Announcing MapText Public Beta

A new tool for editing SketchMaps

After way too many months of not getting around to releasing it, despite it being essentially finished, I am pleased to announce a public beta of my MapText SketchMap editing utility. MapText is a command-line utility that converts SketchFigher 4000 Alpha maps between .SketchMap format and a tab/return-delimited text format suitable for editing in a spreadsheet editor. It can also convert the two formats into the .LMScene format used by SF4ka for the built-in levels.

MapText is a Universal Binary, and should work on any computer running MacOS 10.3 or higher (although it has not been tested on Leopard yet).

Simple usage:

1. Open Terminal
2. Drag MapText into the Terminal window.
3. Type the flag for the format of the file to convert (text: -t; sketchmap: -s; LMScene: -l).
4. Drag the file to convert into the Terminal window.
5. Type the flag for the format you wish to convert to (same as above).
6. If desired, type a path to write the converted file to. If you skip this step, MapText will write the converted file with the same path and name as the original file, except with the extension changed to be appropriate for the new format. Note that this may overwrite existing files.

More detailed instructions, including reading and writing with non-'.' decimal markers, can be found in the readme.

Note that this is beta software. I don't expect it to damage your computer, but use it at your own risk.

Please post any bugs you run into, or any comments you may have.

Edwards

Attached File(s)

• MapText_Beta_4.zip (23.5K)
  Number of downloads: 4

Oh, cool. MapText is my new bicycle. I may just have to make a new level because of this.

Seems to work fine on 10.5/Intel.

Attached File(s)

• MapText_Prettyness.jpg (87.06K)
  Number of downloads: 29

what on earth is that thing, Cheleball?

That was my first test of MapText. It's a gradient composed of 300 Wave Gun Upgrade sprites, and was extremely easy to churn out with some basic spreadsheet-fu.

Of course, any such construct in a real level would tank the framerate on G4s, so it's not really useful for much. MapText, on the other hand, is a brilliant piece of work that opens so many possibilities it makes my head spin. Just as a ferinstance, some may remember my fascination with SketchMapMerge shapes. With MapText and Excel (and not a single line of code), you could generate almost any shape at all. You wouldn't even need the careful initial setup in the editor that SMM shapes require.

Very good, Edwards! (well, in fact, I already had the opportunity to test and thoroughly review the code of previous betas of MapText, so this is just an update for me). Just one question: why 10.3+?

And yes, it's a much better suited tool than SMM for doing such manipulations. I'm glad you'll no longer have to (mis)use SMM for such stuff, since it was certainly not ideal for that.