xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx xx A M O S xx xx xx xx TTTTTTTT OOOOOOOO MMMMMMMM EEEEEEEE xx xx TTTTTTTT O OOOO O MM MM MM E EEEEEE xx xx TT O O OOO MM MM MM E EEEE xx xx TT O OOOO O MM MM MM E EEEEEE xx xx TT OOOOOOOO MM MM MM EEEEEEEE xx xx xx xx Programming by Aaron Fothergill xx xx xx xx Graphics by Adam Fothergill xx xx xx xx (C) SHADOW SOFTWARE 1992 xx xx xx xx xx xx xx xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Well, what about this then? A review of the latest version, of one of THE HOTTEST Amos Extensions available. The one, a games programmer would be mad to be without. You must have seen those games, where the levels seem to stretch for many screens. You must have thought at some point, how the hell do they fit that much screen in to a single Amiga? Well, the answer is simple. Tiles. The maps that you play the game on, are a sort of jigsaw, made up of a number of tiles. These tiles are then scrolled around. This allows you to have VERY large maps, in a small space! These maps are put together, using a Map Editor. And TOME (Total Map Editor), is the one for AMOS Programmers. Oh, and by the way, it is also the best Map Editor in the World, anywhere. The Map Editor itself (Written in AMOS), is very large. There is over 230k's worth of code alone. And then you have got all of the extra GFX to boot aswell. It is no surprise, that TOME requires 1 Megabyte of memory to run. If you have lots of drives, and therefore less FAST memory, TOME goes into to 2-col mode, and it still runs fine. When AMOS has finished, testing it...( May as well go on holiday here! ), you will be presented with the actual screen. Along the top, is the MENU buttons. Each of these Menu Buttons, lead to a further set of buttons, which are shown at the bottom of the screen. Down the left hand side of the Editor Screen, is the current Tile Bank, where you can pick tiles from. There are two arrows which you can use, to scroll through the bank. Next to the Sub-Menu buttons, along the bottom of the screen, is the X and Y co-ordinates ( Map Co-ordinates from the Top left, or Map Co-ordinates at the Mouse Pointer). Next to the Menu buttons, at the top of the screen, is the scroll icons, to scroll about the map, and in the centre of these arrows, a button for viewing the entire map, using 1,2,4,8,16 or 32 size blocks (To get an overall idea of the map). There are options to do almost every possible thing to your map. Instead of going other all the buttons which would take ages, and also provide Anne with a large text file, I will tell you about a few of the special ones. It is quite easy to plot tiles, just pick a tile from the list and put it down. Mmmm, couldn't really be easier could it? You also have fill mode, and box and circle mode so that you can draw certain designs more quicker. There is also a cut and paste 'brick' mode, where you can cut sections of the map out to be pasted down elsewhere. The really good thing about this though, is that you can save your 'bricks' and load them in to an AMOS bank, and paste them down within your program! ( Say a player activates a lever and suddenly a whole room goes 'PING', and appears in front of him???!! ) You can edit the actual bank, adding deleting tiles, etc. There is also a fine edit mode, where you can zoom in on a tile and use a couple of standard drawing tools to edit it. This is great if you need to slightly modify a specific tile, say have a wall with graffiti on. You just edit the wall and save the tile at the end of the bank. Or you could replace the old tile with the new one. It's all very easy to do. Resizing the map could not be easier either! Just click on the new dimensions, and bingo! It's done! You can make TOME initialize the map when it re-sizes, or just add on the extra tiles, keeping the old map intact! MaPLe ( Map Programming Language ), is one of things which one particular application has, and all others lack. For instance, Dpaint has a number of REALLY useful things which other paint packages have neglected. MaPLe basically allows you to easily write a small routine to do certain things to the map. The process of making the routine is all done using mouse clicks, and so you always remain in the flow! You could make a quick routine which searched for the tile of a tree stump, and replaces it with a tree trunk and the top of the tree on top of that. Some routines will take a long time to do, but it will save a long time in the long run! ( I did one, for my game 'Wrath Of Kintex', to put a bedside table by all of the beds in the world!! ) One of TOME's most impressive features, is the animation controller. It is very very simple, to have fires roaring and water flowing, with the minimal amount of hassle. You can also have tiles moving about!! Again all the work is handled by buttons and at the click of a mouse button the results are working straight away whilst you edit the rest of the map! All I could say when I first saw this was, "Wow!". All the little utilities, are included in the main editor ( If you have enough memory that is ), like the TILE PASTER ( Which makes an IFF screen out of your tile bank, ready to load into Dpaint to edit again ), TILE MAKER ( Which converts an IFF picture into tiles again! ), and other little bits and bobs! The commands included ( Totalling 60 ), cover every aspect that you can think of, and more. The ones that aren't included, are simply either not possible, or in the next version. You can define Map Zones, ( Like screen zones ), to check whether a player has walked into a certain area of the map! ( You could for instance, check to see whether a player is trespassing on private property! ). With a single command you can find out the Tile value of any position on the map. You can check to see whether a certain tile has been plotted. You can define a GAME AREA, so that it is easy to check whether bobs or other miscellaneous things have entered the screen. If I was to give a detailed description of all of the commands, you bloody pirates out there would know exactly what to do, some I am not going to give away any command names. Needless to say, that if you buy TOME from Shadow Software which I Strongly recommend, then you get a lovely, full-blown, glossy ring-bound, manual. TOME also comes, with the Shuffle extension, which is basically all the little commands which Francois Lionet left out of AMOS. To mention but a few functions, there is now the CASE set of statements, seen in almost all other Basics, except AMOS. You can Check the Height, Width or Icons and Bobs, again with a single command. You can change colours of individual bobs, and also there is a word wrap command which given the string and the maximum line length, will tell you how much can be displayed. To summarise this, all I can say is if you own AMOS, and you have not got TOME, then I think that you are missing something. If you think that you can produce Map-Based games, on your own without TOME, and get it as good, then you go ahead and try, because you have about as much chance of beating TOME, as you have of drinking 236534 bottles of Vodka and staying alive. Get it! Or be A Nobody.