Eschalon Book II (and Book I) Character and Map Editor

Homepage: http://apocalyptech.com/eschalon/
Other Resources: Sourceforge | Github
Latest Release: v0.8.1 February 6, 2012

Book I Character+Map Editing Forum Topic

This is the topic for my Eschalon Character and Map editor. The original versions were only for Book I, but as of 0.6.0, they now support Book II character savegames, and as of 0.7.0, Book II map files. Apart from a few unknown values, I believe this is mostly complete, and should give you access to anything you'd want.

Note: Make sure to back up your character files before editing, just in case something nasty slipped past my testing. Especially if you go in to edit/create new items, be aware that you're certainly capable of creating things which Book 2 hadn't counted on. So yeah, be careful. I'm not aware of anything wrong with it at the moment, though.

Windows folks can just download/install the EXE version; instructions for Linux are on the site (though you can probably just run it directly). As usual, if somebody can figure out how to get GTK+/PyGTK working in an OSX environment (and subsequently run the app), I'd love to hear about it.

Be sure to let me know of any bugs you find!

Known Book II Modifications built using this editor: (Let me know if I've missed any.)

• Port Kuudad Tower, by raverdave2k
• Treasure of the Orakur, by raverdave2k

constantsb2.py, lines 273-278

0x00000800: 'Fleshblight',
0x00001000: '(unknown 4)',
0x00002000: '(unknown 5)',
0x00004000: '(unknown 6)',
0x00008000: '(unknown 7)',
0x00010000: 'Encumbered',

I believe 4-7 there are penalties for having things equipped you're not skilled with (weapon, light armor, heavy armor, and shield in that order)

Aah, good call - I'll add that in for the next version. Thanks!

Cool. I noticed your Book 1 editor is smart enough to not edit Book 2 files, and the Book 2 editor is smart enough to know if your file is from a version pre- 1.03. Very well done. So, how's the map editor coming?

The Map Editor has a small roadblock -- BW opted to password protect the data pack in this game (unlike Book I) - while it's easy to find the password, it IS a EULA/ToS violation to do so - so xolotl would have to make all his own graphics for the map editor, which just isn't happening. This, of course, is fine - it's perfectly reasonable for BW to want to protect his assets (though, in this case, it's not protecting them from pirates - it's only protecting them from legitimate users like xolotl).

Actually, up until a couple of days ago, there was just one character editor program which was capable of opening both, but dealing with preferences (and a couple of other semi-related bits) turned out to be too much of a hassle, so I split it out. The limitation of which app can open up which book is a fairly artificial one I put in recently to simplify some UI issues. :) Just, you know, FYI and all.

As silverkitty mentioned, a map editor wouldn't be able to access the game graphics directly - I could certainly release something which would allow the user to specify an uncompressed folder (so the user would have to find the password and unzip it manually beforehand), but I need to find out if BW would be okay with that before starting on it. The app itself wouldn't know how to bypass the protection, but it'd sort of be encouraging users to do that on their own, and it's possible BW wouldn't want that to happen. So yeah, it'll have to wait on that. I'll probably wait until 1.04's out to ask about it, since I don't want to interfere in the more pressing matters he's got to deal with now.

Thanks for the editor! I, uh, have a skillpoint I want to reallocate...

Version 0.6.1 of the Character Editor is now available here: http://apocalyptech.com/eschalon/

Windows users are strongly encouraged to upgrade, to avoid potential problems with locking the savegame directories, which could result in losing a savegame slot if you run the editor at the same time that Eschalon is running. Users on other platforms wouldn't be affected by this (it was a bug in the bundled version of gtk+ which was causing this).

Apart from that, there were a few minor bugfixes not really worth enumerating; check the ChangeLog for details if you want.

Enjoy!


FYI, I ended up taking out the "permanent" statuses which are automatically computed by the game engine. When I added in the weapon penalties, it just seemed like too much wasted space for values which you can't actually change in the game (since your changes would just get overwritten as soon as the game is loaded). So those aren't present in the GUI anymore (they'd still show up when listing characters from the CLI, though).

Just a quick note that 0.6.2 of this has been released. Nothing major - of relevance to Book 2 is:

1) Stacked item quantities (arrows, for instance), were accidentally capped at 255 in the editor; that's been fixed.
2) Loading one character file and then another one wouldn't clear out the spell checkboxes properly, if the two chars had varying spells.

