Savefile Character / Map Editor v1.0.1 (April 15, 2014)

[xchrisx]

I managed to navigate to the folder where eschalon_b1_char.py lives, and ran it, only to be told that PyGTK version 2.0 or higher is required. This is where I get stuck. There doesn't appear to be any Mac OS X version of PyGTK around (unless I know how to compile it from source files, which I don't).

Am I any closer? BTW, nice work on the app. The screenshots are certainly enticing!

[xolotl]

I managed to navigate to the folder where eschalon_b1_char.py lives, and ran it, only to be told that PyGTK version 2.0 or higher is required. This is where I get stuck. There doesn't appear to be any Mac OS X version of PyGTK around (unless I know how to compile it from source files, which I don't).

Dunno, the only thing I could recommend is perhaps checking out this FAQ entry from pygtk.org - it looks like there's some manual work that needs doing to get everything installed. If you do get it working, if you'd type up a little paragraph on what's necessary, I could add that in to the docs.

[xolotl]

Actually, I have been meaning to ask this here for awhile: I'm curious what the game install directories are, and where the savefiles are stored by default, for the various platforms that Eschalon supports (including the Greenhouse vs. Basilisk versions, and different Windows versions, previous versions of the game, etc).

So... Could folks help me out and let me know where those locations are on your system? Also, for the Windows versions (do Macs have a similar sort of system?), is this information available in the Registry somewhere that I could get to?

On my Greenhouse Linux version, savegames are in ~/eschalon_b1_saved_games/ - I seem to remember reading somewhere on the forums that that used to be a dotdir, as well? Clearly the actual install directory for the game itself will vary on Linux systems - where did folks put theirs? I figure /usr/local/games/eschalon_book_1 or /opt/eschalon_book_1 would be decent places to check, at least for the Greenhouse version, since that unpacks as "eschalon_book_1"...

[Rogosh]

I'm running 1.04 Basilisk on Vista Home Premium 32 bit with administrative privileges.

I've an empty "C:\Users\USERNAME\Documents\Eschalon Book 1 Saved Games" (well, the config file is there, and up to date), but the saves themselves are located in a similar folder created in the install directory, "H:\Games\Eschalon Book I\Eschalon Book 1 Saved Games".

I suspect this will be the case for the large majority of Vista users:

If the game doesn't see "My Documents", it will attempt to save the game inside the installation directory.

[xchrisx]

I was able to edit savegames from my Mac version on my Windows XP partition. After I downloaded the Editor for Windows, I simply copied the savegame folder onto my Windows partition from my Mac, made my edits, and then copied it back across the partition.

On the Mac the savegames are kept in _User/Documents/Eschalon Book 1 Saved Games.

[Xydarc]

Thanks for the application.

I've followed all of the installation instructions for Windows (I'm running Vista Ultimate 64-bit) and I'm getting the following error:

"The application has failed to start because libglib-2.0-0.dll was not found. Re-installing the application may fix this problem."

All of the dependencies are installed %systemroot%\Program Files (x86). Any ideas?

Edit: nevermind, I forgot to re-install pygtk.

[xolotl]

Saturday afternoon! Is there a better time to edit Eschalon characters and map files? I THINK NOT.

It is with great relief that I announce to you the release of the Eschalon Book 1 Savefile Editor, v0.4.0.

There aren't too many enhancements to the actual Character Editor portion of the app, though there is some nice graphics integration now (ie: you can graphically select your avatar, and graphically select the icon to use for any of your items). The biggest enhancement of the new release is, by far:

A map editor! Yes, it's now possible to edit Eschalon maps. Disclaimer: this current version does not feature any "drawing" type tools which would make it easy to, say, create a new map from scratch, or even make overhauls on existing maps. The editor currently just operates on a square-by-square basis, so if you want to make a change to the square, you click on it, make your changes, and then hit "OK" to move on to the next square. That's perfectly acceptable for just digging around and making little tweaks here and there, and it's certainly quite sufficient to do things like add a bunch of new enemies all over the map (or remove enemies, if that's your thing), but drawing a whole new wall (or clearing a new path through the forest, etc), would be pretty cumbersome with the current interface. I'm guessing that whenever 0.5.0 happens, I'll have added some nicer functionality for doing that kind of thing. I think it'd be pretty cool if the tool got to a point where people could realistically create whole new maps to dungeon-crawl through.

I suppose that's it for now. I've got a lot of information up at my site now which should get you going on it, so look it over, and if anyone's got any questions, just let me know. Oh, and thanks for your input on file locations, to the folks who had responded. That certainly helped me get things together.

Now perhaps I can get back to playing games, instead of just writing utilities for them. :)

[function.require]

Wow. This reminds me of the old character/map editor program for Ultima VI. I remember building myself a little house over by Yew back in the day. This was done tile by tile so I can perfectly imagine re-inventing a whole map this way. It takes a while to get the hang of it and it can be tedious; but can be therapeutic in the same way that playing the same game 8 times over can be.

I had some bad experiences with dependency hell with python in the past. I'm by no means a programmer but like to tinker, and will try this when I get home. I running mac os x right now; I'm thinking macports may be able to help with the dependency issue.

Any event, thanks for the cool contribution.

[xolotl]

I had some bad experiences with dependency hell with python in the past.

