Early Work Platform Editor for Platform Starter Kit

Early work on a Platform Starter Kit Editor for XNA's Platform Starter Kit.

Credits for inspiration:
Nick Grevelyn's Tile Engine
http://xna.jtmbooks.com/
Platform Starter Kit

It is a mashup of the three. So far loading the levels, and placing of the tiles work perfectly. Next up is the entity placements like player start position, enemies and pickups.
We are working on an entity definition file so you can load in your custom entities.

Staff:
GlaphanKing initial editor.
MadMax32 - entity definition file and custom entity packs.

Once completed, we will release the editor for all to use on our new website (under construction). The initial plan on this is to start cranking out updated 8 bit platform games. Time will tell.

Workable Tile Editor coming soon!

Ok, I have figured it out about the tile maps. Apparently, and this is really stupid, the 5 tilemaps (8x8) create 3x3 blocks(24x24). Using the caravan program I discovered this. I also resized the tiles to 48x48. Granseal's map tileset is gigantic but that is because they only use one tile layer. I might change this in future versions because this can make creating the tilesets very annoying.

So scratch what I said about putting off the tile editor. Its near releasable and will soon be able to create your own new maps and stories or make an entirely new game completely.

Tile Editor put on hold until further notice

Well, I have decided to put the tile editor on hold for a while. There were way too many bugs and errors that I have decided to use a converter that converts RPG Maker XP files into a workable XML file. Since I already sunk money into RPG Maker XP a few years ago, I think its going to be an editor for now. I will do one later but for now, I doubt it. Sorry, guys.

With that in mind, I have been converting and studying the tilesets. I have noticed that there are some missing tiles. The reason for this is because they flip certain tiles horizontally and vertically. This is very annoying but when you are working with limited memory on a Genesis cart, I can see the point. But since the engine is on the PC, it makes it virtually limitless. Therefore, I'm going to make one tileset per map instead of one per layer in a map. 5 separate tilesets just doesn't work imho and I wanted to stick with the old ways but it looks like an upgrade is in order. Its for the best.

So I'm off to make some tilesets and maps. Hopefully everything will convert correctly, so I dont have to do things by hand. Its very tedious and I don't have the time to do it by hand.

Until next update.

Tile Editor Update

Happy New Year!

With that out of the way I can say that progress on the tile editor is moving along nicely. There is a bug when the tilesets change, the whole map changes. I've found the problem and should have it fixed soon. Other than that the til editor is working nicely. Its loading all the tilesets, changing them, and drawing/erasing/filling like it should. More features will be added later.

Next I will be adding the save and load functions once the bugs are fixed.

Until the next update.