Blazing Editor

Level Editor

This is a very simple level editor that allows you to 'paint' tiles onto your trail. If you do any cool levels please send them to me, I may add them to them to the Blazing Trails game!

Rules for making levels

Trails MUST start with a StartZone. When the ball leaves the start zone the timer begins.
Trails MUST end with an EndZone. When the ball enters an end zone the level is completed. (you could have a trail with multiple EndZones..)
The start of a level in the editor begins at the top of the 2D view and progresses downward to the end zone.
The ball is dropped in the centre of the first row of cells - make sure that a StartZone tile is underneath it!
Select properties from the Trail menu to edit the width, length, qualifying time, bonus times and ball textures.
If you reduce the width or length the trail it will be clipped from bottom right.
Don't put turbo tiles in front of blocks! The player can get stuck to the block and can only move sideways, if you 'sidestep' the block the ball will rebound at full speed!
Don't make the trail too wide or the game will fail when it loads the level in (at the moment the max width is 30 cells.)
The editor saves the texture filenames with absolute paths. This will cause problems if you attempt to run the level on another machine. If you want to show the level to other people you must make sure the textures are in the correct directory (i.e. data\GFX\) and the reference in the data file is relative to the executable.

changing absolute texture paths to relative:

[CELLTEXTURE]

C:\WINDOWS\Desktop\BlazingTrails\Data\Gfx\Crate.bmp

In this example the .exe resides at 'C:\WINDOWS\Desktop\BlazingTrails' so the above line must be changed to:

[CELLTEXTURE]

Data\Gfx\Crate.bmp

Adding your level to the game

Look for a text file called 'easy.txt' this file contains all the levels that will be played by the game. Simply add your level filename to the list. Note that the order of the levels in this file is important, if you place your level at the beginning then your level will be played first, if you place it at the end then your level will be the final level played.

Known problems:

The editor isn't intended to be part of the release of blazing trails I know there are many problems with it, but unless they are major hindrances I doubt I'll be fixing em. Anyway here's the list I know about:

Edit box bug hit a non numeric key and the caret will reset to the 1st character of the edit box.
No save document reminding.
Absolute path names for textures.
No limits for entered values - Its very possible that you can 'break' the BlazingTrails program by entering large numbers (rule of thumb keep most values less than 2. Keep max & min speed values less than 10)
No file extension checking when using file open dialog.

Download

Click here to download Blazing Trails & Blazing editor installer program (3.12 MB)

Click here to download BlazingEditor.Zip (140kb)

Updated!:

Rebuilt to work with windows XP / 2000.

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Last updated : 29/05/04

Allan.Bentham@btinternet.com