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Lunar Magic suggestions and discussion (LM v3.40)

Tool

Bug report:
Menubar -> Overworld Editor -> File -> Layer 3 Submap -> Load Layer 3 of submap, hit yes and select any submap -> 8x8 Overworld Tile Selector.

This window has a bug on it that the combobox (a dropdown box) to select different overworld submap gets locked on “Overworld Map” and doesn't allow you to select other maps. Please fix this.
Give thanks to RPG hacker for working on Asar.
That's not a bug. Viewing the graphics/palettes for other submaps in the tile selector is not available in layer 3 editing mode (and it'd be pretty pointless even if you could). I could have disabled the box entirely, but it didn't seem necessary.
Would it be possible to have the ability to import and export graphics files from the Overworld editor? It's a granular request, perhaps, but I am the sort who might change a handful of pixels on an ExGFX file and immediately want to see how it looks. To have to go back to the main editor to perform the insertion is ever so small an inconvenience.

Thanks for doing what you do.
GANYMEDE

Chapter Two: Land of No Shame
Yeah, it does sound like it could get a bit repetitive for someone editing graphics. Given the intended usage you're describing, I think it'd make more sense if I add a new toolbar button to the overworld editor that would combine several functions together: insert all GFX and ExGFX then reload the graphics.
I second the above.
Honestly, such a button could be useful for the main editor too, since switching levels back and forth WORKS but isn't very intuitive and interrupts the flow a fair bit.
It would be sort of redundant with the 4 mushroom buttons already there though I suppose.
Your layout has been removed.
Really, you'd just need the two insert buttons to force a refresh.
Let's milk Sunny Milk. Then she'll have enough money to fund Sunny Milk Real Estate.
Everypony's digging with a shovel
(or pressing 7 twice.)

But yeah, I guess the want for more intuitive ways isn't unjustified.


 
Dealing with the tile behaviors of slopes can be annoying at times, especially when dealing with custom graphics. Pulling out all kinds of charts with all of the behaviors of each section of tiles, and manually adjusting their properties can be a bother.

This might be tricky to implement in a clean or intuitive way, but my suggestion is a button on the 16x16 Tile Map Editor that would open up a sheet of land tiles with varying slopes and behaviors. They can be copy and pasted back onto the tile editor with tile behaviors intact. The graphics can be adjusted from there without much hassle.


Other Submissions of mine!
It would be nice to have the names of levels and the message box texts for a level be stored in the MWL file for that level.
Originally posted by Deeke
Dealing with the tile behaviors of slopes can be annoying at times, especially when dealing with custom graphics. Pulling out all kinds of charts with all of the behaviors of each section of tiles, and manually adjusting their properties can be a bother.

This might be tricky to implement in a clean or intuitive way, but my suggestion is a button on the 16x16 Tile Map Editor that would open up a sheet of land tiles with varying slopes and behaviors. They can be copy and pasted back onto the tile editor with tile behaviors intact. The graphics can be adjusted from there without much hassle.

Another solution would be to give the slope tiles proper tooltips instead of just "A tileset specific tile"...
Let's milk Sunny Milk. Then she'll have enough money to fund Sunny Milk Real Estate.
Everypony's digging with a shovel
Originally posted by Wiimeiser

Another solution would be to give the slope tiles proper tooltips instead of just "A tileset specific tile"...


Actually that was changed, but it's still not entirely helpful. Now it says "Slope assist tile. If used on its own, there can be some unusual or glitchy effects…" and it goes on like that.

Hunting around for a "Bottom-most fourth from the left tile of a gradual slope" tile would be cumbersome too, but maybe images could be incorporated into the tooltip?


Other Submissions of mine!
Is there a way to make custom sprite displays and Map16 use external GFX files instead of the ones that are currently loaded? If not, could that be added as a feature?

----------------

I'm working on a hack! Check it out here. Progress: 64/95 levels.
Originally posted by Wiimeiser
Really, you'd just need the two insert buttons to force a refresh.


That would work, however... I also find myself sometimes pausing before hitting the GFX insertion button in that group of 4, just to make sure I'm really hitting the right button. Differentiating those buttons more might help, but it still kind of makes me wish I hadn't interleaved the buttons that way in the first place (extract/insert/extract/insert instead of extract/extract/insert/insert). But changing the order now would probably mess people up too much.

It's a bit redundant, but maybe throwing a copy of the new button in the level editor too is worth it just for not having to think about what you're hitting there.

Originally posted by randomdude999
It would be nice to have the names of levels and the message box texts for a level be stored in the MWL file for that level.


Those depend on the overworld level number, not the regular level number. There'd be a fair amount of confusion sticking them in there, as they're handled in the overworld editor (as non-overworld levels can't have their own separate ones).

Originally posted by Deeke
This might be tricky to implement in a clean or intuitive way, but my suggestion is a button on the 16x16 Tile Map Editor that would open up a sheet of land tiles with varying slopes and behaviors. They can be copy and pasted back onto the tile editor with tile behaviors intact. The graphics can be adjusted from there without much hassle.