Let me know if you have issues... It shouldn't be too bad. If you're on Linux, most of it may even be installed already, and what isn't should hopefully be a package-manager call away. On Windows, there's just a few things to download (I'm looking in to providing a totally-bundled version for Windows which includes all the dependencies at once).

Changing the destroyer level. Would there be a way to make the guards turn into ghosts when you kill them? A lot of my characters had trouble with the ghosts so only a character with sufficient wisdom would be able to achieve destroyer.

That'd be basically impossible. To give you an idea of the sort of interface that we've got into that kind of thing, the Chancellor's death script is as follows:

Code: Select all

quest 57 2 ; cond_special 9

So it flips the state of quest 57 to "2" (which I assume means "failed" in this case - I haven't really looked closely at the quest scripting), and then executes "cond_special 9" which is something hard-coded in the game engine which spawns all those guards.

You could, of course, litter Bastion Spire with a bunch of Poltergeists anyway, and they'd just be there in the room before you even had a chance to try for Destroyer. :)

Also, When do you envision adding way to install new maps? It would be interesting to make a little side quest off the salted coast for instance. Perhaps the island that never made it into the finished product.

Yeah, that's actually what excites me most about it. As I mentioned previously, right now the editor is totally unsuited towards that, but I think that it's entirely possible that it'll get to a state where map creation is feasible. Mostly it's got to do with "drawing" type tools, and object awareness. Like, if you want to make a forest, it'd be nice to be able to just click-and-drag your mouse around the map and a forest would just grow around your mouse pointer as it moves. So the editor would have to know "okay, these are the tree graphics, we'll randomly put those down, and also make sure that they're marked as barriers so the player can't walk through them, we should also make sure there's a grass tile underneath" etc. Similarly, you'd want to be able to say "start drawing a brick wall," and you could just click around and the editor would automatically "link up" the walls appropriately, so you didn't have to waste time going "okay, this needs to be a T-square, this one's just a bare wall," etc.

Certainly possible, and I hope that it'll come to that eventually. I'm taking a little break from working on this, though, so it'll probably be at least a month or two (though of course I could end up getting the itch to work on it sooner).

[AK_Marty]

(I'm looking in to providing a totally-bundled version for Windows which includes all the dependencies at once).

A windows version would be really cool. I'm not as much of a computer whiz as a lot of the posters here seem to be. It would be a hoot to create a super fighter right at the beginning of the game, then see how fast I can storm through everything.

[xolotl]

A windows version would be really cool.

It actually does run fine on Windows. The site has instructions for getting it going. There's three things to install (the last of which actually has three parts, so I guess there's five things to install, but they're all just "double-click-the-installer-and-hit-'next'-until-it's-done" style things) and then it should just work. Let me know if you've got problems with it.

[Zeno]

Well, I downloaded for Windows. Seems to work very well! I commend you.

...NYAHH! Now I won't be able to resist the urge to cheat. CURSES!

[xolotl]

Version 0.4.2 of the Editor is now available, by the way. There's been absolutely no updates to the character editor, so if you're only interested in character editing, this release Isn't For You.

The map editor is still a tile-by-tile editor, so it doesn't feature any drawing functionality yet. Here's what's been changed:

• Click-and-drag to move around the map (you can hit "m" and "e" to flip between Moving and Editing modes, or just use the icons. Right now the right mouse button will do the opposite action that you've got selected, so you don't actually need to flip between the two unless you want.)
• What I was calling "Scripts" before I'm now calling "Objects," which makes a lot more sense to me.
• I've got what seem to be the most important Object fields figured out, and it should be far, far easier to construct your own chests, doors, and other type objects in the game. Take a peek at the screenshot to see what I mean.
• The buttons on the main screen have been replaced with checkboxes, which take up far less room and should allow for the drawing features to fit in there, whenever they do get implemented
• The "Map Properties" button is no longer on the main screen; you can only access it from the "File" menu now (or via Ctrl-M). Just an aesthetic change there.
• Sconce-mounted torches and campfire flames now get drawn on the map as you'd expect.

I believe that's about it. Enjoy!

[waryk]

Alright so apparently I first had to update Python to 2.6.2. I did that with some help and lots of stumbling around by creating a custom .bash_profile.

This was all in preparation for installing CAIRO... the only option for doing which is to compile it and the configure file was running into the error: "configure: error: no acceptable C compiler found in $PATH".

This is all in preparation to actually touching the character/map editor python files themselves.

I'll try the Windows version to see if it's any easier, but I dare say that unless the user is already working with python or has a *nix background there might as well NOT be any OSX support. Too much effort for the "it just works" crowd

[xolotl]

First off - are you talking about the OSX version? It sounds like you are; it'd be good to know for sure, though. Support on both Linux and Windows should be relatively hitch-free.

Alright so apparently I first had to update Python to 2.6.2.

Note that the app does work fine with Python 2.5 - if there's precompiled stuff (pygtk, pycairo, etc) which only exists for OSX on a 2.6 version, though, that could certainly get in the way.

This was all in preparation for installing CAIRO... the only option for doing which is to compile it and the configure file was running into the error: "configure: error: no acceptable C compiler found in $PATH".

If you are on OSX, you might have some better luck if you install the development tools... When last I played around with OSX (this was back in 10.2 or so, I think), there was a separate install disc which had all the development stuff on it. That'd include the C compilers and stuff that you'd need.

Too much effort for the "it just works" crowd :P

Yeah, it'd be a shame if that was the case. I assume eventually someone'll package up the necessary prereqs...