Time to start another large project! Now I have four ongoing: HigherPower (suspended until Forge updates), Logofrag (never made it to the add frag screen), NetBLAM (unsure where to go now), and this.
What's this? It's FMod: a total mod creator for Commander Keen. My vision is for this to be able to do all operations necessary to creating a Keen mod - tiles, levels, sprites, texts, behaviors, and other miscellaneous stuff. I really want this to just be a side project that I work on when I genuinely don't have anything else to do. Unfortunately, it will probably usurp all my free time like my other projects initially did.
Anyway, I started by creating a class for Vorticons-engine levels. Since it was essentially ripped from FleexCore, it wasn't that hard to write the original code. The trouble came when I tried to remove extraneous functionality and use streams instead of VB6-style files for the IO. I deleted a bunch of unnecessary code, cleaning it up quite a bit. In the process, I moved all the number-shifting functions (e.g. converting an unsigned 16-bit integer to a byte array for writing) to their own module, accessible to any class.
When I tested the new class, it worked - kind of. When it resaved the level, everything was shifted two tiles to the right. I had no idea what was going on, but continued adjustments to various numbers and addresses created a different problem. Tiles weren't shifted, but sprites were going completely crazy, having a million junk sprites covering the top half of the level, shifting the real ones down. It took a hex editor and Mindbelt to figure it out, but I finally noticed that I had forgotten to multiply the area by two in calculating the plane size. With that fixed, the test succeeded. It's very important to remember variable sizes.
Here we go!
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