display working in the may editor. It got a long ways to go but I'm working on it on and off.

If I edit the file in the sourcefile (from the download link) "CE_TSC_INFO.txt" and add in all of the new definitions from the newly posted Compete TSC, would all of those definitions and flags be in the flag list in the script editor when I recompiled? (or got someone else to recompile since my 'doze hasn't got any compiling options)

What Boots said. It you match the format of the original CE_TSC_INFO.txt then the program will read it when started with whatever you have in there. It even bases the syntax checking off of it too.

Oh! Random thought! If it's not too much work, I'd suggest interpreting the TSC files as Shift-JIS text rather than extended ASCII; that way the Japanese characters in a couple of the files will be visible (as long as the user's computer can display such characters, of course).

That's a good idea. Ok... I just did a quick check and it looks like I'll need to do a complete conversion to Unicode since Shift-JIS doesn't appear supported by VC++. Fun fun... I'll keep digging though.

 

Tileset Data????

I can't make any changes to the tileset data. I want to make something in the foreground, but when I try to save it, it says "Error saving tileset data!" and then closes the message box, then I hit save again and the same error happens. And then, when I close the tileset window, just to taunt me, it asks "Do you want to save your changes?" hit yes, you get the same error message. I've tried redownloading. I've tried with a virgin copy of Cave Story. I have no idea what I'm doing wrong.

 

Search...

II've tried with a virgin copy of Cave Story.

And there's your problem.
Earlier on in this very same thread, people discussed this and a few other related issues, and the problem was attributed to not turning off the "Read Only" part of the Cave Story data files.
Just right click the folder and uncheck {Or check and then uncheck, incase not all of the files were checked} the "Read Only" box and try again.

 

Some random thoughts

In the place where you view NPC assembly data, it would be nice if you could scroll through the NPCs like you can in the "npc.tbl" editor. The feature in CE that allows you to see NPC assembly is so much more convenient than using OllyDebug, or at least it would be if you could rapidly scroll instead of having to press "next" over 200 times to get to NPCs with high numbers.

It would be nice if your image editor allowed you to edit the pallettes of 1-bit, 4-bit, and 8-bit bitmaps (I have a program I wrote which edits 4-bit pallettes, but it's really slow/annoying/inconvenient and I'd much prefer to have such a feature built in to CE).

In the map editor, I notice that the NPCs don't refresh as often as they should (for example, when you change an NPC's type, the text/sprite on screen doesn't change appropriately until you move the NPC).

About what you said about making drop down lists in the script editor, if that's too hard, you could just have a listbox off to the side of the main editor, which shows possible values for whichever parameter the cursor is currently over. This might require additional *.ini files for the names of songs/sound effects/facepics and such. You might even want to combine some of the *.ini files so that you don't have a brazillion of them (maybe even combine everything into a single "CaveEdit.ini" file with multiple sections). It would also be nice if it were possible to put a "CaveEdit.ini" file in the same folder as the *.exe of your mod which would be like the "local data" for that mod, while the main "CaveEdit.ini" file would be the "global data". Any data in the local file would override the corresponding global data. This would be useful for mods with custom NPCs/music/facepics/etc.

 

What about this suggestion?

 

I've got a suggestion too, probably wouldn't be too hard to implement.
When you have a background in CE, it displays it in the editor as starting exactly in the upper-left corner, but in the game it shows up about 8 pixels down and 8 pixels to the right of that. Not a big deal, but still something.