Saturday, January 6, 2018

Some apparently blank tiles may render as garbage in-game

The Keen Galaxy games' tilesets have a lot of unused slots. To save space, the developers completely deleted these chunks from the EGA files. Attempting to use them produces visual garbage - the game hits junk memory when it tries to get their images. Programs that extract the EGA files to bitmap images, however, display these missing chunks as blank. Therefore, what you see as a blank tile in the level editor might be glitched in game. (It's particularly easy to get these tiles into a level by copying nonrectangular multi-tile structures from a tile palette.)

I don't know of an easy way for users to deal with this. Level editors might be able to help by rendering missing chunks differently, maybe as hex numbers on a glaring background. Alas, this can only work if the level editor uses the EGA resources directly, which only Abiathar can. I'll have to see if I can implement something helpful.

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