Also it fixes a map loading issue for the Steam version of Book 1, but that's offtopic in here. :)

So yeah, enjoy - available at the usual spot: http://apocalyptech.com/eschalon/

Announcement!

Version 0.7.0 of the editor is now available, which features one major new feature relevant to this forum. Thanks to the kindness of the ever-great BW, version 0.7.0 supports Book 2 Map Editing. Thanks again, BW, for your permission to access the necessary graphics files to do so!

It's available at the usual spot: http://apocalyptech.com/eschalon/

If you're going to use the Windows EXE version, you can just go ahead and play with it. If you're on another OS (Linux), or wanted to run the sourcecode directly on a Windows machine (without the EXE), then you'll have to make sure you have two extra dependencies (note that these extra dependencies are only required to edit Book 2 Maps; Book 1 maps don't require these, nor do either of the character editors)

• PyCrypto - This may actually be installed by default on some Linux distributions. If not, the package name is usually "python-crypto," though Gentoo uses "pycrypto" instead. Windows folks can find precompiled versions from voidspace.co.uk.
• czipfile - This actually isn't technically required, but loading Book 2 maps can take a real long time without it. This is probably not installed by default on your distro, and in fact your distro probably doesn't package it. On Linux, one of either
  Code:
  sudo easy_install czipfile
  or
  Code:
  sudo pip install czipfile
  should install it for you (no need for the "sudo" if you're already root, of course). There's a Windows EXE available on that page for people who want to run the editor from sourcecode.

So yeah. Be careful when editing, and make backups. I don't know of any severe bugs in the app, but that doesn't mean that they might not be lurking in there. The safest thing is to just archive the entire "slotX" folder, but if you do just back up individual map files, remember that there's an associated ".ent" file which goes along with the ".map" file. You'll need to back that one up too.

Let me know when you find any bugs, and enjoy!

This thing is so much fun

But I don't really know what I'm doing

Is it possible to play the maps that we make?

Yes, though I admit that I have yet to try making and playing a brand new map; thus far all I've done is edits to existing maps.

On a practical consideration, what you'd probably have to do to make a completely new map would be to edit an existing map in your save slot so that it contains a new "entrance" or whatever, and then make sure that the new .map and .ent you created are in the save slot as well. Book I is structured a little differently so you can actually edit the "global" map files in there, which means that you wouldn't have to muck about in the savegames, though apparently there's a bit of weirdness with that. (Which I don't think would apply for the Book II editor, since all you can really edit are your savegames.)

... and while I'm at it, I should probably repost this:

I assume that if it's a Book II map we're talking about, a link to http://basiliskgames.com/eschalon-book-ii would be appropriate as well.

As an FYI, I've burned through a few revisions of the editor and we're now at 0.7.3. Most of the fixes were geared towards Book 1 maps, but of note for Book 2 is the addition of a "New" menu item in the File menu for maps, so that you can easily create blank maps to start out with, if you wish. Additionally, the program will now prompt first for if you want to create a new map, rather than going stright into the "Load" dialog (hitting "Cancel" or escape will still get you to the Load dialog, though).

Anyway, available here: http://apocalyptech.com/eschalon/

Enjoy!

I was just about to post on that "new" map feature, glad to see it is already in

One thing I would like to see is some sort of "paint bucket" feature and/or bigger brush to paint with (and for erase too!) I was about to create an island but it is quite time consuming to do one (even with the new blank map feature I suppose) One thing what could be nice is when you create a new blank map you could automatically choose if it is filled with certain floor tile, like water or grass. I haven't yet tried the new version so dunno if you made it like that already.

I was also wondering if it could be somehow possible to use those special character NPCs as common townsfolk etc somehow? Or to create new shopkeepers using the existing ones as a base or something? Also, would be really cool if those scripts were listed somewhere, like the bed script you can snatch from the bed at your home (where the game starts). Maybe I'm asking too much or things that you can't sniff out from the code. Cheers for this fun tool, finally got myself a decent place to store my stuff

And one last thing, how in vanilla maps is that map port done for wilderness maps? I mean, I checked some of the edge tiles in map editor and they didn't seem to have any scripts on them, so any ideas how the game knows where to move the player when he reaches that black edge of the map?