Firebox It Up!



This is a side-project of mine. I've always wanted a tile-editor I can use over for different projects. That's what this project is going to be. It's called Firebox. If you haven't guessed it already, the name is a play off of Firefox.

Most projects have very distinct level formats, so in the past I've had to build a new tile editor for each project that can support the complexities of the level format. Many games have more to their maps than just tiles. Things such as scripts, tags, and touch-plates add complexity to level maps. The goal of this project is to make a scalable tile editor that I can reuse for any number of projects.

I'm not quite sure yet how to make it support multiple projects. One idea I have is to make it very basic and flexible, so one can take the source and easily add modifications for his or her project rather than building a new one from the ground up.

Currently, Firebox supports multiple resolutions. You can load bitmap files or binary sprite files into the tile selector window. It also supports multiple map layers.

Much of the options are hard coded, like resolution and map size. In the future, I will create a menu to adjust these options, or at the very least load them in from a text file.

I've been using this for my 3D raycasting game and will be using it for Toadman 3. I need to make some adjustments to it. I made it a little to specialized for ORE, such as adding tags (the numbers on top of some of the tiles) that identify dynamic objects. So I'll need to run through my code and clean things up so I can also use it for Toadman 3 when the time comes.

Delta Code's New Home

Delta Code is now located at http://www.deltacode.net. I've been waiting for this domain for some time. I wanted to buy it back in 2007, but one of those domain scalpers got to it before I did. I thought I lost my chance at it forever. I lucked out though, because it apparently expired and was up for grabs, so I purchased the domain.

YES!!!

A New Toadman Game

I've decided on making another Toadman game. I've been planning some things out on paper. I want to keep things as simple as possible for the most part, and I don't want this project to be plagued with feature creep.

It may be as simplistic as Toadman 2 with 8x8 sprites, or I might do something a little different. A lot of it will depend on how good my drawing ability is and how much time I want to invest in graphics.

I'll post updates of the project as it moves along.