Getting Started
Hello, and welcome to The Omegamatic, often abbreviated TOM, a level editor for the fourth, fifth and sixth Commander Keen episodes. This is hopefully a viable alternative editor to the three current ones: venerable old TED5, Keen: Next, and The Photachyon Transceiver. In my level editing experiences, I've found TED5 to be great, but it being DOS-based is somewhat of a bummer (well, that and the ultra-slow carmackization). K:N is my absolute least favorite editor because it doesn't have enough keyboard shortcuts and is far too clunky, even though its stamp tool is certainly nice. TPT3, on the other hand, was far and away my editor of choice for a long time despite its incompleteness thanks to its ease-of-use and . This program hopefully rectifies these problems (and combines the attributes) and presents an overall more enjoyable level-editing experience. :-)
Basic Editing
Levels in Keen: Galaxy are divided up into three planes: background, foreground, and info, each of which can be toggled by pressing [1], [2], or [3], respectively. Similarly, the visibility of each plane can also be toggled with [4], [5], or [6]. Activity/visibility is displayed on the left of the status bar at the bottom, so it shouldn't be too hard to keep track of them. Left click to place a tile in the active planes, and right click to grab the tiles at the mouse's current location. You can also bring up the tile palettes with [Spacebar], and then use [1], [2], [3] to switch to the back-, foreground and info planes. Pressing [Enter] will bring up the custom infotile selection - be sure to enter the value in hex. Oh, and the default value is the mouse's current position, so pressing [Enter] twice is a quick way to get the infotile once you've got the mouse positioned above the desired location. Everything else should be pretty self-explanatory.
Revision History
- Version 0.1 ß — Released on July 10, 2010 — After around ten days of work, the bare-bones editor is up and running (bare-bones here meaning it can do pretty much nothing except load and save levels along with place tiles). It's missing a lot of the nice tools and settings that have come to be expected of level editors as well as the infotile font (yeah, kind of important). At least it has a nice interface, even if it is basically just a carbon copy of The Photachyon Transceiver.
- Version 0.2 ß — Released on July 11, 2010 — This release saw the implementation of some basic settings like grid mode and tile search mode and the all-important infotile font (which had to be created from scratch and is a pixel-for-pixel recreation of the one in TED5) The active plane indicators are also now different colors to help accomodate the tile search mode. Oh, and I also redid the mousewheel-scrolling mechanism so you don't chunk around the screen anymore.
- Version 0.3 ß — Released on July 20, 2010 — Added all the really important/basic tools like specifying new infoplane values, copy, paste, rectangular-fill, and add/delete rows/columns. The way it draws the level was optimized, too, which brought about a vast reduction in the start-up time and a tasty side effect: switching levels is amazingly quicker.
- Version 0.4 ß — Released on July 28, 2010 — Copying directly from the tile palettes is finally implemented, and there are a couple more Mindbelt-esque settings, the most exciting of which is the show links mode.
- Version 0.5 ß — Released on July 29, 2010 — Mostly a polishing-up release - it now has a spiffy icon and this very same help file you are now reading (yes, yes, I had neglected to put one together before this release (gasp!)). And then there's also now a 'view only active planes' mode.
Special Thanks
Ultra-extremely special thanks to CK Guy, without whom this program in all likelihood wouldn't exist. TOM is actually somewhat of a cannibalization of Mindbelt, his Vorticons editor. In fact, the vast majority of TOM is based on Mindbelt, even going so far as to, ahem, borrow numerous routines (particularly in the tools/settings departments) wholesale in an attempt to stay faithful to its nigh-perfect design (also to save time - hey, don't mess with what works well!), and was also just generally inspired by the incomplete TPT3.
And then there's also the obligatory thanks to Andrew Durdin (who always manages to pop up in these things, oddly enough :-P) for his Plumbing the Depths of Keen article which, as usual for a project like this, has proven invaluable in figuring out the level format.
Goodbye (Galaxy!)
Be sure to let me know about any bugs you may run across or features you think could be helpful; I can be reached most conveniently at the Keen: Modding forums. And hopefully this will make it a little less intimidating for more people to get into modding the next generation of Keen games - come on, we need to see more Galaxy mods!
-Mink