SpiceWare's Blog - Sector Editor

RSS Bot · September 14, 2017

applied Reposition Kernel optimizations from Omegamatrix which freed up 105 bytes
created a sector editor for user submitted Delta levels.
revised the pause screen to show the blinking starfield instead of a black screen with text

At the moment there's 408 bytes free of ROM.

I'd originally planned to try to write the Sector Editor as a web app and put it up on my site. Harvey put me a bit behind schedule, and since I've not written a web app like this before I decided a command line program would be more expedient. The program's called dracsec. To run it, download the draconian.bin file and put it in the same directory as dracsec. Also in the directory is a filed called sectors.txt which can contain up to 4 sector layouts. dracsec will patch the bin file, to run it you'll open a command prompt/terminal window and executive the following:

Linux & Mac:

dracsec draconian.bin sectors.txt

Note: you'll use draconian_20170913.bin for this build. I modified the level data so dracsec can locate it, so this will only work with this and future builds of Draconian (and won't work anymore once the final 16 Delta levels are in place).

The text file's in a fairly simple format. You'll have a line specifying the initial X and Y location of the player's ship, followed by 1-8 lines for station locations. The station starts out with the Orientation followed by its X and Y location.

Allowable X and Y values are 0 to 255 to position the station within the sector. Additionally you can use -1 to -8 for the X value and -1 to -16 for the Y value. These values refer to the radar pixel locations and will be converted to the appropriate 0-255 value to light up a specific radar pixel.

Orientation is H for Horizontal and V for Vertical. The orientation denotes which direction the E-Type missiles will be launched.

Blank lines and anything following an * will be ignored.

Example:

don't forget to change the QUADRANT to Δ (delta) to playtest your levels.  I plan to post a topic this weekend for the sector design contest.

dracsec builds:






For Harmony or Stella (requires Stella 5.0.2 or newer)


Source

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