Snowed In

So during yesterday’s Super Bore, er, Bowl, and overnight, I got 8+ inches of snow. Needless to say I was working from home today. 🙂

I spent a good part of my time during the football game working on a couple of new C# utilities, one that would extract and create a graphics PNG from my game file, and the other which would auto-generate maps from my map data using that PNG file. I’ve been spending far too much time saving screenshots in the emulator and pasting them together in MS Paint to create map images. So now I got an automatic tool which generates them, both in color and black and white. 😀

In case you’re wondering WHY I need map images, my editors on the TI are limited to the 32 column screen, and really limited with slanted maps. As a result, I often can’t see the entire map and get a feel for if it’s large enough, or TOO large, and where things are. Having map images helps me with my planning. Plus BW images will come in handy when I get around to writing up a hint book, I’m sure. 🙂

I’ve completed all the maps for the 2nd World part now, I’m now working on finishing mobs and transactions. This is where I often find I need to add or remove things, because I realize I need something to spruce things up somewhere. I was working on a cavern that was just for transition from one point to another, and I had a great idea for adding some specific monsters to it to make it a “special” location with a bit of a story to it.

The slowest part are the mobs, because I have to constantly look at the map to get coordinates, and I often decide treasure at that moment as well. I do placeholders as much as possible just to get data in place, but I want to limit that if I can. Many times with the first set of world content I found things I had forgotten to populate and now I had to do the work to make it look right.

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