The Tile Map Editor (experimental)

Experimental

New in v1.4.0 and not yet tried on many maps. It edits the text file directly and VS Code's undo covers every change, so it cannot lose work. Keep an eye on what it writes, and report anything odd.

A ground tile map is an ASCII grid, and typing one is easy. The hard parts are seeing it and checking it. Edges, fringes and shade depend on the neighboring cells, so a map only really shows in the game. The Tile Map Editor paints the grid and draws it with the mission's own art, the way the game does.

It is part of the Artemis AMD VS Code extension.

Open it

Open any .tiles file and it opens in the editor. Text on the toolbar switches to the plain text editor. To come back, use Open in Tile Map / Tileset Editor on a .tiles text editor's title bar.

The editor needs the AMD language server, the same one that checks .amd files, for art, the tileset's rules and problems. Without it you can still paint, and cells are colored by kind.

Painting

Tool	Key	What it does
Paint	`B`	Paints the selected legend entry. Drag to paint a line with no gaps. The right mouse button erases to nothing.
Rect	`R`	Drag a rectangle. Hold Shift as you release for an outline.
Fill	`F`	Fills the region the clicked cell belongs to.
Pick	`I`	Picks the clicked cell's legend entry. Alt+click does it with any tool.
Entry	`E`	Sets `entry:`, where a party beamed down stands.
Move	`M`	Drags a prop, person or hostile (or the mark it stands on), or one point of a patrol, to a new cell (see Things). A click without a drag opens it in the AMD Inspector.

The legend is the palette. Click an entry to paint with it. Double-click it to change its kind or mark. + Entry adds one: pick a kind (the tileset's kinds are offered), an optional mark (to_<area> makes an exit) and a character. By default the character is the kind's first letter, if it is free. A mark is just a legend entry, so painting with it places the mark.

Resize sets the map's width and height. It writes a size: header so that blank columns at the edge are kept.

What you see

Kinds colors each kind. A cell that cannot be walked is hatched. A character that is not in the legend is magenta, and the whole area will not load until it is fixed.
Art draws the mission's art sets: its own builtin set, then the TILE_ART setting. They are found in the mission, then in a repo checked out beside it, then in __lib__. The footer names the sets it found and any it did not. The art comes from the game's own code (tilemap_cell_look and tilemap_cell_fringes), so edges, fringes, grids and shade match the game. A freshly painted cell shows its kind's color for a moment, until the new look arrives.
Marks outlines every mark and labels it. Exits are drawn in blue with the area they lead to. The star is the entry.
Problems lists what sbs lint would say about this area. A red corner marks the cell each problem is on. Click a problem to open the text at that line.

Zoom with + / - or Ctrl+wheel. A toggles Kinds and Art.

Things: props, people and hostiles

Things (on by default) draws every prop, person and hostile that the mission's .amd files place in this area, read from your unsaved text too. In Art they are drawn with their sprites, standing on their cell and tinted the way the game tints them. In Kinds they are icons:

an amber square for a prop
a green circle for a person who never attacks (Calm: yes)
a red circle for a hostile

A hostile's Patrol: is drawn as a dashed loop through its points. Anything with Hidden until: is drawn faded. Anything with a problem is ringed in red. The sidebar lists everything placed in this area, including anything that cannot be drawn because it is off the map or on a mark that is not there. Click an entry to open it in the AMD Inspector.

With the Move tool:

Drag a thing placed by At: to rewrite its At: x, y in the .amd.
Drag a patrol point to rewrite that one point of Patrol:.
Drag a thing placed by Mark: to move the mark. The mark keeps its whole shape and each cell keeps its own character. Everything else standing on that mark, and any scene that belongs to it, moves with it. The cells it leaves become plain ground of the same kind, or the ground around them if the legend has no plain character for that kind.
Click without dragging to open the thing in the Inspector.

Moving a mark edits this file, so the editor's own undo covers it. Moving an At: or a patrol point edits the .amd, which the editor's undo cannot reach. For those, use Undo move on the toolbar, which puts back the last move while the text is still what the move left. If the .amd had no unsaved changes, a move saves it again, so a drag does not leave a file dirty in the background. If you have unsaved edits there, they are left for you to save.

Face S cycles the figures through S, W, N and E, to preview a set's art each way round. It only changes the preview. The game places everyone facing south and turns them as they walk.

What it writes

The text file is the map. A stroke rewrites only the rows it changed, so comments, the header and the legend's spacing are left alone, and each stroke is one step of undo. A row's trailing blanks are dropped, because they mean nothing anyway.

The Tileset Editor

Open a .tileset file and it opens as the Tileset Editor. Each row is one kind, with:

a picture of the look it wears, from the mission's art sets, tinted by its color=
Walk, See and Tall checkboxes
its Look, with the art sets' looks offered as you type; a look no art set draws is outlined in red
its Tint and Over
Cells: how many cells of the mission's areas are drawn with it

Below the table is every look the art sets offer. Select a kind, then click a look to put it on. + Kind adds a kind that can be walked and seen across. x removes a kind, and one that is still drawn somewhere takes a second click. Renaming a kind changes it only here, so the status line says how many cells of the areas still use the old name. Those areas' legends then show up as problems until they are updated.

Each edit rewrites one line. It is lined up with the file's own columns, so a file laid out in columns stays that way.