Elysian Shadows

Yeah, um... I believe that since the birth of TheChaosRift I haven't posted here even once regarding my own development. I've been too busy codin' for my baby, the Dreamcast.

Well here I am, and I've been forced to work on the PC. I'm working on a level editor that creates levels for Null. It's written in C++ with SDL. Once finished, it'll be available to download for free, so that anybody can make and/or freely distribute levels or even a full game using the Null engine.

Anyway, I started just the other day. I've been working on and off through spring break. I got lots of stuff done, but it's still got a looooong way to go. Especially if I ever want the editor to be user-friendly (that'll be a bitch).

Anyway, It now draws the level and lets you edit/place tiles. I need to make it load/save and it'll be basically functional. After that I'll have to add menus and all that fancy stuff so that any moron can use it.

Here's a screenshot. Oh, I was too lazy to cut out my desktop, so don't mind it:

Look, the level editor is smiling at you!

Anyway, questions, comments, complaints, and all that other crap can be posted here.

Sweet! Looks good!

Thanks, it's good to know that at least one person still visits the development forums.

Nice mouse.

Hah, the ironic thing is that it's fake. Did you know that cursors are only black and white? Pretty gay, huh?

Then in SDL you have to make the cursor in binary and load it as hex. :watiff:

I actually used SDL_CursorDisable or whatever and drew that at the cursor's coordinates. So yeah, it's fake, but you'd never know.

Alright, between guzzling Bawls and randomly busting out the Dance Mats for DDR and the Maracas for Samba De Amigo, I've actually slaved my ass off on the editor and got lots done.

I've had some troubles and have been stuck in a few places, but I'm glad to say that everything is going smooth now.

You can now pop the tile select menu and do some other stuff like left click to lay tiles and right click to copy a tile.

Here's some screenies for you:

I've layed some cheap test tiles.

Popped the sexy tile menu with it's alpha blending goodness.

Oh, I've also got specs as well.

Apparently the editor runs fine on all computers but one.

Arce's Pentium II running at 400mhz without alpha allowed by the video hardware had some slowdowns. The editor functioned perfectly, but it was slower due to the fact that SDL tries to emulate the alpha effects if the hardware doesn't support it.

Anyway, I'm sure that everybody's computer here will be adequate to run this baby.

Sweet.

It actually runs smooth on my computer IF it's in full screen mode. Otherwise, it is slow.

Seriously, the editor is l33+ do far. OMG the alpha blending makes it look great. The screen shots cannot begin to show its greatness!

Today all that I had time for was figuring out how to compile to a perl executable. It works really great and it's very useful. Those stupid DOS console programs are so much easier as perl scripts. You don't need C/++ efficiency or anything, it's not like it's a game.

Anyway, the tile adding wizard to the editor is a Perl EXE. It'll be so user-friendly though, so don't be hating on the black box. I might even decide to embed perl in the level editor even...

Now as long as nobody posts a long sentence, I won't have any trouble w/ this topic ... :P