You can achieve pretty much the same thing by creating a page of Map16 tiles with the tiles arranged as they are in those charts, and having a second copy of LM open with that page being shown in its Map16 editor in a level with the appropriate graphics. Ctrl+C/Ctrl+V in the Map16 editor will work between multiple copies of LM.

Originally posted by Deeke
Actually that was changed, but it's still not entirely helpful. Now it says "Slope assist tile. If used on its own, there can be some unusual or glitchy effects…" and it goes on like that.


Gameplay-wise, the tiles with that tooltip are interchangeable with one another.

Originally posted by Deeke
Hunting around for a "Bottom-most fourth from the left tile of a gradual slope" tile would be cumbersome too, but maybe images could be incorporated into the tooltip?


Problem is, one would still be moving the mouse over tiles one by one to find the tile they want. There's a lot of tiles in there to hunt through.

Originally posted by imamelia
Is there a way to make custom sprite displays and Map16 use external GFX files instead of the ones that are currently loaded? If not, could that be added as a feature?


Nope. And no, at least not without a pretty good reason for it anyway.
Speaking of graphics, what about a Save GFX to ROM button, alternative to F9?
Add an option to disable ExAnimation slots starting at different frames.
S.N.N. might be the antichrist, but we aren't sure.
Originally posted by Ruberjig
Speaking of graphics, what about a Save GFX to ROM button, alternative to F9?


I'm a little reluctant to spend much time/effort on LM's 8x8 editor, as it's always been fairly basic and most people use separate tile editors anyway.

Originally posted by ni-pah
Add an option to disable ExAnimation slots starting at different frames.


They don't simply start at different frames, they actually run in different game frames. The SNES is not powerful enough to be able to do all 0x40 slots in the same frame along with everything else in NMI without exceeding vblank, so the slots are distributed among different frames to reduce the load on any single frame.

If you want more details, read the technical info in the help file under "Level Menu", "Edit Level ExAnimated Frames" (it's about 2/3 of the way down in that page).
This one is likely too tricky, but I'll ask anyways: would it be possible to add a few command line parameters to Lunar Magic which allow you to do a few common tasks on a ROM (such as importing/exporting levels, GFX, ExGFX etc.) via the command line? For example:

Code
lm.exe --export-gfx AllGFX.bin
lm.exe --import-gfx MyAllGFX.bin
lm.exe --import-level 105 MyLevel.mwl


etc.

Reasoning: I work as a submission moderator here and testing certain stuff can be quite tedious, so I like to streamline my work process and make everything as convenient as possible. I accomplish this by making simple helper scripts which I just have to execute once and which do a lot of the stuff that needs to be done for me so that I can test stuff easily. As an example: one of my bat files, which I always use for testing patches, does the following:

-Delete ROM from the output directory if it exists
-Copy a ROM from my "baserom" directory into the output directory (I keep files like "lm1mb.smc" around there - basically a ROM opened once in Lunar Magic, expanded to 1 MB and then saved, otherwise untouched)
-Run asar.exe with the patch on the ROM

And then I have more bat files around which let me quickly start the ROM in Higan, BSNES, Snes9x, ZSNES etc.

Now this works fine. However, occasionally I have to test stuff which requires me to work with Lunar Magic. For example: when testing sprites, I of course need at the very least a level with the sprite in it, which probably also needs a certain palette, certain GFX etc. Some nice people already include all of that, and even an .mwl file for testing, in the ZIP, and that's very helpful, but even when they do, I still have to go through the slightly inconvenient process of:

-Making a copy of lm1mb.smc in the baserom directory
-Exporting all GFX
-Overwriting the GFX files
-Importing the GFX into the ROM
-Importing the level into the ROM
-Saving the ROM
-Adjusting my scripts to take this new new ROM instead of lm1mb.smc

And if a new version of either tool is released, I might have to redo all of that because this new baserom might not be compatible anymore. Not to mention that my baserom directory eventually gets cluttered because I have so many different ROMs, each just for testing a single sprite.

Granted, this entire process still takes a few minutes at most and it might be possible to optimize it, but with just the addition of even a simple command line interface I could probably cut it down so much that it would only cost me a few seconds every time, since I would only ever have to copy one of my bat files and change a few names in there. Not to mention how neat this could potentially be for collabs.

I won't be surprised if this turns out to be completely out-of-scope for Lunar Magic, but if it is somehow doable, it would be an enormous help for me in many ways.
Feel free to visit my website/blog - it's updated rarely, but it looks pretty cool!
LM wasn't really meant to be used that way, but after looking things over it seems possible with a few adjustments. I suppose if it's just for some common tasks I don't mind putting it in. Most warnings and errors will still use message boxes though, so not sure how suitable it'd be for large scale stuff.
At least for me, message boxes would be absolutely okay. It's probably still a lot faster to just click "OK" or "Yes" a few times than to navigate everything manually. It would definitely be appreciated, even as a simple and limited implementation.
Feel free to visit my website/blog - it's updated rarely, but it looks pretty cool!

Tool