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

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

Book II Character+Map Editing Forum Topic

Quite awhile ago, I got to be curious about the structure of Eschalon Book I character savegame files, and wrote up some quick code to do some introspection and poking around for my own benefit. It wasn't long before it developed into a fully-fledged GUI character editor, and later on a map editor as well. When Book II was released, it wasn't too long before support for that got added in as well.

For much more extensive information, including a lot of information which you'll need if you want to do any serious map editing, see the documentation at the utility's homepage. Some things to note here, however:

• This should be considered beta software; make backups before you use it on your files.
• This was developed in Linux using Python/PyGTK/Glade, but should work on both OSX and Windows. Ever since 0.5.0 I've provided a Windows EXE, and there are instructions for installation on OSX at the webpage.
• Most attributes you'd want to edit are available, but there's still quite a bit of data in the files that I haven't deciphered yet.

Enjoy!

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

• Thaermore Revisited, by Jedi_Learner
• Elderhollow Rebuilt, by King_ov_Death (unfortunately, no downloads for this were ever made public, though. Some nice screenshots, though.)
• Raver Dave's Book I Mod, by raverdave2k

editor works...but did not use, will ruin game play....

I am using Ubuntu this is how to use editor

Download file, extract file, open up terminal; goto directory where editor is located and type in ./eschalon_b1_char <location of save game char file> to open up GUI

Thanks xolotl, nice work.

I extended your work adding a few command line options for things like HP, Mana and Disease mitigation, as well as a less verbose print option. Those changes are available here: http://goerlich.org/eschalon/

Cheers!

Great, thanks for the changes! I've got a list of stuff I want to do for an official 0.3 release, and I'll be sure to merge in the stuff that you've done as well. Unfortunately it'll probably be a good three weeks before I'll be able to get around to it, due to impending wedding + honeymoon, etc. Feel free to add in anything else you'd like, of course, since it's all opensource and stuff. :)

Take longer than that for your honeymoon if you can!

Jude

Hello, just a note to let any interested party know that I've just put out a new verison of the editor, version 0.3.0. It fixes a few niggling problems with the previous version, adds in a number of commandline switches to let you change the character without the GUI, supports an "Open" and "Save As" dialog, and features some other little improvements and bugfixes that I won't bother to enumerate here.

Homepage
Screenshots
The program Edited 2010.06.11 to remove direct links to 0.3.0, since it's rather old by now

The "Open" GUI functionality in particular may be of interest to Windows and OSX users who may want to use this... You won't have to deal with a commandline anymore to get it working (theoretically, anyway, depending on how Python and PyGTK, etc, are installed on those platforms). You should be able to just extract the archive somewhere on your HD, make a shortcut to the main program (eschalon_b1_char.py), and go from there. If you use either of those platforms and get this working on one of them, please let me know so I can update the docs, and potentially fix any issues that may exist in getting it working.

Also, note that this release folds in the various changes that woodlitnight had posted earlier, though I changed around the commandline options from his versions. Thanks again for that!

So, er, yeah. Enjoy!

Hey, one more note - a friend of mine on Windows just started playing Eschalon, and he was able to get the editor running on a windows machine. As best I can tell, here's what you need:

Edit: (June 11, 2010) - Removed these instructions since as of 0.5.0, Windows folks can just use the EXE version, which should be much easier.

PyGTK is not available for Mac OSX currently, though I'm sure in development somewhere, so as of now this is a no go for Mac users.

Hm, that'd be too bad. There's some information about it out there, anyway, including what looks like it might be a .dmg with what could be necessary:
http://www.mail-archive.com/pygtk@daa.c ... 16687.html
http://faq.pygtk.org/index.py?req=show& ... 01.019.htp
http://pdb.finkproject.org/pdb/package.php/pygtk2-py23

Though of course, I don't have the ability to test any of that out, so it could be that none of it works. :)

In other news, I've been occasionally working on some new stuff... I've got it so you can actually pick out item icons and avatar images from the GUI, which is nicer than having to guess/figure out the numerical IDs yourself. There'll be some more minor improvements and stuff like that, too. That'll get released eventually.

I actually ended up poking around in the map files, and I've got a utility now which at least lets you do map introspection. I doubt that it'll ever turn into a full map editor (or at any rate, an editor which would be at all useful for making anything but quite minor changes). I've been having fun with it, though. That stuff'll get bundled up into the next release as well, whenever that is.

Screenshot of the current map GUI, if anyone's interested: http://apocalyptech.com/eschalon/screen ... editor.png

Just a quick note here to mention that I've released 0.3.1 of the editor, which just fixes an issue with some versions of the game (I assume it's just an older version that we're talking about) which sometimes omits some data from the char file. If you've got an older version and my editor couldn't open your character file, this version may fix it up for you.

Also note that the package is officially released as eschalon_b1_utils instead of eschalon_b1_char now, since 0.4.0 will include some map introspection abilities (and possibly some rudimentary editing), so it's not just a character editor anymore. I'd have actually had this out already but it turns out that the image compositing functions available in GDK really aren't sufficient for what I needed to do, so in order to get decent speeds when doing a lot of highlighting, I've gotta convert everything over to using Cairo for the graphics processing, which seemed like Less Fun Than Other Things. I'll see if I can get going on that soon, though.

I put a little clip of the object highlighting in-action here, if anyone cares: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1PgnYNUmLk

(Well, it's there even if nobody cares. So there.)

Outstanding...
Thanks for the info and update.
BTW, how well does this run on Linux? Fedora or Ubuntu?

You guys do realize that any complaints on balancing will be moot now right?

It runs fine on Linux - that's actually my desktop and development environment. I've only run it in Windows once or twice to make sure it works there.

Nah, I don't think it should have much effect on that kind of thing. People using a utility like this know what they're getting into, and what the potential effects on gameplay would be. I suspect it's only a pretty small percentage of folks who'll even be interested in using this.

I made an attempt to gather all the files necessary to run this on my Mac (Intel, 10.5), but to no avail. I found MacPython 2.5, GTK, and pycairo, but I'm not sure I have everything, and I'm also not sure how to put them together if I do. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

I assume that if you have the dependencies installed, you'd probably just be able to run it and it should work. I'd recommend starting it up from a command prompt (I believe it's called "Terminal" in OSX) so that you'd see any error messages when you try to run it. You should be able to just "cd" into the directory you unzipped it into and then run "./eschalon_b1_char.py" (without the quotes). Let me know if you get a useful error message.