Table of Contents
Editor Tools
The Tools menu, available from the editor's main menu, gives access to a number of tools and utilities. Each of the available tools is explained below.
Merge Walls
Each wall spriteset comes with a large number of images : there are endpoints, T-sections, map edges, and so on. If you were to manually choose the correct image for each wall tile in a map, you'd be spending a lot of time. The Merge Walls tool will do this for you.
This tool will search for all entity objects on the map that are set to the 'wall' subtype. For each such entity, if it's main image belongs to any style in the floor sprite set, the correct tile will be chosen. Other entity object that use wall tiles, such as turrets and walltraps are not affected by this tool. Affected wall tiles will only see their sprite change and not alpha, brightness or other stats, such as image flipping or rotation.
So a fast way to build walls would be to create an entity layer on a gridslot, copy that layer (c), then select all the gridslots where you want walls to be, one by one, pasting that layer into each slot's entity layer (press n, then v for each slot). Once this is done, use this tool to merge all the wall pieces.
Copy-fill tool
This tool allows you to fill an area with the contents of the copy memory. Clicking the Copy-fill entry in the Tools menu brings up another panel, where you can set the top left corner and the bottom right corner of the area that should be affected. You can also select which layers should be copied. If the copy memory doesn't contain a certain layer, you can opt to have that layer (should it be present) to be deleted from the affected area. Layers that are already present in the affected area will otherwise not be affected if they're not enabled in this tool's menu. Layers that can be selected for deletion will have a red cross next to them in the tool's menu.
Combined with the 'Merge Walls' tool, the Copy-fill tool can help you set up the basics of a map very quickly. Example : we want to make a closed-off indoors map, so we'll start by creating the outer walls as well as the floor tiles. Assume that the compatibility mode is set to Technospire II, so we're working on a map with 25 columns and 19 rows.
First select a slot, press b, escape, n, escape, c. This gives us a slot with a default background tile and a default entity tile (a wall). The final c makes sure the entire slot is copied into memory. Now go to the Copy-fill tool, set the top left corner to C = 0 and R = 0 and set the bottom left to C = 24 and R = 18. Make sure both NTT and BKG layers are set to ON. Click 'Start copy' and see how all slots on the map now have a floor and wall tile.
Now select any tile that's not on the edge of the map and delete it's entity layer. Make sure you're on this tile's overview panel and press c to copy this entire gridslot. Return to the copy-fill tool and this time set the top left corner to C = 1 and R = 1 and the bottom left to C = 23 and R = 17. This time the NTT layer must be set to DEL and the BKG layer can be either ON or OFF. Click 'Start copy'. Then use the 'Merge Walls' tool to clean up the remaining entity layers and your map should have walls at its outer edges. From this point on you can start adding more walls or other content to your map.