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JCF Éminence Grise

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Oct 17, 2011, 09:34 PM
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MLLE test release #1
To install: extract all files into a single directory (not necessarily your main JJ2 directory). Open MLLE.ini and replace the folder names in the [Paths] section with those appropriate to your own computer. Run MLLE.exe. Requires .NET runtime environment, I guess.

Major features missing in this release, aka my (partial) to-do list:
  • ✓Tile layout editing
  • Reworder-esque functionality
  • ✓Help string editing
  • ✓Animated tile editing
  • Tileset compilation/conversion
  • Search & Replace Events window
  • Tile Type selection window (although you can just use the popup menu)
  • ✓Functional Multiplayer mode checkbox
  • ✓Differentiation between Battery Check and 1.00o
  • ✓Conversion to AGA
  • ✓Proper 1.00g/h translucent tile support
  • Most error messages
  • Mac and Linux versions
  • Documentation
  • ✓cooba's icon, because I got an error trying to convert it to an .ico and then never got around to trying again
  • Support for AGA events not included in the demo, because I only have the demo

You can probably tell that this release is really pretty low on actual layout editing capabilities. You can clear and resize layers, and change the events around all you like, but that's about it. This release is intended to determine whether I've got pretty much everything else taken care of before delving deep into that stuff.

I'm particularly interested in looking for any mistakes in saving, loading, and converting between versions, although any and all errors are of course welcome. I've only really been testing this in Windows 7, so if stuff looks broken/ugly in other versions of Windows, screenshots and such would be great. I've included a .pdb debugging file which should produce some nice informative errors for you to copy the text of. A short list of known bugs, off the top of my head:
  • Editing a Generator event (by pressing E or clicking the Select Event menu item over it) produces an error and/or a jarbled mess of parameter setup boxes.
  • The vertical scrollbars will stop redrawing themselves from time to time. Not sure how to fix this.
  • Certain combinations of window and layer sizes lead to errors with the scrollbar values, but I haven't determined exactly the source of the problem, so if you run into this, details about what you did to cause it would be appreciated.
  • Scrollbars don't always get updated with the proper dimensions of a layer/tileset right away. Again, not sure what's up, so step-by-step ways of triggering this would be appreciated.
  • Scrolling in parallax view while selecting a layer with speed 0 doesn't have any effect. This makes sense, since layers with speed 0 just don't move, but it makes it harder to edit some of the tiles. Maybe more of a design issue than a bug proper.
  • The game profile .ini filenames are currently hardcoded instead of being specified in MLLE.ini, so 11o Style and JCS Style never actually get read.

Finally, besides generally looking for mistakes in loading/saving/converting and other errors, I'd love a volunteer or two to help me with AGA events. Right now, even though only the events used in the demo are supported, there are literally hundreds of parameters whose functions need to be determined in order to build a proper .ini file. While a lot of them are almost certainly repeated across similar events, that still leaves a whole lot of stuff to discover, and I don't really want to tackle it all alone.


tl;dr: Download this and you can look inside 1.00g/h and AGA levels for the first time ever! Just let me know if anything goes wrong.

Besides thanks to everyone who's worked on the various file formats at play here, thanks go also to EvilMike and Jerrythabest, whose JCS.inis I make use of.
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Last edited by Violet CLM; Jan 22, 2012 at 04:55 PM.