Editing is done in the area shown above. In all drawing modes, either mouse
button will draw using the currently selected tile.
Different drawing modes can be selected with the
map edit controls.
The following modes are available:
Below the editing area is a black block with a white block inside it. You can use this to alter which bit of the map is displayed if the map is too big to fit in the editing area. Simply drag the white block with the mouse to move it. The current position in the map is displayed as an X,Y co-ordinate pair. The Nudge buttons can be used to nudge it one character cell in the appropriate direction.
This mode simply plots single tiles onto the grid. You can draw while holding down the mouse to 'paint'.
Draw a line by dragging it with the mouse button.
Draw a circle by dragging it with the mouse button.
Draw an ellipse by dragging it with the mouse button.
Draw a rectangle by dragging it with the mouse button.
Flood fill an area by clicking the mouse button. Note that if the area is big
then it may not be filled correctly (sorry - just my dodgy quick and dirty
fill routine uses too much stack).
The fill will try and be intelligent if tiles larger than 8x8 have been used -
each seperate 8x8 part of the large tile will be filled in. Try it and see!
This allows you to enter text easily into a map. Don't ask me - it seemed a
good idea at the time.
Key to tile mappings are defined using the
text mapping dialog.
To use this, simply press the keys to enter your string of text. The only
editing available is BACKSPACE, which deletes the last entered character. Once
you have finished your text you can move the pointer to position it, then
pressing the button sets it in place.
Note that the text entry will honour the current Horizontal Flip setting,
so that backwards text will be written backwards. Try it to see what I
mean.
Also note that if no mapping has been setup for the SPACE bar, then pressing it
will leave a gap.
The copy/paste works much as it does when editing sprites, except that there
is no transparent paste option.
The only additional feature is the inclusion of an option to select an area
and then alter the Flip Horizontal and Flip Vertical settings of
the selected area. The menu options should be fairly self explanatary
(no really - I'm not getting bored writing this help file...)