Codetapper's new graphics, tile, level and map ripper!

[BippyM]

Wow!

Maptapper is nice, but would confuse non-amiga people.. Maybe Amitapper?

[Dan]

maybe:
CTs Gfx Tool
CTs Amiga Graphic Tool
CT's Amiga Graphic Multitool
Cody's Mapbench (gfx, level etc)
CT's Amiga Graphic Wrench

[CodyJarrett]

Originally Posted by Dan

Cody's Mapbench (gfx, level etc)

I like the sound of this one!

[Joe Maroni]

doesn´t matter how it is named...this tool is amazing...
if you are already using tomcats gfxrip you´ll love Codetappers new tool...

well done....

[Big-Byte]

+1 for using Delphi Still my favourite language although its been some years since I last used it ( mainly c# dev now )

What I would be interested in if it can save the map data and tiles out in a basic plain text format so I could use the data to quicky load a map into my game (to be specific I want to recreate the first level of either battle squadron or r-type)

something like:

// Map
//Screen 10 tiles wide, 4 tiles high
0,0,0,0,1,2,4,7,3,1
1,4,6,8,3,2,0,0,1,0
0,0,0,0,0,2,5,8,1,7
9,3,1,2,0,0,0,0,0,0

etc..

then the tiles would be saved as a bitmap in a given order.

[Codetapper]

An "output map as text" option would be trivial to implement, I'll add it to the list

The only snag will occur on games like Aladdin, Cool Spot etc with flipped tiles. As the game stores $1002 for tile #2 flipped, and $0002 for an unflipped tile. Or are you happy to have it output the real hexadecimal values?

[Big-Byte]

Whatever is easiest for you really..

My map data looks like below so if you can make it easy to flag a tile as flipped that would be great.

<Layer Number="0">
<HeightInTiles>4</HeightInTiles>
<WidthInTiles>10</WidthInTiles>
<HeightInPixels>1024</HeightInPixels>
<WidthInPixels>2560</WidthInPixels>
<InitialHorizontalScrollSpeed>0</InitialHorizontalScrollSpeed>
<InitialVerticalScrollSpeed>0</InitialVerticalScrollSpeed>
<TileHeightInPixels>256</TileHeightInPixels>
<TileWidthInPixels>256</TileWidthInPixels>
<TileCollection Number="0">
<AnimationType Type="standard">
<AnimationDelay>1</AnimationDelay>
<LayerTile>
<Number>200</Number>
<Life>10</Life>
<RotFlipNum>-1</RotFlipNum>
</LayerTile>
</AnimationType>
</TileCollection>
<TileCollection Number="1">
<AnimationType Type="standard">
<AnimationDelay>1</AnimationDelay>
<LayerTile>
<Number>201</Number>
<Life>10</Life>
<RotFlipNum>-1</RotFlipNum>
</LayerTile>
</AnimationType>
</TileCollection>
<TileCollection Number="2">
<AnimationType Type="standard">
<AnimationDelay>1</AnimationDelay>
<LayerTile>
<Number>202</Number>
<Life>10</Life>
<RotFlipNum>-1</RotFlipNum>
</LayerTile>
</AnimationType>
</TileCollection>


some background history: A few years back I started writing a shoot-em up in xna to teach myself c# and part of this was a map editor which morphed into more of a level editor [written in windows forms not xna] - Last thing i was working on was dragging enemies onto the map to set their start poisitions and patterns.

I also wrote a utility to make it a bit easier to grab sprites from mame screenshots. mame has built in viewer which is quite basic but allows you to cycle through palettes etc..

Im a bit rusty on this as l stopped working on it once my daughter was born..

[Joe Maroni]

everyone who expect the tool will be any kind of map editor i think i have to say no...it won´t be it until now.
Codetapper write it for map ripping and ripping means to find the data in the savestate to arrange the tiles to the found data and create maps for HOL.
Sure, it can be make possible to edit the data, but just editing the tile indexes didn´t mean that it is an ALL-IN-ONE editor.
the only result by editing the data (tile indexes) is to change the background tiles inside a game. and only then when the data just points to the tiles in memory.
sure...much games just have arrays with the pure tile indexes and then it might work, but a game consist of more than just gfx. collision, animated tiles, foreground/background tiles. all this could be stored as bits inside each data word/byte/longword whatever....

correct me Codetapper if i´m wrong....

i´m already working with the tool and all i can say is if i had such a tool when i started creating maps the HOL surely would already have 5000 maps...

[BippyM]

I'm sure adding the ability to make maps and edit them at a basic level wouldn't be too difficult, I'd assume most of the code would already be in place somehow or other.. No?

[Joe Maroni]

there are many tile editors around the web...imho the best solution would be to save the data for an existing editor and then the ability to load it back in Codetappers tool.
but making new maps and put them back to a savestate doesn´t mean that it works.
when editing existing games you are limited by map size and all that other stuff...
imaging you rip a map and resize it. if the game works with static/absolute adresses you would overwrite pieces of memory that the game use.
the worst case would be a crash and get a guru.

[dlfrsilver]

I will post images of the toaplan TED editor for X68000, maybe this will give an insight for arcade machines and also maybe give ideas to add to the tool ^^.

[Retro1234]

OK so we just cut and past the data from the winuae save state if you don't change the map size no problem and its a nice way of cheating ;-)

collision could of course be more complex than tile a is solid b is not.........

[Joe Maroni]

the tool didn´t cut off the data...it works WITH the savestate. it is possible to mask the data and to cut off several bits off the words/bytes/longwords.

those bits that not match the data with the tile indexes might be used for collision, animated tiles, foreground...it depends on the game.

finally you can say it modify the original data that the indexes match to the tiles stored in memory...

for example:
Yo!Joe! uses 2 arrays for map data. values of both arrays are stored as bytes. the reason that the game uses more than 256 tiles it have to combine the arrays in a way to get word indexes.....
it carry over one bit from one array to expand the value on the other array by $100.
the other left 7 bits from the first array are used for collision.

[Retro1234]

I'm only suggesting very basic editing not moving enemies changing animation and if the collision is more complex it won't work but I suspect with a lot of games it will provide a nice way of cheating.
I not bothered ever way we can just cut the map data edit it in our chosen editor and past it back, but I would think it wouldnt take much to add this feature but its realy up to you and codetapper and I don't want to take this thread of course :-)

[BippyM]

I think I misinterpreted what was wanted. I assumed basic map editing features, not the ability to change save states etc..

[Joe Maroni]

editing the tile indexes would be in fact a nice feature for cheating games. it is not direct possible (not yet), but you can do it with an hexeditor you have. the offset of the map data location can be found with the tool.

it is Codetappers tool and CodyJarrett and I just helped him a little bit with bug tracking.

any features you like to have in that tool should be requested to him...

[AF2013]

This is going be really Good Tool

[Joe Maroni]

it already is....

[Codetapper]

Just an update guys, I'm working on a few docs for some of the more technical parts and fixing up the sprite ripping section. Then I need a final name of the app (perhaps a poll of the choices so far) and it'll be ready for everyone to have a play.

It won't have all the features I want in it but will add them as I find time! Stay tuned...

As for the name, I don't think it necessarily has to reference Amiga or anything, Maptapper so far seems to be the most popular. The current list of suggestions so far are:

Maptapper
GLAM Ripper (Graphics Level and Map Ripper)
Amitapper
Coderipper
GRipper
CTs Gfx Tool
CTs Amiga Graphic Tool
CT's Amiga Graphic Multitool
CT's Amiga Graphic Wrench
Mapbench
GRipper
GDigger
Graphics and Map Extractor
Amiga Ripper

[kamelito]

RippIt
BytesRipper
ArchRipper
RippHunter
GfxSeeker
Ripp16